William Hogarth engravings Data

William Hogarth was born in 1697 at Bartholomew Close, Smithfield in London to Richard Hogarth, a school teacher and textbook writer of Latin, and Anne Gibbons. When Hogarth was sixteen he was apprenticed to Ellis Gamble,a silverplate engraver in Leicester Fields, where he learned to engrave trade cards etc. Around this time his father, had opened an unsuccessful Latin-speaking coffee house at St John's Gate, resulting in his imprisoned for debt in Fleet Prison between 1707 and 1712.
By 1720 Hogarth had own business engraving book plates and painting portraits. Around this time Hogarth met the artist, Sir James Thornhill. Impressed by his history paintings, Hogarth made regular visits to Thornhill's free art academy in Covent Garden. The two men became close friends and Hogarth eventually married Thornhill's daughter, Jane.During the 1720s Hogarth worked for the printseller, Philip Overton. Hogarth also started to produce political satires. In 1726 Hogarth published The Punishments of Lemuel Gulliver, a satire on the prime minister, Robert Walpole.By the 1730s Hogarth was an established artist but he suffered from printsellers who used his work without paying royalties. In 1735 Hogarth manages to persuade his friends in Parliament to pass the Engravers' Copyright Act. Later that year, Hogarth established St. Martin's Lane Academy, a guild for professional artists and a school for young artists.
In 1731, he completed the earliest of the series of moral works . This was A Harlot's Progress, first as paintings, (now destroyed), and then published as engravings. The six scenes show the miserable fate of a country girl who began a prostitution career in town is traced out remorselessly from its starting point, the meeting of a bawd, to its shameful and degraded end, the whore's death of venereal disease and the following merciless funeral ceremony. The original paintings of A Harlot's Progress were destroyed in the fire at Fonthill House in 1755 which razed the house belonging to William Beckford Senior also known as Alderman Beckford NOT the Abbey as some moron on Wikipedia keeps putting which was not yet built at this time work commenced in 1796 and also a full five years before the birth of William Beckford of Fonthill Abbey(1 October 1760 – 2 May 1844)
A Harlot's Progress was an immediate success, and followed in 1735 by the sequel A Rake's Progress showing in eight pictures the reckless life of Tom Rakewell, the son of a rich merchant, who wasted his money on luxurious living, whoring, and gambling, and finished his life in Bedlam. The original paintings of A Rakes progress are in the Sir John Soane Museum in Londo In 1743–1745 Hogarth painted the six pictures of Marriage à-la-mode (now in the National Gallery, London), a pointed satire of upper class 18th century society.
After a period painting portraits of the rich and famous, Hogarth returned in 1751 to producing prints of everyday life. Prints such as Beer Street, Gin Lane and the Four Stages of Cruelty were extremely popular and sold in considerable numbers.
In 1762 Hogarth published his anti-war satire The Times. This work upset a large number of MPs and one of the country's leading politicians, John Wilkes attacked Hogarth in his newspaper, The North Briton. Hogarth retaliated by producing his engraving, John Wilkes, Esq.In the engraving Wilkes is wearing a horn-like wig and holds his symbolic cap of liberty in such a way as to make a halo for himself.

Soon after producing his print of Wilkes, Hogarth became seriously ill. In July 1763 he had a paralytic seizure but the following year he started work again and in April, 1764, produced his final print Tailpiece: The Bathos (1764). Hogarth died in London on 26 October 1764 and was buried at St. Nicholas's Churchyard, Chiswick Mall, Chiswick, London.