Hogarth was born near Smithfield Market in London. His childhood was blighted by his father’s imprisonment for debt.
Apprenticed to a silver engraver, this gave him skills which he later adapted to produce prints and to teach himself to paint. Hogarth was a shrewd businessman as well as an artist. He sold his prints at relatively modest prices, thus reaching a much wider audience than those who could afford his paintings.
He became prosperous enough to take on this house in Chiswick and extend it, adding the projecting Venetian-style oriel window on the first floor (an identical window appears in one of Hogarth’s prints, The Times).
Hogarth’s fame rests in particular on his series of pictures telling stories with contemporary real-life settings, his ‘modern moral subjects’ such as A Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress and Marriage-a-la-Mode. These began as paintings full of detail, theatrical in style and showing the follies and foibles of humanity which he displayed to an enthusiastic audience, taking orders in advance for his engravings of the same images.
These were so successful that pirated copies were produced by other engravers and Hogarth campaigned successfully for the first copyright legislation in 1735 to protect the work of artists.
His pictures are among the best-known visual representations of everyday life in Georgian London and Hogarth has been hailed as the “defining spirit of London’s art”.
Hogarth’s House in Chiswick, built around 1700, was the country home of the great painter, engraver and satirist William Hogarth (1697 – 1764) from 1749 until his death.
Hogarth’s House is celebrating the award of a Heritage Lottery Fund grant with a new exhibition telling the story of our garden from the 1680s to the present day. The grant will go towards the creation of a learning centre and the refurbishment of the garden over the next two years.
Step back into the past through the gate in the high brick wall and you enter a sheltered garden with an ancient mulberry tree. Through images, maps and contemporary writing, you will discover Hogarth’s stable and studio and the memorials to the Hogarth family’s pets, meet the Victorian pig-keeper and nursery gardeners who lived there in the 1870s and read descriptions by past residents and visitors.
Using 18th century gardening books, old garden tools and historic images, the exhibition will present some lavish local gardens which have now been lost and the Georgian nursery gardeners who supplied plants and garden equipment in Brentford and Chiswick. The initial ideas for the Mulberry Garden project of 2015-17 will also be on show.
