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Books on
British Caricature

Books on
William Hogarth

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James Gillray

L

ike many of history’s successful artists, William Hogarth’s aesthetic

interests were intricately linked to his business concerns. He published prints to bring his art to as wide an audience as possible and to generate a renewable source of income.

Hogarth composed his major works on canvas. When he finished a painting he, or his hired engravers, carefully engraved the images onto copper plates. When an inked plate transferred the image to paper, the composition was reversed: elements positioned on the right side of the canvas appeared on the left-side of the print. Later, when other artists copied his prints, the process would again reverse the image so that the composition of the copies often matched the paintings.

From 1720 until his death in 1764, Hogarth published multiple editions of his work as individual prints, suites of prints, and bound volumes.

Print States

As Hogarth engraved his plates he worked through ideas and experimented with rendering techniques. When the image reached a stage of completion, he inked the plate and pulled a print. This maked the first state of the print. Subsequent changes that appear on later prints represent additional states.

Most prints went through three or four states, but some went through as many as eight states. An image could undergo several states before it was publicly issued. Or years after Hogarth first issued a print, he would publish subsequent editions, often reworking the plates and creating additional states.

Most of the differences between states are subtle, but on some plates Hogarth made significant changes that altered the content of the work.

Over the course of his lifetime Hogarth made hundreds of changes to his plates. The definitive reference that documents the states of each print is Hogarth's Graphic Works by Ronald Paulson. The extremely detailed text and an abundance of illustrations make it an invaluable tool for understanding the publication history of Hogarth's prints.

Gulielmus Hogarth and The Bruiser

In 1749, Hogarth engraved a self-portrait that he used as a frontispiece for bound volumes of his prints. In 1763 he burnished out the dog, the curtain, and the palette. In the empty oval he engraved Churchill with a beer in one hand and a club in the other to represent a drunken clergman who writes brutal satires.

The subscriber's edition of A Harlot's Progress was published in 1732. When Hogarth re-published the series in 1744, he designated the second edition by placing a small Latin cross beneath the center of each image. Before releasing the prints to the public, he made additional changes to several of the plates.

Some of the modifications made to Plate 6 include a cast shadow that was added to the bottle in the lower-right corner. Shadows have also been added to the faces of the undertaker, his companion and others.