A Shakespeare in Oils

England had an internationally renowned theater a century before it had an artist even known by most of his countrymen. During the early 18th century, William Hogarth became Britain's first great painter, winning that distinction with an art charged more with dramatic subject matter than seductive style. He called himself an "author" rather than an artist, and works came out like serial scenes of a play. He illustrated a rake's progress in eight pictures, a harlot's downfall in six. "My picture is my stage," he wrote, and he made it roar with rogues in wrinkled breeches and buxom wenches in disarray.

As a-critic of his times, Hogarth was the visual counterpart to his great verbal contemporaries--Swift, Pope and Defoe. "The proper study of mankind is man," wrote Pope; Hogarth agreed in paint. Satire was his sword--and just how sharp it was can be seen in the current exhibition of 110 paintings, prints and drawings at Richmond's Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the biggest public showing of Hogarth in U.S. history.

Poking the Foibles. One of his most satiric series was his dozen oils of Hu-dibras, the central figure in Samuel Butler's scathing poem on puritanical hypocrisy. Hudibras was ignorant, conceited, preachy, distempered, vain--a cocksure jackass. Butler used him to poke fun at reformers, and so did Hogarth.

In one painting, the Puritan knight Hudibras visits an astrologer named Sidrophel to seek advice on how to win the hand of a wealthy widow (see opposite page). It is clearly a case of one fraud patronizing another, and when Hudibras sees the astrologer's ludicrous array of tools--a stuffed crocodile, a Jacob's staff--he feels duped, and the two men quarrel. In another picture, a bloated effigy of Hudibras is ridden to a fiery stake by people who are finally fed up with Protestant reformers.

Neither prude nor Puritan, Hogarth sought to lay bare the foibles of his England. Yet he was no revolutionary; he wore the scarlet coat of a gentleman, and respected the Crown. He married the daughter of the man who painted murals in St. Paul's, eventually succeeded him as Serjeant-Painter to Kings George II and III. He began life as an apprentice silversmith, wound up with a country house and six servants.

In art, Hogarth depicted ordinary people as they lived. He was an inspiration to Goya and Daumier. His rough dramatic paintings also helped open the way for the French impressionists to chronicle the real world around them. He was a Shakespeare in oil paint.

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