Characters and Caricaturas

Although William Hogarth gained a reputation as a “caricaturist,” he viewed most caricature as crude and unempathetic. With the cloud of faces in this print, he showed off his ability to create a range of what he called “characters,” including at the bottom center laughing profile likenesses of himself (right) and his friend the novelist Henry Fielding (left). Along the bottom of the engraving, to make the distinction between the two modes clear, Hogarth contrasted three acceptable “characters” after the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael on the left with a set of what he believed were exaggerated “caricatures” on the right.