“Hogarth”
Tate Britain, London.
February 7, 2007-April 29, 2007
It is clear from the major new exhibition in London’s Tate Britain that the artist William Hogarth was seriously politically incorrect. His famous satirical series of pictures and prints such as A Harlot’s Progress (1732), A Rake’s Progress (1734), Industry and Idleness (1747), and The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) are all unflinchingly moral tales of individuals who chose wicked modes of conduct—betrayal, profligacy, idleness, and cruelty that led them inexorably to imprisonment and execution. In one case, the earthly penalty even went beyond death itself, as we see his corpse being handed over to the anatomists after a public hanging for murder and gruesomely dissected. We are left in no doubt but that each of them is to blame for his or her own fate. Hogarth’s is a world of real justice, not social justice, and a direct and deliberate rebuke to those who would excuse or romanticize crime. Hogarth’s highwaymen are not dashing outlaws but muggers on horseback, and murder is murder, not a product of deprivation but rather the end point of a series of successively more and more evil choices. As in a traditional western, the varmints got what they deserved.
Insofar as society has a duty to them, it is that of restricting access to temptation, notably gambling and gin, the subject of Hogarth’s Gin Lane (1751). Gin, mother’s ruin, is for Hogarth an evil foreign drink, the strongly alcoholic Dutch-invented jenever,