Discussion Forum 1

Part 1:

Post a paragraph of some length and detail on the Discussion Forum, telling some of the things you have learned about life in London during the 18^th century from Hogarth's prints. You may refer to the prints in our text or to some that you find on a Web site. You should compose your statement off line so that you can be thoughtful about it and then cut and paste it into the Discussion Forum message box.

I invite you to read your classmates' paragraphs and to respond politely to them.

Part 2:

There are a number of Web sites dedicated to Hogarth. I especially recommend the following: http://www.library.northwestern.edu/spec/hogarth/main.html It is titled "William Hogarth and 18^th Century Print Culture." You should especially examine the prints on exhibit in the section called "Topography of Decay" for a realistic, minutely detailed depiction of London life as the authors we are to study saw it during the first half of the 18^th century.

Chronologically, Hogarth should come several weeks into our course. As you see from our text, he was born in 1697 and flourished as a painter and engraver during the 1730s, 1740s, and 1750s. While it is true that fashions changed with some speed during the 17^th and 18^th centuries, just as they change now, you will not be too far off from the appearances of people during the early and late portions of these periods if you see how they looked during the 1740s, when, as your text tells you, Hogarth created the "Marriage A-La-Mode" sequence.

English painting came into its own during the last half of the 18^th century with the emergence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Benjamin West, and others who excelled in portrait painting. The subjects of their portraits, gentlemen and ladies, give us a detailed understanding of fashion and dress among the upper classes during the late Neoclassical Era. They also engaged in landscape painting, which offered scenes of pastoral beauty. Some forty painters and patrons of painting formed the Royal Academy in 1768 under George III. Sir Joshua Reynolds was president of this painters' society for twenty years, delivering annually a formal essay on aesthetics and painting. A selection from these essays is often included in anthologies of 18th century literature.

Had he lived long enough, William Hogarth would have undoubtedly been a member of this illustrious society. Hogarth was a reputable painter of portraits and landscapes and a serious theoretician on the nature of beauty. But he is best remembered for the fact that, giving vent to a neoclassical impulse toward satire, he created engravings of ordinary London life for mass reproduction in books and periodicals, which make an invaluable pictorial record for the modern student of history and literature. Hogarth first painted a scene in oils, then transferred it to a copper plate by engraving with a sharp tool or by etching with acid. The copper plate was then positioned on a printing press. The resulting picture was called a print.

Hogarth created many sequences, series of related paintings and engravings that narrate a progressive story about their subject. "Marriage A-La-Mode" is one of these sequences. Each engraving merits close study, being a detailed episode from the larger story. You may assume that Hogarth created this sequence from a double motive. One is the pleasure he took in realism, realism being the depiction of the ordinary, the probable, and the commonplace in literature or other art forms. The other was the pleasure he took in satire. A true son of the Neoclassical Era, he assumed that a realistic portrayal of this couple's unhappy end would influence his audience to a better way of life.