Hogarth

Hogarth will be the most comprehensive exhibition of this artist’s work in recent times, presenting a full range of his work and highlighting his unique contribution to the development of modern British art. At the same time, Hogarth will offer a fresh and original interpretation of the artist’s career and output, by situating his work in relation to distinctly urban themes and concepts, and to a metropolitan visual culture that was strikingly European in character.

In the past, Hogarth exhibitions have tended to concentrate on either his paintings or his prints, or on a specific part of his multi-faceted career. Hogarth will instead showcase every aspect of his work: his remarkable canvases, ranging from elegant conversation pieces to salacious brothel scenes; his vibrant drawings and sketches; and the numerous engraved works for which he is perhaps most famous, including Industry and Idleness, Gin Lane, Beer Street and the Four Stages of Cruelty. Moreover, the exhibition will examine the whole of Hogarth’s life and work, from his beginnings as a young and ambitious engraver in the 1720s, through to his rise to fame as a painter and printmaker in the 1730s and 1740s, and on to the more difficult and conflicted years of the 1750s and 1760s.

In telling this story, Hogarth will not only examine an individual artist, but also take a new look at an increasingly urbanised and diverse British art world. The exhibition will highlight the metropolitan issues that preoccupied painters and engravers in the first half of the eighteenth-century, and reveal how Hogarth worked within, and drew upon, a visual culture characterised by a rich mix of native, immigrant and visiting European practitioners. In doing so, Hogarth will offer a new image of the artist as someone whose works were strikingly modern and urban in nature, and whose celebrated patriotism and ‘Britishness’ were shaped, paradoxically, by the remarkably cosmopolitan character of the artistic environment he inhabited.

Exhibiting at:

• Tate Britain (7 February – 29 April 2007)
• Louvre, Paris (18 October 2006 – 6 January 2007)
• Fundació 'La Caixa', Barcelona (29 May – 26 August 2007)