William Hogarth’s Election series
After more than a year of partisanship, pundits, and polls, as well as a seemingly never-ending stream of gaffes, accusations, and distortions, Election Day has finally come and gone. Contemporary satirists had plenty to work with in this presidential campaign (see Barry Blitt’s most recent New Yorker magazine cover cartoon based on a Norman Rockwell painting from our collection), just as artists like James Gillray, Francisco Goya, and Honoré Daumier found inspiration in the politics of their own eras. Rich Aste, our Curator of European Art, reminded me that our print collection contains excellent works by these early giants of political satire, as well as by the artist that influenced all of them: William Hogarth (1697-1764).
Hogarth was an English painter and printmaker who took as his subject no less than the panorama of life in 18th-century London. From the drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the teeming and raucous city streets, Hogarth trained his critical eye on themes of marriage, adultery, prostitution, religion, disease, poverty, crime, drunkenness, insanity, gambling, commerce, and, of course, politics, creating indelible images that are spiked with humor and pathos, and brimming with narrative details.
For his four Election series prints (published in 1757-58 and based on his paintings dated 1754-55), Hogarth turned his attention from the squalor of urban life to the corruption of the political world. He was inspired by the notorious contest between the liberal Whig party and the conservative Tory party to win Oxfordshire’s parliamentary seats in the General Election of 1754. Set in the fictional country town of ‘Guzzledown,’ Hogarth depicts four stages of an election, each of which is filled with acts of bribery, mayhem, wastefulness, and venality; in short, a catalogue of behaviors and traits associated with winning by any means and at all costs.
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