July 5, 2017 • 35 mins
In the early 18th century, an engraver-turned-artist made his mark on the art world by producing satirical prints in series that commented on morality and society. And some of his work is used today as a teaching tool.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm tra C V. Wilson, and
today we're gonna talk about an artist. But his story
really involves so much more than art. It involves satire
(00:22):
and social criticism, and it even gets into some legislation
for artist rights. But one thing we should point out
is that his satire and social criticism was being made
in the early seventeen hundreds when the society he was
criticizing was very different than ours. It was debuted in
a lot of ways. Yes, so there are a lot
of things that are viewed very differently than we view them. Uh.
(00:47):
There is discussion of of sex workers in this episode,
not any details, but they come up in in some
of his prints, as well as some violence, some drug use,
things like that come up. So just be aware that
that's that's in the hopper and that it will be
again based on on the views of England in the
(01:10):
seventeen thirties and forties and fifties. Well, and especially because
our artwork for this one is a self portrait of
the artist with his dog and it looks so sweet.
It looks very sweet, and I was like, I could
just see teachers saying, hey, this would be a great
episode to share with the kids. Um, and it might
be depending on the age of your kids, the kids
(01:31):
you're thinking of that you would want. Still, I think
to frame it and kind of listen first and decide
based on the actual content. But we're going to talk
about William Hogarth, who was an English artist that, as
I said, uh, you know, his life story involves a
lot more than just art. M William Hogarth was born
(01:51):
to Richard Hogarth and Anne Gibbons in London, England, on
November tenth seven. He did have some siblings, although the
tally's on those siblings very wildly. Uh. Richard Hogarth, William's
father was a teacher and a classical scholar, and while
he did have patrons, the family still struggled financially. Yeah.
(02:16):
Hogarth's later in his life would talk about how his
dad had really been treated very poorly and he ended
up in deep debts. Some accounts say that his father
went to debtors prison, but I couldn't find a solid
verification on that, but that does kind of inform some
of his work going forward, and despite being the child
of an educator, though William was pretty disinterested in formal education.
(02:37):
He was really smart and he was curious, but even
from a young age, he was more inclined to draw
than to study texts. But it seemed that his father
was not exactly sure what to do to help William
find a path in life that would suit his interests.
He wasn't against him pursuing art, but he didn't really
know what to do with it. So William ended up
looking for an apprenticeship. And this is another time where
(02:58):
I will say there are some accounts that suggests that
his father was in debtors prison and he had to
get the apprenticeship, and others that say that he just
knew his dad was not going to be much help
in in finding him a career path, so he went
and found one himself. At fifteen, he became a silversmith's apprentice,
and he learned engraving skills. But a master in this
(03:18):
position might have hindered his development by giving him a
mediocre instruction, and Hogarth, once again, frustrated that his mentors
guidance was really lacking, opted to seek out information about
the trade on his own, so he was augmenting this
kind of weak training that he was getting with self
guided study, and during his apprenticeship, Hogarth studied the world
(03:42):
around him as much as his trade. He was definitely
a fan of all of the various entertainments offered by
early eighteenth century London, from theaters to body houses to
coffee houses where intellectuals gathered. He sort of was one
of those people I always think of as like a
student of life. He just wanted to go around and
see people doing all the things that people do and
learn from that. When Hogarth was twenty three, he opened
(04:06):
his own shop. In that same year he started taking
formal drawing classes, but the normal curriculum for drawing lessons,
which was sketching live models or prepared tableau and attempting
to replicate other artists work, had the same effect on
Hogarth as this early attempts at his education had. He
was not interested. He found it frustrating and limiting, and
(04:28):
he had turned to drawing school to expand the possibilities
of his engraving work, but he didn't think the classes
were actually going to help him achieve that goal, and
so he opted once again to rely on himself for
his education, and he began to train his observational skills
because he wanted to be able to draw real life
subjects from memory. So he developed his own improvisational style
(04:50):
over time, and simultaneously he was supporting himself through his
regular engraving work. That work included projects like book illustration,
so he was getting some practical experience in commercial art,
but this was not particularly fulfilling. He would later say
that the work quote did a little more than maintain
myself and the usual gaieties of life, but wasn't all
(05:13):
a punctual paymaster. And it wasn't long though, before he
found himself attracted once again to drawing school. But this
time it was a little different. It was a school
housed in the home of Sir James Thornhill. Thornhill was
an accomplished artist. He had been the official history painter
in the courts of George the First and George the Second,
(05:33):
and he had been knighted in seventy He was also
a member of Parliament. He painted in the Italian Baroque style,
and Hogarth was a fan of his work, and part
of the appeal of studying under Thornhill was the fact
that Thornhill had achieved a level of social standing that
was unusual for an artist. He wasn't toiling penniless at
the whim of a patron, although he was at odds
(05:56):
with the neo classical revival that was underway at the time,
and in f are to gain favor with Thornhill and
make clear that he felt they were of the same
mindset regarding art, Hogarth even published an engraving at the
time titled Masquerades and Operas, which was a criticism of
the trends to embrace foreign art above the art that
was actually created in England. The engraving features, among other things,
(06:20):
a fool and a devil leading a crowd into the
theater to see the latest popular entertainment, while a woman
with a wheelbarrow carries away all the writings of Congreve, Drieden, Otway,
Shakespeare and Addison, and below the image is the following inscription.
Could new dumb faustus to reform the age conjure up
Shakespeare's or Ben Johnson's ghosts? They'd blush for shame to
(06:43):
see the English stage debauched by fooleryes at so great
a cost. What would their main say? Should they behold
Monsters and masquerades, where useful plays adorned, the fruitful theater
of old and rival wits contended for the base. A
copy of disengraving, which is known as The Bad Taste
of the Town, was in the British Museum's collection and
(07:04):
while it's not on display, it is digitized and available
online and we will be linked in our show notes. Yeah.
I feel like with all of Hogarth's work, we should
I mention that it's worth going and looking at it
for yourself because we can describe it, and we will
for a couple of them describe them. But uh, they're
very busy. There is a lot going on in every
single picture. Uh. And that's part of his social commentary
(07:27):
that he includes things. And it's kind of like you
will never fully grasp all of the sort of intensity
of these these very very detailed pieces until you actually
see them for yourself. So I encourage you to good
look for them. Uh. And publishing Masquerades and Operas had
long term ramifications for Hogarth's life and career. So the
(07:49):
criticism of England's contemporary art and culture scene and the
connoisseurs in it, of course earned him a number of enemies,
and most prominent among them was the architect Richard Boyle,
who was the third Earl of Burlington. He and others
would kind of have this rivalry with uh Hogarth for
the rest of his life, and it was not the
first time in his early career that he would butt
(08:10):
heads with art patrons. After several years of study with Thornhill,
Hogarth believed he had learned enough that he should begin
a painting career in Earnest. One of his first patrons
was a tapestry maker named Joshua Morris, who had requested
a painting from Hogarth, and when Hogarth delivered the art,
Morris refused to accept it, claiming that Hogarth had not
(08:32):
finished it and that it was apparent that the artist
was really an engraver and not a professional painter. William
Hogarth then sued Morris for his money and brought a
number of expert witnesses to the trial, including Thornhill, to
a test that yes, the work involved was a complete
painting and that Hogarth should be paid the money that
(08:53):
he was owed. The court found in Hogarth's favor. Yeah,
I think this is a time when artists were not
so willing to really like pursue legal action when someone said, oh, no,
I don't want that painting after all, but he did.
That will come up again in a little bit that
he's willing to take legal action for his rightful money.
Also in seventy eight, Hogarth painted his first dated painting.
(09:15):
Up to this point he had produced some plates and
other things, but they didn't have dates on them. And
this is The Beggar's Opera. And it was a recreation
of a scene from a current production of the farctical play.
And it was an example of just how well he
had trained his memory to recall detail, because apparently, according
to many people, he basically perfectly recreated the scene as
it had played on the stage, even though he had
(09:37):
of course gone away and painted it later. He actually
ended up painting five different versions of the scene. In
seventeen twenty nine, Hogarth and thorn Hill's relationship took on
a new dimension. William became Thornhill's son in law when
he and Jane Thornhill eloped. And in his early career
Hogarth became known for paintings known as conversation pieces, and
(09:58):
these were portraits of small groups of people depicting them
in a casual, informal moment, like they're having a light conversation.
And these also tended to be physically small paintings. And
as Hogarth's conversation pieces became popular, they did afford him
a degree of financial success, but he also started to
find them really boring to work on, and this was
in part because each individual piece didn't really bring in
(10:20):
all that much money. He was a very quick worker,
but he had to basically keep cranking them out at
a rapid pace to keep money coming in. But even
as he continued speedily cranking out these conversation pieces, he
also worked on other projects for which he had greater enthusiasm.
And these pieces were humorous, realistic scenes, and like masquerades
(10:41):
and operas, these works often skewered social trends and preached morality.
If they had been published as sequential art on a page,
they would look very similar to comics and style, but
they came out as full size prints, each one taking
up an entire page of its own. And this was
where he truly hit his stride as an artist. Yeah,
(11:02):
this is really what made him famous, uh, and what
continues to make him sort of an important figure in
the art world, and he was very savvy about the
success that started to come with it, so much so
that it did, as I mentioned earlierly, to some legislation.
We're going to talk about all of that in just
a moment, but first we will pause and have a
little sponsor break. Whereas Hogarth's conversation pieces offered him financial stability,
(11:28):
his moral satires brought in a great deal more money,
so much so that he reached a point where he
really had financial independence. He could work on the things
that he chose to do, rather than depending on commissions
or patronage to meet his ongoing financial needs. As prints
of Hogarth's engravings were made to sell to a wider audience,
he was aware of the risk that copycats could plagiarize
(11:50):
his work, and that is because that had happened to him.
He published a very popular series called A Harlot's Progress
in seventeen thirty three, and the six paintings, which were
then adapted into plates that made up A Harlot's Progress
were produced at a time when the topic of prostitution
and sex workers were the focus of a lot of
attention in London in the late seventeen twenties and early
(12:13):
seventeen thirties, there was this effort on the part of
city officials to bring morality back to London streets by
working to eliminate or at least reduce the obvious appearance
of prostitution. But out of the initial vilification of women
that this sort of charge started, there was this secondary
wave of characterization of women's sex workers that made them
(12:36):
seem more like innocence who had been trapped by corruptors.
And this was a debate that was going on in
papers throughout London at the time, and Hogarth's engraving told
a tale along the lines of that second characterization of
an innocent who falls into this life through no desire
of her own to pursue it. In the first plate,
an innocent young woman named Mall hack About arrives in
(12:59):
the city from the country, thinking she'll make her way
in a trade such as dressmaking, but she's intercepted by
a brothel keeper named Mother Needham, who has shown assessing
Mall's attributes. And a second plate, Mall has become a
kept mistress living in luxury, but then she's caught cheating
on her keeper, and by the third plate, Mall has
(13:20):
been cast out by that keeper and has become a
prostitute on the street. Uh and in plate four she
has been imprisoned for that. In plate five she is
once again a free woman, but at this point she
has an illegitimate child and she is dying from a
sexually transmitted disease. Plate six is Mall's funeral, attended by
women who also work in the sex trade, and men
who appear to be more interested in taking advantage of
(13:42):
those women than in mourning the dead person before them Mall.
Even the parson in that final plate has his hand
in the skirt of one of the other mourners. Because
of the popularity of a Harlot's progress, fake copies were
produced all over London by CD printers hoping to cash
in on Hogarth's work, and naturally the artist was incensed
(14:04):
so much so that he took legal action. So, of course,
it was not really feasible to chase down all of
the various printers who had been making unlicensed copies of
these popular plates. So William Hogarth, along with several other artists,
went to Parliament and they made a case that their
work should be legally protected. And after hearing the artists case,
a piece of legislation called the Engravers Act was introduced
(14:25):
in seventeen thirty four with language that would protect engravings
that featured original designs, and it was signed into law
on June seventeen thirty five, and it became known by
the nickname Hogarth's Act. You'll sometimes also see it written
as Hogarth's Law. While the Engravers Act was in legislation
but not yet assigned law, William Hogarth actually had another
(14:47):
series that he was ready to publish, but he was
not willing to do so until there were legal protections
in place to prevent pirated copies from circulating. And in
the meantime, Hogarth's mentor and father in law, Thornhill, died
in seventeen thirty four, and after the loss, Hogarth decided
that he would reopen Thornhill's drawing school, which had never
(15:07):
been a particularly successful venture. Hogarth's version became much more
of a salon where artists shared ideas and discussed their work.
Once the Engravers Act was law, Hogarth released the series
he had been withholding, titled A Rake's Progress. The series,
like A Harlot's Progress, was painted an oil first and
then adapted as a set of print engravings. The Rake
(15:31):
in this narrative is Tom Rakewell, a young man of leisure.
In the first scene, young Tom has freshly come into
his fortune as his wealthy and apparently miserly father has died. Tom,
wasting no time spending his new found money, is being
fitted for a fancy new suit while simultaneously paying off
a paramore who appears to be pregnant and heartbroken. She
(15:52):
will appear in later plates as well. In scene too,
Tom is surrounded in his home by an assortment of people,
all vying for his attention in his financial favor. By
the time the viewer sees Tom and the third scene,
he has fully descended into a life of debauchery. He's
in a brothel taking part in an orgy. And this
is a good time to mention that in Hogarth's works
(16:13):
on morality, even though sexual situations are conveyed, there's no nudity,
but there is the suggestion of it. So to modern eye,
the plate three looks like a wild party. It might
take a moment for the viewer to actually register exactly
what is going on. Yeah, he's you know, he is
taking part in this big thing, but it's not overtly portrayed.
(16:38):
I mean, once you start seeing the clues and you realize, like, oh,
people's hands are in each other's clothes and stuff, but
it's not quite so graphic as you might be envisioning.
And in the fourth scene, Tom is about to be
arrested for the debts that he's accrued in his debaucherous lifestyle,
when that same young woman from the first plate that
he bought off steps in and she pays the bail
(17:00):
of all of her money so that she can save him.
And in the fifth scene, Tom is getting married, but
not to that kind young woman who saved him though
he had wronged her, but instead to an elderly heiress
in the hopes of regaining a fortune in the match.
The sixth image is a seed scene. Tom is anna
gambling den. The room is on fire, but neither Tom
(17:22):
nor the other gambler's notice because they are so absorbed
in the fortunes that they stand to gain or lose.
Tom appears to be pleading to God for assistance in
his bet, and Tom is pictured in debtor's prison in
the seventh image in the series, he has written a
play in the hopes of selling it. To make some money.
It's kind of sitting to the side, and his wife
(17:42):
is pictured, that same woman that he married for her money,
but at this point she has gaunt and clearly not
the wealthy woman she once was. And the final scene
shows Tom in the Bethlehem Royal Hospital known colloquially as Bedlam,
where the insane and impoverished of London were sent, and
he is naked at this point save for a rag
a cloth that straped over him, and a wealthy woman
(18:03):
who has come to see the spectacle of Bedlam, looks on.
She has paid for admission to come and sort of
observe the lower creatures in this horrible condition. This particular
series was popular when it first appeared, and it's remained
so in the centuries since. In nineteen thirty five, the
story of Tom Rakewell was adapted into a ballet, became
(18:25):
a film in nineteen forty five, and an opera by
Igor Stravinsky in nineteen fifty one. The original painting series
of A Rake's Progress was purchased at auction in eighteen
o two by the wife architect Sir john Soon. Today
they are part of the Sir Johnson Museum collection. Unfortunately,
the original paintings for A Harlot's Progress were lost in
(18:46):
a fire in seventeen fifty five. Yeah, and A Rake's Progress.
There have been even more modern adaptations and other works
inspired by it, but those are the sort of the
key points were. In the more modern age, it suddenly
had this resurgence of interest, and both of these series
of works, as well as others that he worked on
during the seventeen thirties and seventeen forties and some in
the seventies fifties, are filled with these details like I
(19:09):
mentioned before, that add to the story and in some
cases they make direct social or political commentary. In some
cases he'll have pieces of art on the walls in
the backgrounds that have meaning. And uh. Some of the
people that are depicted as supporting characters in these works
were actually well known figures of London at the time.
Sometimes they are cast in roles that make it clear
that William Hogarth did not think very highly of them.
(19:32):
Not long after the release of Our Rake's Progress, Hogarth
was elected as one of the governors of Britain's oldest hospital,
Saint Bartholomew's. He contributed to the decor of the facility
by painting two large pieces for the main staircase, which
were the historical paintings Pool of Bethesda and the Good Samaritan. Yeah,
that hospital was founded, I believe in the eleven hundreds. Uh,
(19:53):
And we're going to talk about the unique legacy of
those two paintings there. But first we're gonna pause for
a word from one of our fans answers. Those paintings
in St. Bartholomew's, which are often mistaken for murals because
they take up whole walls, but they are in fact canvases,
(20:14):
are still in the hospital today and they have taken
on sort of a unique role. In addition to acting
as massive decor, the figures in those paintings are seven
feet tall, so extrapolate from that how big like full
scenes featuring people that size would be. They are also
used in a really kind of interesting way as teaching tools.
It's believed that Hogarth used patients from the hospital as
(20:37):
his models for the paintings, and he captured their illnesses
pretty accurately and without exaggeration, and as such, the characters
in the paintings are sometimes introduced as topics of diagnosis
discussion with medical students. Hogarth subjects display conditions which could
be my atonia, congenita and ricketts and syphilis and gout,
among others, and so it's kind of an interesting way
(20:58):
to um test and develop observational skills, which I think
is just sort of fantastic to go, hey, what do
you think this person in the painting has. While these
two large scale historical paintings are not considered to be
Hogarth's best work, they are an important part of the
hospital's history Because they are in an active space, they
need constant upkeep, and his lifetime Hogarth covered the expenses
(21:22):
to do so himself. He also requested that the two
paintings never be varnished, though at some point that request
was disregarded repeatedly. During a cleaning of the paintings in
nineteen thirty seven, layers of varnished were carefully removed, and
after his work on the st Bartholemew's Staircase project was complete,
Hogarth turned to more traditional portraiture, and one of his
(21:44):
first portraits in this period was a painting of philanthropist
Thomas Coorum, which he displayed at an orphan's hospital that
Coream had founded, and he also convinced other artists to
donate their work to the hospital when it was completed
in seventeen. His famous self portrait A Painter and his
Pug was created in seventeen forty five, and that same
year he released another series called Marriage a la Mode
(22:08):
and the exhibition description of Hogarth's work at the Tape
Museum in two thousand and seven, it was described as follows.
The satirical thrust of Marriage Alla Moode is as much
about patronage, aesthetics, and taste as it is about marriage
and morals. Over and above the title itself, Marriage alla
Moode includes Italian and Dutch old masters, French portraiture and furnishings,
(22:30):
Oriental decorative arts, an Italian castrato singer and a French
dancing master, a turbaned black page boy, a masquerade reference,
a bango and an aristocratic toilet. And even syphilis which
Lord Squanderfield probably contracted abroad and was popularly known as
the French pox. Thus his emasculated and diseased body is
(22:52):
additionally emblematic of the spread of quote foreign culture that
has infected and weakened British identity, society and commerce. And
I wanted to include that because they so perfectly kind
of encapsulated in that one paragraph a lot of the
way that his his art worked in terms of how
it would take people down with these little subtle clues
about uh and not so subtle clues about what was
(23:15):
going on in the picture and the people involved. So
the story of marriage a la mode is that of
an arranged marriage which leads to a life of idle
distance between the couple involved and extramarital indulgences, both in
terms of affairs and just debaucherous behavior otherwise, including drug use.
So for Hogarth, who married for love and really seemed
to have had a happy match with Jane Thornhill, marriage
(23:36):
is arranged for financial benefits seemed to both ludicrous and doomed.
The late seventeen forties and early seventeen fifties saw a
shift and Hogart's worth back to prince, but they were
more basic images intended for mass market sales. He didn't
start with paintings for those prints, but from drawings. One
of these series, titled The Four Stages of Cruelty, is
(23:57):
a commentary on how unkind children can easily become violent adults.
It depicts animal abuse in the first plate, and then
the main character, Tom Nero, becomes progressively more a monster,
culminating in m. A. Cobb final scene in which the
hanged Tom is being dissected for an anatomy lesson in
(24:17):
the surgery. Yeah, that was one I will confess. Uh,
there are debaucherous and sometimes unpleasant images in all of
his work. That series, really I found quite troubling. The
animal abuse is really graphic. And then the things that
sort of happened as this character becomes more and more
(24:39):
of a lost person and a violent person are really
a little effect surprisingly affecting to me for plates. Um,
So if you go looking, just know that that's the case.
At the same time that he was working on these
simple morality prints, ho Garth was also painting, but he
had reached this point where he was starting to struggle
to finish any of his canvases. Yeah. Really staged two
(25:00):
auctions of his work between seventeen forty five and seventeen
fifty one, but these led to both frustration and embarrassment
because they did not generate enough interest to really bring
in much money. In seventeen fifty three, William Hogarth published
a book titled The Analysis of Beauty, in which he
laid out his principles of beauty and focused on the
import of what he called the line of beauty, an
(25:23):
s shaped curve that's inherently appealing and exciting to the
human eye. The book met with mixed reviews and was
mocked by his detractors. Yeah, as we mentioned earlier, early
in his career he made enemies and they stayed that
way for the rest of his life. In seventeen fifty four,
Hogarth produced another satirical series. This was known as the
(25:43):
Election Series, which is a critique of electoral corruptions as
told through a narrative detailing of political race in a
fictional town called guzzle Down. And this series, which once
again began his oil paintings and then was made into etchings,
so he had had gone back to that he had
started doing the quicker drawings into etchings version skewered both
(26:04):
the Tories and the Whigs for bribery and corrupt practices,
and the first painting in the series actually went on
display several days before the general election that year, at
a time when election corruption was being discussed in every
paper in London and seventeen fifty seven Hogarth became sergeant
painter to King George the Third, but despite this prestigious
and well paying position, his later years were really marked
(26:27):
with disappointment. In seventeen fifty nine he painted Sigismunda Morning
over the Heart of Giscardo, which features the titles heroin
holding a goblet containing the heart of her husband murdered
by her father. The criticism of the work was severe
and Hogarth did not paint much after that. Yeah, there
(26:48):
are some write ups of that piece saying that he
was trying to prove that English painters could produce work
exactly as good as the Italian masters, and that the
the reception was more of like a m hmm, I
don't think so. Uh. It did not go well, and
he did make one other political statement with his anti
war print series titled The Times, which he did after that,
(27:10):
which made a rather unpopular statement in coming out against
the Seven Years War. And at the time that that
series was published, the war had not yet ended, so
it was like in year six and did not have
the name the Seven Years War. Yet people were outraged
by this particular work, and politicians who supported the war
vocally and publicly criticized Hogarth, and it only served to
(27:31):
dampen his interest in his work. Hogarth's last artistic endeavor
was an etching titled The Bathos or Manner of Sinking,
which was published in March of seventeen sixty four. It's
often described as having an air of doom in it,
and it time is depicted as a winged figure, broken
and lying prone amid an assortment of debris, a puff
(27:52):
of air escaping his lips, with the word Pheni printed
on it. The image was intended to be the tailpiece
rebound collections of his work, and when considered in that context,
it's a little bit less ominous. Yeah, it definitely looks
like a death and destruction kind of image, but when
you consider that it would be the end paper of
(28:13):
a book where they're saying the book has ended, it
seems a little less upsetting. But people will sometimes hint
that it it was maybe important of his upcoming death.
Uh So, a few months after The Bethos was created,
in the summer of seventeen sixty four, William Hogarth had
a seizure and he remained quite ill from that point
until his death on October seventeen sixty four, and he
(28:37):
was sixty seven at that point and had been working
as an engraver and artist for more than four decades. Today,
not only can you find Hogarth's works and museums around
the world, but you can also visit the house he
lived in from seventeen forty nine until his death. It's
now a museum and we will link to information about
it in the show notes. Yeah, William Hogarth, He's fascinating creature.
(29:01):
He's one of those artists. Like usually I will wax
rapsodic about artists and kind of fall in love with them.
And I was telling Tracy before this, I don't know
how I feel about him, Like if I think he
would be a delightful fun person or if he might
be a crabby stick in the mud, I'm not sure.
But some of his work is really lovely. Yes, so
most art historians and critics will say, like, if you
(29:23):
look at his his satire pieces, because of their composition
and what he included and how um sort of rich
unless they were, those are are warranted as the things
that make him famous. But if you just compare like
his straight paintings to other painters at the time, he's fine,
but not not particularly a big standout, And you wouldn't
be like, Wow, he was really amazing. Yeah, I saw
(29:46):
some really interesting things that were about him trying to
make it acceptable for anything to be the subject of
art instead of just appropriate things being a subject of art. Yeah,
that a lot of that came from that sort of
bucking against the the established art society in the early
(30:07):
seventeen hundreds. That he thought like, that's foolish. Nobody should
control what should be art and what shouldn't be art
and what's valid art and what is it, which I
completely get behind. Uh, But yeah, he's he's an interesting chap.
I have sort of a multilayered listener mail because I
have three in front of me, but they're all kind
of similar and related, but I wanted to call them
(30:27):
all out and mentioned them. They're all related to our
episode on veterinary medicine, because fortunately we have listeners who
are smart and no things and can add to that.
I will read the one from Allison, who says, Dear
Holly and Tracy. Last week, I sat down at my
desk at the end of a twelve hour work day
to type up medical notes from my evening appointments and
nearly cried when I saw the topic of the podcast
(30:50):
was a brief history of veterinary medicine. I'm a veterinarian
who practices both Western and traditional Chinese veterinary medicine, so
your podcast touched on so many aspects of my career,
and after a long day of work, it was a
welcome reminder of my profession's rich history, of which I'm
proud to be a part of. And she mentioned that
she wanted to make a tiny correction about the episode.
At one point, you were discussing blood letting as a
(31:10):
treatment for excess blood, and Holly, you joked that you
can't have too much blood. Fun fact, while we no
longer recognize that as a common medical ailment, there actually
is a relatively uncommon condition of excess blood called poly
psythemia uh poly meaning many size meaning cells and emia
meaning related to the blood. Polysythemia can have several causes. Generally,
(31:32):
it is caused by bone marrow cancer, leading to overproduction
of blood cells that are then released into the blood
stream faster than normal. This more in than out process
leads to excess blood cells. Another reason for a patient
to develop polycythemia would be chronic hypoxia or lack of
oxygen delivered to the tissues, and the body will over
time respond to a chronic lack of oxygen by producing
(31:53):
more red blood cells, whose job it is to carry
oxygen from the lungs to the tissues. Uh So she
thankfully added that little bit to teach us more about
veterinary medicine. I believe that is also a thing that
can happen in humans and not just animals. Yeah, they're
definitely various blood disorders that can involve too much of
various blood cells. Yeah, but I did say in that episode,
(32:17):
you can't have too much blood, like that was a
crazy idea. Well, and it also reminds me of I
don't even remember when this was so long ago. We
at some point mentioned the non non medical practice of trepidation,
where they would drill holes in people's skulls um and
how like there's no basis to that at all, And
(32:38):
people wrote in to say, well, but if you're if
you're needing to relieve too much pressure on people's brain,
we do drill a hole in their skull. And I
was like, yeah, but that that's not trepenation though, like
that's the medical procedure, right. Trepidation is a different thing. Uh.
And then we also had both Megan and Aaron wrote
(32:59):
to us, both of them also involved in veterinary medicine,
and they mentioned too that one of the things we
talked about briefly was how it was twelve thousand dollars
I think in Germany in nine to get a veterinary degree,
and how that was an exorbitant amount of the time.
Of course, it continues to be exorbitant to go to
medical school. Both of them cited figures that are well
(33:21):
into the six figures. I have such immense respect for veterinarians.
I love my veterinarian desperately. She's amazing. We've been together
for more than a decade thirteen years, I think, man,
which she's like family to me practically, uh, and has
foolishly given me her private number, which she probably regrets
because I will text her with things. But we've gotten
(33:42):
so much great feedback from veterinarians and vet text and
I just wanted to thank them all for sharing info
with us, and and they all share such complete passion
for their work and the life saving stuff that they do,
and the incredible breadth of knowledge that they have to have.
So I think every ternary and if I did not
make that completely clear. There was a brief period in
(34:03):
my life where after I had been working in a
secondary education library for over a decade, I thought maybe
I want to go into animal care, and then I didn't.
Then went into broadcasting instant, which I know is bizarre,
but it's because I do not have the wherewithal to
hack that job. It's very very stressful. Um, no matter
what level you're at, it's very very stressful. So thank
(34:25):
you to all of the veterinarians and texts that have
written us. I appreciate the work you do. Uh if
you would like to write to us, you can do
so at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
You can also find us across the spectrum of social
media as missed in History. You can also come to
our website to find us, which is missed in history
dot com, where there are show notes for every episode
that Tracy and I have worked on. Now those are
(34:47):
incorporated right into the show page. There's not a separate
show note page. You can also find every episode of
the show ever from its inception, way before Tracy and
I were ever involved, And if you would like to
learn more, you can go to our parents, which is
how stuff works dot com. Type in almost anything you
want about art, or veterinary sciences, or almost any other
topic in the search bar, and you're going to get
(35:08):
a wealth of information to delight and entertain and inform you.
So please come and visit us at missed in history
dot com and how stuff works dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff
works dot com.
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm tra C V. Wilson, and
today we're gonna talk about an artist. But his story
really involves so much more than art. It involves satire
(00:22):
and social criticism, and it even gets into some legislation
for artist rights. But one thing we should point out
is that his satire and social criticism was being made
in the early seventeen hundreds when the society he was
criticizing was very different than ours. It was debuted in
a lot of ways. Yes, so there are a lot
of things that are viewed very differently than we view them. Uh.
(00:47):
There is discussion of of sex workers in this episode,
not any details, but they come up in in some
of his prints, as well as some violence, some drug use,
things like that come up. So just be aware that
that's that's in the hopper and that it will be
again based on on the views of England in the
(01:10):
seventeen thirties and forties and fifties. Well, and especially because
our artwork for this one is a self portrait of
the artist with his dog and it looks so sweet.
It looks very sweet, and I was like, I could
just see teachers saying, hey, this would be a great
episode to share with the kids. Um, and it might
be depending on the age of your kids, the kids
(01:31):
you're thinking of that you would want. Still, I think
to frame it and kind of listen first and decide
based on the actual content. But we're going to talk
about William Hogarth, who was an English artist that, as
I said, uh, you know, his life story involves a
lot more than just art. M William Hogarth was born
(01:51):
to Richard Hogarth and Anne Gibbons in London, England, on
November tenth seven. He did have some siblings, although the
tally's on those siblings very wildly. Uh. Richard Hogarth, William's
father was a teacher and a classical scholar, and while
he did have patrons, the family still struggled financially. Yeah.
(02:16):
Hogarth's later in his life would talk about how his
dad had really been treated very poorly and he ended
up in deep debts. Some accounts say that his father
went to debtors prison, but I couldn't find a solid
verification on that, but that does kind of inform some
of his work going forward, and despite being the child
of an educator, though William was pretty disinterested in formal education.
(02:37):
He was really smart and he was curious, but even
from a young age, he was more inclined to draw
than to study texts. But it seemed that his father
was not exactly sure what to do to help William
find a path in life that would suit his interests.
He wasn't against him pursuing art, but he didn't really
know what to do with it. So William ended up
looking for an apprenticeship. And this is another time where
(02:58):
I will say there are some accounts that suggests that
his father was in debtors prison and he had to
get the apprenticeship, and others that say that he just
knew his dad was not going to be much help
in in finding him a career path, so he went
and found one himself. At fifteen, he became a silversmith's apprentice,
and he learned engraving skills. But a master in this
(03:18):
position might have hindered his development by giving him a
mediocre instruction, and Hogarth, once again, frustrated that his mentors
guidance was really lacking, opted to seek out information about
the trade on his own, so he was augmenting this
kind of weak training that he was getting with self
guided study, and during his apprenticeship, Hogarth studied the world
(03:42):
around him as much as his trade. He was definitely
a fan of all of the various entertainments offered by
early eighteenth century London, from theaters to body houses to
coffee houses where intellectuals gathered. He sort of was one
of those people I always think of as like a
student of life. He just wanted to go around and
see people doing all the things that people do and
learn from that. When Hogarth was twenty three, he opened
(04:06):
his own shop. In that same year he started taking
formal drawing classes, but the normal curriculum for drawing lessons,
which was sketching live models or prepared tableau and attempting
to replicate other artists work, had the same effect on
Hogarth as this early attempts at his education had. He
was not interested. He found it frustrating and limiting, and
(04:28):
he had turned to drawing school to expand the possibilities
of his engraving work, but he didn't think the classes
were actually going to help him achieve that goal, and
so he opted once again to rely on himself for
his education, and he began to train his observational skills
because he wanted to be able to draw real life
subjects from memory. So he developed his own improvisational style
(04:50):
over time, and simultaneously he was supporting himself through his
regular engraving work. That work included projects like book illustration,
so he was getting some practical experience in commercial art,
but this was not particularly fulfilling. He would later say
that the work quote did a little more than maintain
myself and the usual gaieties of life, but wasn't all
(05:13):
a punctual paymaster. And it wasn't long though, before he
found himself attracted once again to drawing school. But this
time it was a little different. It was a school
housed in the home of Sir James Thornhill. Thornhill was
an accomplished artist. He had been the official history painter
in the courts of George the First and George the Second,
(05:33):
and he had been knighted in seventy He was also
a member of Parliament. He painted in the Italian Baroque style,
and Hogarth was a fan of his work, and part
of the appeal of studying under Thornhill was the fact
that Thornhill had achieved a level of social standing that
was unusual for an artist. He wasn't toiling penniless at
the whim of a patron, although he was at odds
(05:56):
with the neo classical revival that was underway at the time,
and in f are to gain favor with Thornhill and
make clear that he felt they were of the same
mindset regarding art, Hogarth even published an engraving at the
time titled Masquerades and Operas, which was a criticism of
the trends to embrace foreign art above the art that
was actually created in England. The engraving features, among other things,
(06:20):
a fool and a devil leading a crowd into the
theater to see the latest popular entertainment, while a woman
with a wheelbarrow carries away all the writings of Congreve, Drieden, Otway,
Shakespeare and Addison, and below the image is the following inscription.
Could new dumb faustus to reform the age conjure up
Shakespeare's or Ben Johnson's ghosts? They'd blush for shame to
(06:43):
see the English stage debauched by fooleryes at so great
a cost. What would their main say? Should they behold
Monsters and masquerades, where useful plays adorned, the fruitful theater
of old and rival wits contended for the base. A
copy of disengraving, which is known as The Bad Taste
of the Town, was in the British Museum's collection and
(07:04):
while it's not on display, it is digitized and available
online and we will be linked in our show notes. Yeah.
I feel like with all of Hogarth's work, we should
I mention that it's worth going and looking at it
for yourself because we can describe it, and we will
for a couple of them describe them. But uh, they're
very busy. There is a lot going on in every
single picture. Uh. And that's part of his social commentary
(07:27):
that he includes things. And it's kind of like you
will never fully grasp all of the sort of intensity
of these these very very detailed pieces until you actually
see them for yourself. So I encourage you to good
look for them. Uh. And publishing Masquerades and Operas had
long term ramifications for Hogarth's life and career. So the
(07:49):
criticism of England's contemporary art and culture scene and the
connoisseurs in it, of course earned him a number of enemies,
and most prominent among them was the architect Richard Boyle,
who was the third Earl of Burlington. He and others
would kind of have this rivalry with uh Hogarth for
the rest of his life, and it was not the
first time in his early career that he would butt
(08:10):
heads with art patrons. After several years of study with Thornhill,
Hogarth believed he had learned enough that he should begin
a painting career in Earnest. One of his first patrons
was a tapestry maker named Joshua Morris, who had requested
a painting from Hogarth, and when Hogarth delivered the art,
Morris refused to accept it, claiming that Hogarth had not
(08:32):
finished it and that it was apparent that the artist
was really an engraver and not a professional painter. William
Hogarth then sued Morris for his money and brought a
number of expert witnesses to the trial, including Thornhill, to
a test that yes, the work involved was a complete
painting and that Hogarth should be paid the money that
(08:53):
he was owed. The court found in Hogarth's favor. Yeah,
I think this is a time when artists were not
so willing to really like pursue legal action when someone said, oh, no,
I don't want that painting after all, but he did.
That will come up again in a little bit that
he's willing to take legal action for his rightful money.
Also in seventy eight, Hogarth painted his first dated painting.
(09:15):
Up to this point he had produced some plates and
other things, but they didn't have dates on them. And
this is The Beggar's Opera. And it was a recreation
of a scene from a current production of the farctical play.
And it was an example of just how well he
had trained his memory to recall detail, because apparently, according
to many people, he basically perfectly recreated the scene as
it had played on the stage, even though he had
(09:37):
of course gone away and painted it later. He actually
ended up painting five different versions of the scene. In
seventeen twenty nine, Hogarth and thorn Hill's relationship took on
a new dimension. William became Thornhill's son in law when
he and Jane Thornhill eloped. And in his early career
Hogarth became known for paintings known as conversation pieces, and
(09:58):
these were portraits of small groups of people depicting them
in a casual, informal moment, like they're having a light conversation.
And these also tended to be physically small paintings. And
as Hogarth's conversation pieces became popular, they did afford him
a degree of financial success, but he also started to
find them really boring to work on, and this was
in part because each individual piece didn't really bring in
(10:20):
all that much money. He was a very quick worker,
but he had to basically keep cranking them out at
a rapid pace to keep money coming in. But even
as he continued speedily cranking out these conversation pieces, he
also worked on other projects for which he had greater enthusiasm.
And these pieces were humorous, realistic scenes, and like masquerades
(10:41):
and operas, these works often skewered social trends and preached morality.
If they had been published as sequential art on a page,
they would look very similar to comics and style, but
they came out as full size prints, each one taking
up an entire page of its own. And this was
where he truly hit his stride as an artist. Yeah,
(11:02):
this is really what made him famous, uh, and what
continues to make him sort of an important figure in
the art world, and he was very savvy about the
success that started to come with it, so much so
that it did, as I mentioned earlierly, to some legislation.
We're going to talk about all of that in just
a moment, but first we will pause and have a
little sponsor break. Whereas Hogarth's conversation pieces offered him financial stability,
(11:28):
his moral satires brought in a great deal more money,
so much so that he reached a point where he
really had financial independence. He could work on the things
that he chose to do, rather than depending on commissions
or patronage to meet his ongoing financial needs. As prints
of Hogarth's engravings were made to sell to a wider audience,
he was aware of the risk that copycats could plagiarize
(11:50):
his work, and that is because that had happened to him.
He published a very popular series called A Harlot's Progress
in seventeen thirty three, and the six paintings, which were
then adapted into plates that made up A Harlot's Progress
were produced at a time when the topic of prostitution
and sex workers were the focus of a lot of
attention in London in the late seventeen twenties and early
(12:13):
seventeen thirties, there was this effort on the part of
city officials to bring morality back to London streets by
working to eliminate or at least reduce the obvious appearance
of prostitution. But out of the initial vilification of women
that this sort of charge started, there was this secondary
wave of characterization of women's sex workers that made them
(12:36):
seem more like innocence who had been trapped by corruptors.
And this was a debate that was going on in
papers throughout London at the time, and Hogarth's engraving told
a tale along the lines of that second characterization of
an innocent who falls into this life through no desire
of her own to pursue it. In the first plate,
an innocent young woman named Mall hack About arrives in
(12:59):
the city from the country, thinking she'll make her way
in a trade such as dressmaking, but she's intercepted by
a brothel keeper named Mother Needham, who has shown assessing
Mall's attributes. And a second plate, Mall has become a
kept mistress living in luxury, but then she's caught cheating
on her keeper, and by the third plate, Mall has
(13:20):
been cast out by that keeper and has become a
prostitute on the street. Uh and in plate four she
has been imprisoned for that. In plate five she is
once again a free woman, but at this point she
has an illegitimate child and she is dying from a
sexually transmitted disease. Plate six is Mall's funeral, attended by
women who also work in the sex trade, and men
who appear to be more interested in taking advantage of
(13:42):
those women than in mourning the dead person before them Mall.
Even the parson in that final plate has his hand
in the skirt of one of the other mourners. Because
of the popularity of a Harlot's progress, fake copies were
produced all over London by CD printers hoping to cash
in on Hogarth's work, and naturally the artist was incensed
(14:04):
so much so that he took legal action. So, of course,
it was not really feasible to chase down all of
the various printers who had been making unlicensed copies of
these popular plates. So William Hogarth, along with several other artists,
went to Parliament and they made a case that their
work should be legally protected. And after hearing the artists case,
a piece of legislation called the Engravers Act was introduced
(14:25):
in seventeen thirty four with language that would protect engravings
that featured original designs, and it was signed into law
on June seventeen thirty five, and it became known by
the nickname Hogarth's Act. You'll sometimes also see it written
as Hogarth's Law. While the Engravers Act was in legislation
but not yet assigned law, William Hogarth actually had another
(14:47):
series that he was ready to publish, but he was
not willing to do so until there were legal protections
in place to prevent pirated copies from circulating. And in
the meantime, Hogarth's mentor and father in law, Thornhill, died
in seventeen thirty four, and after the loss, Hogarth decided
that he would reopen Thornhill's drawing school, which had never
(15:07):
been a particularly successful venture. Hogarth's version became much more
of a salon where artists shared ideas and discussed their work.
Once the Engravers Act was law, Hogarth released the series
he had been withholding, titled A Rake's Progress. The series,
like A Harlot's Progress, was painted an oil first and
then adapted as a set of print engravings. The Rake
(15:31):
in this narrative is Tom Rakewell, a young man of leisure.
In the first scene, young Tom has freshly come into
his fortune as his wealthy and apparently miserly father has died. Tom,
wasting no time spending his new found money, is being
fitted for a fancy new suit while simultaneously paying off
a paramore who appears to be pregnant and heartbroken. She
(15:52):
will appear in later plates as well. In scene too,
Tom is surrounded in his home by an assortment of people,
all vying for his attention in his financial favor. By
the time the viewer sees Tom and the third scene,
he has fully descended into a life of debauchery. He's
in a brothel taking part in an orgy. And this
is a good time to mention that in Hogarth's works
(16:13):
on morality, even though sexual situations are conveyed, there's no nudity,
but there is the suggestion of it. So to modern eye,
the plate three looks like a wild party. It might
take a moment for the viewer to actually register exactly
what is going on. Yeah, he's you know, he is
taking part in this big thing, but it's not overtly portrayed.
(16:38):
I mean, once you start seeing the clues and you realize, like, oh,
people's hands are in each other's clothes and stuff, but
it's not quite so graphic as you might be envisioning.
And in the fourth scene, Tom is about to be
arrested for the debts that he's accrued in his debaucherous lifestyle,
when that same young woman from the first plate that
he bought off steps in and she pays the bail
(17:00):
of all of her money so that she can save him.
And in the fifth scene, Tom is getting married, but
not to that kind young woman who saved him though
he had wronged her, but instead to an elderly heiress
in the hopes of regaining a fortune in the match.
The sixth image is a seed scene. Tom is anna
gambling den. The room is on fire, but neither Tom
(17:22):
nor the other gambler's notice because they are so absorbed
in the fortunes that they stand to gain or lose.
Tom appears to be pleading to God for assistance in
his bet, and Tom is pictured in debtor's prison in
the seventh image in the series, he has written a
play in the hopes of selling it. To make some money.
It's kind of sitting to the side, and his wife
(17:42):
is pictured, that same woman that he married for her money,
but at this point she has gaunt and clearly not
the wealthy woman she once was. And the final scene
shows Tom in the Bethlehem Royal Hospital known colloquially as Bedlam,
where the insane and impoverished of London were sent, and
he is naked at this point save for a rag
a cloth that straped over him, and a wealthy woman
(18:03):
who has come to see the spectacle of Bedlam, looks on.
She has paid for admission to come and sort of
observe the lower creatures in this horrible condition. This particular
series was popular when it first appeared, and it's remained
so in the centuries since. In nineteen thirty five, the
story of Tom Rakewell was adapted into a ballet, became
(18:25):
a film in nineteen forty five, and an opera by
Igor Stravinsky in nineteen fifty one. The original painting series
of A Rake's Progress was purchased at auction in eighteen
o two by the wife architect Sir john Soon. Today
they are part of the Sir Johnson Museum collection. Unfortunately,
the original paintings for A Harlot's Progress were lost in
(18:46):
a fire in seventeen fifty five. Yeah, and A Rake's Progress.
There have been even more modern adaptations and other works
inspired by it, but those are the sort of the
key points were. In the more modern age, it suddenly
had this resurgence of interest, and both of these series
of works, as well as others that he worked on
during the seventeen thirties and seventeen forties and some in
the seventies fifties, are filled with these details like I
(19:09):
mentioned before, that add to the story and in some
cases they make direct social or political commentary. In some
cases he'll have pieces of art on the walls in
the backgrounds that have meaning. And uh. Some of the
people that are depicted as supporting characters in these works
were actually well known figures of London at the time.
Sometimes they are cast in roles that make it clear
that William Hogarth did not think very highly of them.
(19:32):
Not long after the release of Our Rake's Progress, Hogarth
was elected as one of the governors of Britain's oldest hospital,
Saint Bartholomew's. He contributed to the decor of the facility
by painting two large pieces for the main staircase, which
were the historical paintings Pool of Bethesda and the Good Samaritan. Yeah,
that hospital was founded, I believe in the eleven hundreds. Uh,
(19:53):
And we're going to talk about the unique legacy of
those two paintings there. But first we're gonna pause for
a word from one of our fans answers. Those paintings
in St. Bartholomew's, which are often mistaken for murals because
they take up whole walls, but they are in fact canvases,
(20:14):
are still in the hospital today and they have taken
on sort of a unique role. In addition to acting
as massive decor, the figures in those paintings are seven
feet tall, so extrapolate from that how big like full
scenes featuring people that size would be. They are also
used in a really kind of interesting way as teaching tools.
It's believed that Hogarth used patients from the hospital as
(20:37):
his models for the paintings, and he captured their illnesses
pretty accurately and without exaggeration, and as such, the characters
in the paintings are sometimes introduced as topics of diagnosis
discussion with medical students. Hogarth subjects display conditions which could
be my atonia, congenita and ricketts and syphilis and gout,
among others, and so it's kind of an interesting way
(20:58):
to um test and develop observational skills, which I think
is just sort of fantastic to go, hey, what do
you think this person in the painting has. While these
two large scale historical paintings are not considered to be
Hogarth's best work, they are an important part of the
hospital's history Because they are in an active space, they
need constant upkeep, and his lifetime Hogarth covered the expenses
(21:22):
to do so himself. He also requested that the two
paintings never be varnished, though at some point that request
was disregarded repeatedly. During a cleaning of the paintings in
nineteen thirty seven, layers of varnished were carefully removed, and
after his work on the st Bartholemew's Staircase project was complete,
Hogarth turned to more traditional portraiture, and one of his
(21:44):
first portraits in this period was a painting of philanthropist
Thomas Coorum, which he displayed at an orphan's hospital that
Coream had founded, and he also convinced other artists to
donate their work to the hospital when it was completed
in seventeen. His famous self portrait A Painter and his
Pug was created in seventeen forty five, and that same
year he released another series called Marriage a la Mode
(22:08):
and the exhibition description of Hogarth's work at the Tape
Museum in two thousand and seven, it was described as follows.
The satirical thrust of Marriage Alla Moode is as much
about patronage, aesthetics, and taste as it is about marriage
and morals. Over and above the title itself, Marriage alla
Moode includes Italian and Dutch old masters, French portraiture and furnishings,
(22:30):
Oriental decorative arts, an Italian castrato singer and a French
dancing master, a turbaned black page boy, a masquerade reference,
a bango and an aristocratic toilet. And even syphilis which
Lord Squanderfield probably contracted abroad and was popularly known as
the French pox. Thus his emasculated and diseased body is
(22:52):
additionally emblematic of the spread of quote foreign culture that
has infected and weakened British identity, society and commerce. And
I wanted to include that because they so perfectly kind
of encapsulated in that one paragraph a lot of the
way that his his art worked in terms of how
it would take people down with these little subtle clues
about uh and not so subtle clues about what was
(23:15):
going on in the picture and the people involved. So
the story of marriage a la mode is that of
an arranged marriage which leads to a life of idle
distance between the couple involved and extramarital indulgences, both in
terms of affairs and just debaucherous behavior otherwise, including drug use.
So for Hogarth, who married for love and really seemed
to have had a happy match with Jane Thornhill, marriage
(23:36):
is arranged for financial benefits seemed to both ludicrous and doomed.
The late seventeen forties and early seventeen fifties saw a
shift and Hogart's worth back to prince, but they were
more basic images intended for mass market sales. He didn't
start with paintings for those prints, but from drawings. One
of these series, titled The Four Stages of Cruelty, is
(23:57):
a commentary on how unkind children can easily become violent adults.
It depicts animal abuse in the first plate, and then
the main character, Tom Nero, becomes progressively more a monster,
culminating in m. A. Cobb final scene in which the
hanged Tom is being dissected for an anatomy lesson in
(24:17):
the surgery. Yeah, that was one I will confess. Uh,
there are debaucherous and sometimes unpleasant images in all of
his work. That series, really I found quite troubling. The
animal abuse is really graphic. And then the things that
sort of happened as this character becomes more and more
(24:39):
of a lost person and a violent person are really
a little effect surprisingly affecting to me for plates. Um,
So if you go looking, just know that that's the case.
At the same time that he was working on these
simple morality prints, ho Garth was also painting, but he
had reached this point where he was starting to struggle
to finish any of his canvases. Yeah. Really staged two
(25:00):
auctions of his work between seventeen forty five and seventeen
fifty one, but these led to both frustration and embarrassment
because they did not generate enough interest to really bring
in much money. In seventeen fifty three, William Hogarth published
a book titled The Analysis of Beauty, in which he
laid out his principles of beauty and focused on the
import of what he called the line of beauty, an
(25:23):
s shaped curve that's inherently appealing and exciting to the
human eye. The book met with mixed reviews and was
mocked by his detractors. Yeah, as we mentioned earlier, early
in his career he made enemies and they stayed that
way for the rest of his life. In seventeen fifty four,
Hogarth produced another satirical series. This was known as the
(25:43):
Election Series, which is a critique of electoral corruptions as
told through a narrative detailing of political race in a
fictional town called guzzle Down. And this series, which once
again began his oil paintings and then was made into etchings,
so he had had gone back to that he had
started doing the quicker drawings into etchings version skewered both
(26:04):
the Tories and the Whigs for bribery and corrupt practices,
and the first painting in the series actually went on
display several days before the general election that year, at
a time when election corruption was being discussed in every
paper in London and seventeen fifty seven Hogarth became sergeant
painter to King George the Third, but despite this prestigious
and well paying position, his later years were really marked
(26:27):
with disappointment. In seventeen fifty nine he painted Sigismunda Morning
over the Heart of Giscardo, which features the titles heroin
holding a goblet containing the heart of her husband murdered
by her father. The criticism of the work was severe
and Hogarth did not paint much after that. Yeah, there
(26:48):
are some write ups of that piece saying that he
was trying to prove that English painters could produce work
exactly as good as the Italian masters, and that the
the reception was more of like a m hmm, I
don't think so. Uh. It did not go well, and
he did make one other political statement with his anti
war print series titled The Times, which he did after that,
(27:10):
which made a rather unpopular statement in coming out against
the Seven Years War. And at the time that that
series was published, the war had not yet ended, so
it was like in year six and did not have
the name the Seven Years War. Yet people were outraged
by this particular work, and politicians who supported the war
vocally and publicly criticized Hogarth, and it only served to
(27:31):
dampen his interest in his work. Hogarth's last artistic endeavor
was an etching titled The Bathos or Manner of Sinking,
which was published in March of seventeen sixty four. It's
often described as having an air of doom in it,
and it time is depicted as a winged figure, broken
and lying prone amid an assortment of debris, a puff
(27:52):
of air escaping his lips, with the word Pheni printed
on it. The image was intended to be the tailpiece
rebound collections of his work, and when considered in that context,
it's a little bit less ominous. Yeah, it definitely looks
like a death and destruction kind of image, but when
you consider that it would be the end paper of
(28:13):
a book where they're saying the book has ended, it
seems a little less upsetting. But people will sometimes hint
that it it was maybe important of his upcoming death.
Uh So, a few months after The Bethos was created,
in the summer of seventeen sixty four, William Hogarth had
a seizure and he remained quite ill from that point
until his death on October seventeen sixty four, and he
(28:37):
was sixty seven at that point and had been working
as an engraver and artist for more than four decades. Today,
not only can you find Hogarth's works and museums around
the world, but you can also visit the house he
lived in from seventeen forty nine until his death. It's
now a museum and we will link to information about
it in the show notes. Yeah, William Hogarth, He's fascinating creature.
(29:01):
He's one of those artists. Like usually I will wax
rapsodic about artists and kind of fall in love with them.
And I was telling Tracy before this, I don't know
how I feel about him, Like if I think he
would be a delightful fun person or if he might
be a crabby stick in the mud, I'm not sure.
But some of his work is really lovely. Yes, so
most art historians and critics will say, like, if you
(29:23):
look at his his satire pieces, because of their composition
and what he included and how um sort of rich
unless they were, those are are warranted as the things
that make him famous. But if you just compare like
his straight paintings to other painters at the time, he's fine,
but not not particularly a big standout, And you wouldn't
be like, Wow, he was really amazing. Yeah, I saw
(29:46):
some really interesting things that were about him trying to
make it acceptable for anything to be the subject of
art instead of just appropriate things being a subject of art. Yeah,
that a lot of that came from that sort of
bucking against the the established art society in the early
(30:07):
seventeen hundreds. That he thought like, that's foolish. Nobody should
control what should be art and what shouldn't be art
and what's valid art and what is it, which I
completely get behind. Uh, But yeah, he's he's an interesting chap.
I have sort of a multilayered listener mail because I
have three in front of me, but they're all kind
of similar and related, but I wanted to call them
(30:27):
all out and mentioned them. They're all related to our
episode on veterinary medicine, because fortunately we have listeners who
are smart and no things and can add to that.
I will read the one from Allison, who says, Dear
Holly and Tracy. Last week, I sat down at my
desk at the end of a twelve hour work day
to type up medical notes from my evening appointments and
nearly cried when I saw the topic of the podcast
(30:50):
was a brief history of veterinary medicine. I'm a veterinarian
who practices both Western and traditional Chinese veterinary medicine, so
your podcast touched on so many aspects of my career,
and after a long day of work, it was a
welcome reminder of my profession's rich history, of which I'm
proud to be a part of. And she mentioned that
she wanted to make a tiny correction about the episode.
At one point, you were discussing blood letting as a
(31:10):
treatment for excess blood, and Holly, you joked that you
can't have too much blood. Fun fact, while we no
longer recognize that as a common medical ailment, there actually
is a relatively uncommon condition of excess blood called poly
psythemia uh poly meaning many size meaning cells and emia
meaning related to the blood. Polysythemia can have several causes. Generally,
(31:32):
it is caused by bone marrow cancer, leading to overproduction
of blood cells that are then released into the blood
stream faster than normal. This more in than out process
leads to excess blood cells. Another reason for a patient
to develop polycythemia would be chronic hypoxia or lack of
oxygen delivered to the tissues, and the body will over
time respond to a chronic lack of oxygen by producing
(31:53):
more red blood cells, whose job it is to carry
oxygen from the lungs to the tissues. Uh So she
thankfully added that little bit to teach us more about
veterinary medicine. I believe that is also a thing that
can happen in humans and not just animals. Yeah, they're
definitely various blood disorders that can involve too much of
various blood cells. Yeah, but I did say in that episode,
(32:17):
you can't have too much blood, like that was a
crazy idea. Well, and it also reminds me of I
don't even remember when this was so long ago. We
at some point mentioned the non non medical practice of trepidation,
where they would drill holes in people's skulls um and
how like there's no basis to that at all, And
(32:38):
people wrote in to say, well, but if you're if
you're needing to relieve too much pressure on people's brain,
we do drill a hole in their skull. And I
was like, yeah, but that that's not trepenation though, like
that's the medical procedure, right. Trepidation is a different thing. Uh.
And then we also had both Megan and Aaron wrote
(32:59):
to us, both of them also involved in veterinary medicine,
and they mentioned too that one of the things we
talked about briefly was how it was twelve thousand dollars
I think in Germany in nine to get a veterinary degree,
and how that was an exorbitant amount of the time.
Of course, it continues to be exorbitant to go to
medical school. Both of them cited figures that are well
(33:21):
into the six figures. I have such immense respect for veterinarians.
I love my veterinarian desperately. She's amazing. We've been together
for more than a decade thirteen years, I think, man,
which she's like family to me practically, uh, and has
foolishly given me her private number, which she probably regrets
because I will text her with things. But we've gotten
(33:42):
so much great feedback from veterinarians and vet text and
I just wanted to thank them all for sharing info
with us, and and they all share such complete passion
for their work and the life saving stuff that they do,
and the incredible breadth of knowledge that they have to have.
So I think every ternary and if I did not
make that completely clear. There was a brief period in
(34:03):
my life where after I had been working in a
secondary education library for over a decade, I thought maybe
I want to go into animal care, and then I didn't.
Then went into broadcasting instant, which I know is bizarre,
but it's because I do not have the wherewithal to
hack that job. It's very very stressful. Um, no matter
what level you're at, it's very very stressful. So thank
(34:25):
you to all of the veterinarians and texts that have
written us. I appreciate the work you do. Uh if
you would like to write to us, you can do
so at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
You can also find us across the spectrum of social
media as missed in History. You can also come to
our website to find us, which is missed in history
dot com, where there are show notes for every episode
that Tracy and I have worked on. Now those are
(34:47):
incorporated right into the show page. There's not a separate
show note page. You can also find every episode of
the show ever from its inception, way before Tracy and
I were ever involved, And if you would like to
learn more, you can go to our parents, which is
how stuff works dot com. Type in almost anything you
want about art, or veterinary sciences, or almost any other
topic in the search bar, and you're going to get
(35:08):
a wealth of information to delight and entertain and inform you.
So please come and visit us at missed in history
dot com and how stuff works dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff
works dot com.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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