The title of Tate Britain’s latest exhibition, “Hogarth and Europe,” is slightly misleading.1 Setting out, as it does, to “suggest the cross currents, parallels and sympathies that crossed borders” during William Hogarth’s time, it more effectively makes clear some obvious cultural differences. Hogarth is celebrated for his social satires of eighteenth-century life but each time he is compared with a European contemporary—the curators have placed his works beside pieces from Amsterdam, Paris, Venice, and beyond—Hogarth only appears more bawdy, more biting, and more British.

Take, for example, the group of Venetian painters. Pietro Longhi may have elicited comparisons to Hogarth for his genre scenes, but The Painter in His Studio (ca. 1741–44), in which an artist paints an aristocratic young woman seated in his studio, feels like a straightforward portrayal of fashionable society and lacks the narrative vitality of Hogarth’s The Distressed Poet (1733–35). This latter work, depicting a poet’s struggle to write in his noisy garret, is full of vivid details: a milkmaid demanding payment, a wife mending a pile of clothes, a crying baby. Even the family dog plays a part by sneaking in to snatch the evening’s dinner. The pairing of works is intended to indicate new conceptions of artists as creative individuals, and perhaps it does, but only with the benefit of a wall text.

The Sala Grande of the Ridotto (1755–60), by the always arresting Francesco Guardi, shows a crowd of revelers descending on a public casino where the dim lighting and masks hint at dissipation with a detached elegance. By comparison, Hogarth’s raucous Southwark Fair (1733), just around the corner, heaves with individual vignettes, as each face in the crowd has its own story to tell. It makes Guardi’s painting feel vacant. As such, the inclusion here of two works by Canaletto, on the presumable basis that he also depicted figures within an urban setting, feels meaningless.

William Hogarth, Marriage A-la-Mode: 2, The Tête à Tête, 1743–45, Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London. Photo: © The National Gallery, London.

A luscious fête galante by Watteau from ca. 1715–1717 exposes the frivolity of the eighteenth-century French ruling classes, but the portrayal is genteel, and even touching, filled as it is with lovers, music, and dancing. The exhibition claims that this refined French style influenced Hogarth’s vicious account of ruin in the series Marriage A-la-Mode (ca. 1743), a point demonstrated by the curators’ decision to hang the second painting, The Tête à Tête, in which husband and wife stretch and slouch against a sumptuous domestic setting, beside Chardin’s The White Tablecloth (1731–32), a comparatively serene still life. Similarities between the small table stationed between the couple and the one painted by Chardin do make this comparison feasible, although it is unknown whether Hogarth met the French artist before his trip to Paris in 1743 to find an engraver for the series.

Perhaps more convincing is the comparison of Hogarth’s work with a series of Parisian street scenes from 1743 by Étienne Jeaurat, but again the latter’s subdued charms are, in terms of satire, shown up by the rowdy cacophonies of urban life portrayed by the English artist in famed works such as Gin Lane and Beer Street (both 1751). Nicholas Lancret’s series The Four Times of Day (1739–41) is clearly related, in terms of conception, to Hogarth’s The Times of Day (1738), but its treatment of the subject is lighthearted and ambiguous compared to the latter’s overt display of class tensions and hypocrisy.

William Hogarth, Gin Lane, 1751, Etching with engraving on thin paper. Photo: Andrew Edmunds.

Though most of the associations made by the exhibition feel tenuous, there are undoubtedly masterpieces on display. This is thanks not least to the inclusion of over sixty works by Hogarth, whose presence swallows up the sparser offerings from the Continent. A whole room is, pleasingly, dedicated to his magna opera A Harlot’s Progress (1731–32) and A Rake’s Progress (1732–34), moralizing tales of the respective downfalls of the naive Moll Hackabout and the parvenu Thomas Rakewell. Of amusing details, an observer is spoiled for choice. It’s hard to resist smiling as Moll tips over a tea table to distract us—and the wealthy man who keeps her as his mistress—as her secret lover creeps from the room in the second painting of the series. Much darker is Rakewell’s eventual death among the wild savageries of The Madhouse, the final scene in A Rake’s Progress. Here the former man of leisure lies nearly naked and in chains on the floor of Bedlam, London’s lunatic asylum, where he is watched over by two well-dressed females who have paid to view the antics of the inmates (a common form of entertainment in Hogarth’s time).

The nearby placement of Giuseppe Crespi’s A Woman Looking for Fleas (ca. 1715–20), from the Italian artist’s comedic narrative cycle about the rise and fall of an opera singer, presents a potentially interesting link to A Harlot’s Progress although this is left unexplained. Elsewhere, Crespi’s mesmerizingly eerie Courtyard Scene (ca. 1710–15) is the greatest revelation among the lesser-known works on show. In this humble scene, an aged peasant woman washing laundry in a barrel appears to yell at a barefoot man relieving himself nearby, while another woman in the background has turned around, distracted from feeding her child.

William Hogarth, The Painter and his Pug, 1745, Oil on canvas, Tate Britain, London. Photo: Tate.

The exhibition is tricky to appraise because what has been put forward is a proposal that never really emerges. According to the catalogue, the idea for the exhibition arose a decade ago, but in the years since much has changed, including Britain’s relationship with Europe. The new political implications of the show have apparently caused the curators to back off from their original emphasis on Hogarth as a European.

“The title of the show and its basic premise inevitably seems to respond to Brexit,” the curators write, “probably, it may be assumed, as an assertion of a cosmopolitan, outward-looking version of an artist often viewed as an insular patriot, xenophobe, or trailblazer of blunt nationalism.” Rather, they counter, “the interplay of insular and outward-looking aspects in Hogarth’s art and thought have proved to be highly complex. . . . These matters are perhaps better dealt with . . . in the context of academic research rather than in an exhibition.” Tentative statements, like the assertion that “the connections, resonance and echoes or repudiations which may emerge” among the exhibited artists are “not wholly predictable . . . nor do they depend upon the kinds of exacting art-historical narratives which can be set out in textual form,” absolve the curators of the need to declare a specific stance.

Hidden within this confused web of flimsy connections, however, are threads of considerable interest. Rather than leaving the artworks to speak, or mumble, a coherent argument by themselves, the curators might have chosen from a number of other themes to govern the material. Links to colonialism are foregrounded throughout, and indeed Hogarth’s comedies of manners, replete with objects of conspicuous luxury, are a lens through which to apprehend global networks of commerce and exploitation. This telling is aided by a fascinating punch bowl, produced in China, bearing Hogarth’s drunkards from Midnight Modern Conversation (1733) on one side and a rather more civilized scene of Chinese gentlemen enjoying a meal on the other. The possibility of a “Hogarthian” modernity, too, is ripe for exploration. Wall texts make significant efforts, heavy-handedly in this case, to consider the perspectives of typically fringe characters, and there is much said about urbanization, social change, non-conformity, and new opportunities for artists and others.

The premise, as it stands, feels forced. This perhaps results from pressures to find ever new reasons to hold blockbuster exhibitions on reliably popular topics like Hogarth. Luckily, the great shifts and upheavals of the eighteenth century are inherently interesting, and for that this show is worth seeing.


  1.   “Hogarth and Europe” opened at Tate Britain, London, on November 3, 2021, and remains on view through March 20, 2022.

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