SOURCE: Blair, Joel. “Hogarth's Comic History-Paintings and the Satiric Spectrum.” Genre 9, no. 1 (spring 1976): 103-19.

In the following essay, Blair explores Hogarth's redefinition of history painting as a means of representing middle-class subjects.

Even though the twentieth-century public has finally acknowledged the virtues of Hogarth's portraits and traditional history-paintings, his reputation still rests, as it should, on his great cycles, beginning with A Harlot's Progress (1732) and ending with An Election (1758). Frederick Antal calls them “the very beginning of a purely English art”; their author, he says, created a “genre unique in Europe.”¹ While the style of the series is anticipated in the large Hudibras illustrations (1728) and reappears in later paintings, appreciation of Hogarth's genius depends on an understanding and response to this mature work produced during the fruitful years between 1731 and 1758—before this he was discovering his genius; afterwards he was defending it.

Both Hogarth and his public realized...