WILLIAM HOGARTH (1697-1764) was, likeJonathan Swift (1667-1745) before him, an artist whose work represents a set of ideas that are both indicative of his period and transferable to the present. Their significance is such that we describe things as “Hogarthian” or “Swiftian,” and the periods in which they lived saw dramatic social, economic, and political change, in which the power of art to express and marshal political criticism has rarely been matched. The biting satires of Swift and Hogarth were advance warning of the political turmoil of the period, a tumult that would boil over across Europe and spill into the United States of America.

Before 1735, artists and engravers such as Hogarth did not enjoy legal protection for their works and were, thus, open to exploitation by print sellers who simply copied popular images if the original engravers held out for too high a price. Hogarth and his fellow artists lobbied parliament to revise copyright laws to protect their images, and this can be seen as merely an act of financial necessity. But the effect of these changes were more important politically than this reading would indicate: extending copyright protections to satirists like Hogarth meant that he could use them to develop vivid visual political analogies, whose potency become stronger through wide publication and even wider reuse.

Hogarth initially had ambitions to be taken seriously as a history painter, but found that the market for such works was led by an aristocracy whose taste was informed by a style from an earlier age. For him this was notjust a rejection of his style and oeuvre, but also a social and political iniquity. It meant that those with the means to propagate an English national style were besotted to the aesthetics and values of the Italian Renaissance. To challenge this, Hogarth devoted his painting and image-making to important moral statements. He made images that were powerful interventions in the disputes between artists and their critics about taste; debates that had been conducted to this point only by prominent and wealthy individuals, in a closed discourse. He opened out the debate by a familiar artistic tactic.