William Hogarth, A Harlot's Progress

Ian Gordon (Anglia Ruskin University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.05: English Writing and Culture from the Glorious Revolution to the French Revolution, 1689-1789.
Vol. editors: Paul Baines (University of Liverpool), Daniel Cook (University of Dundee), Pat Rogers (University of South Florida), Nicholas Seager (University of Keele)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1732

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Comedy
Satire

Resources

A Harlot's Progress is a seminal work in Hogarth's development. It marks his engagement in a new genre, narrative comic history-painting, or “modern moral subjects”, as he describes them in his Autobiographical Notes, through which he established comedy and satire in art as respectable categories worthy of serious attention. It was in 1730 when, according to the eighteenth-century diarist of artists' lives, George Vertue, Hogarth stumbled, almost by accident, on this genre. He had been painting a whore and her servant in her garret in Drury Lane, when he hit upon the idea of tracing her previous and subsequent histories. The six paintings of A Harlot's Progress, including likenesses of well-known contemporary p…

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2565 words

Citation: Gordon, Ian. "A Harlot's Progress". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 July 2003 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7146, accessed 24 November 2024.]

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