HOGARTH, WILLIAM, the celebrated painter, was the grandson of a yeoman, who possessed a small tenement in the vale of Bampton, near Kendal in Westmoreland. He had three sons. The eldest succeeded his father in his lit tle freehold ; the second settled at Troutbeck, near Kendal, and was remarkable for a talent at provincial poetry the third son, who was the father of the painter, after having kept a school in the country, came to London, and pursued the same occupation in Ship Court, in the Old Bailey. William Hogarth was born in the parish of St Bartholo mew in 1698, and seems to have received only the usual education of a mechanic. He was bound apprentice to El lis Gamble, a silversmith in Cranbourn Court, Leicester fields; and was to learn in that profession only the branch of engraving arms and cyphers on metal. Before his ap prenticeship had expired, his genius for drawing began to point to the comic path which it afterwards pursued. Hav ing one day rambled to Highgate with some companions, he witnessed a quarrel in a public-house, in which one of the disputants received a hlow with a quart pot, that made the blood stream down his face. Such a subject, one would think, was little calculated for gay effect ; but humour is not an over-delicate faculty, and the distorted features of the wounded sufferer, it seems, so much attracted the fancy of young Hogarth, that he sketched his portrait on the spot, with the surrounding figures, in ludicrous caricature. Ills apprenticeship was no sooner expired, than he entered into the academy of St Martin's Lane, and studied drawing from the life, in which he never attained to great excel lence. It was character, the passions, the soul, that his genius was given him to copy. In colouring, he proved no great master ; his forte lay in expression, not in tints and chiaroscuro. It is not exactly known how long he continued in obscurity, but the first piece in which he dis tinguished himself as a painter, is a representation of Wan stead Assembly. In this are introduced portraits of the first Earl Tylncy, his lady, their children, tenants, Ste. The colouring of this is said to be better than that of some of his later and more highly finished pieces.
From the date of the earliest plate that can be ascertain ed to be the work of Hogarth, it may be presumed, that he began business on his own account at least as early as the year 1720. His first employment seems to have been the
engraving of arms and shop bills; the next to design and furnish plates for booksellers.* Among these, were de signs for Hudibras, with Butler's head. His Hudibras (says Horace Walpole) was the first of his works that marked him as a man above the common ; yet what made him then noticed now surprises us, to find so little humour in an undertaking so congenial to his talents.
The success of his plates was sufficient to bring him business as a portrait painter ; but it was not permanent, or attended with much reputation. The author of the volume of anecdotes respecting him, affirms with confidence, that though not a portrait painter, who could gratify the self love of his employers, he drew individual likenesses in`his best pieces. One of his most striking scenes of this sort, was the examination of the committee of the House of Commons into the cruelties exercised on the prisoners of the Fleet to extort money from them. On the table of the committee are the instruments of torture. A prisoner in rags, half starved, appears before them, with a good coun tenance, that adds to the interest. On the other side is the confronted and atrocious goaler, with villainy, terror, and the eagerness to tell a lie, depicted in his features, and ex pressed in his gesture. This was Bainbridge, the warden of the fleet, who, with Huggins his predecessor, were both declared guilty of extortion and cruelty. In 1730 Hogarth made a clandestine marriage with the daughter of Sir James Thornhill, sergeant painter, and history painter, to George I. Hogarth was at this time called in the Crafts man an ingenious designer and engraver ; but his father in-law regarded him as so unworthy of his daughter, and was so much offended by the match being a stolen one, that he was not easily reconciled to it. About the same period our painter began his celebrated Harlot's Progress, some scenes of which were purposely put in the way of Sir James Thornhill, to bespeak his favour. Sir James re marked, that the man who could produce such works could maintain a wife without a portion ; but he afterwards re lented, and the young pair took up their abode in his house.