Oil painting -> List of Painters -> William Hogarth

William Hogarth

Early Days: William Hogarth was born at Bartholomew Close in London on 10 November 1697 to Richard Hogarth, a poor Latin school teacher and textbook writer, and Anne Gibbons. In his early stages he was apprenticed to the engraver Ellis Gamble in Leicester Fields, where he cultured to engrave trade cards and similar products. Young William also took a energetic interest in the street life of the metropolis and the London fairs, and amused himself by sketching the characters he saw. Around the same time, his father, who had opened an unsuccessful Latin-speaking coffee house at St John's Gate, was imprisoned for debt in Fleet Prison for five years. Hogarth by no means talked about the fact. By April 1720 he was an engraver in his own right, at first engraving coats of arms, shop bills, and designing plates for booksellers.

Career:

Early satirical works integrated an Emblematical Print on the South Sea Scheme, about the disastrous stock market crash of 1720 known as the South Sea Bubble, in which many English people lost a great contract of money. In the bottom left corner, he shows Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish figures gambling, while in the middle there is a huge machine, like a merry-go-round, which people are boarding. At the top is a goat, written below which is "Who’ll Ride" and this shows the stupidity of people in following the crowd in buying stock in The South Sea Company, which spent more time issuing stock than anything else.

The people are scattered around the picture with a real sense of disorder, which represented the confusion. The progress of the well dressed people towards the ride in the middle shows how foolish some people could be, which their own fault is not entirely.