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The importance of this British context for art was crucial to Hogarth.
He was fiercely patriotic, proud to belong to the new Great Britain
(England and Scotland were united politically in 1707) and pugnaciously
nationalistic about the importance of British-born painters; he
signed himself on occasion "Britophil". In his satirical
series he remorselessly denigrated fashionable London's preference
for Continental art, and refused to acknowledge the authority of
the old (European) masters. Hogarth's almost propogandist engraving
Beer Street presents a scene of urban prosperity and contentment,
apparently the result of the consumption of British produce and
goods, and in particular British beer. Hogarth's pro-British agenda,
implicitly attacking the "Frenchification" of British
taste and fashion, is seen at its most overt and venomous in his
xenophobic The Roast Beef of Old England (The Gate of Calais) of
1748-9. Hogarth's famous 1745 self-portrait The Painter and his
Pug includes a pile of books by Milton, Shakespeare and Swift, indicating
his allegiance to English literature.
Hogarth's later portraits of individuals
are among the most interesting of the Georgian period. His celebrated
1740 portrait of Captain Thomas Coram, a successful shipbuilder, was
groundbreaking in being a grandiose representation of a man of commerce
(rather than an aristocrat), and showed Hogarth's technical brilliance
in bringing informality, truthfulness of characterisation and vitality
to the conventional format. His Heads of Six of Hogarth's Servants,
painted in the early 1750s, shows amazing spontaneity, painterly expressiveness
and respect for the individuality of the sitters.
Hogarth was strongly anti-academic in his approach to artistic
practice. In 1753 he expressed his views in his book The Analysis
of Beauty ("written with a view to fixing the fluctuating ideas
of taste"), in which he used a serpentine line (his famous
"line of beauty") to illustrate the fact that aesthetic
beauty derived from real, observed visual experiences in life. His
own art academy, which he inherited from his father-in-law, Thornhill,
maintained a free, idiosyncratic creative atmosphere. However, Hogarth
was seen increasingly as unorthodox and out of kilter with mainstream
British art practice. He objected to the founding of a formal national
academy of art, fearing that it would be based on the rigidly hierarchical
French academies and pander to the connoisseurs' taste for Continental
art, and quarrelled publicly with Sir Joshua Reynolds, who in 1768
(four years after Hogarth's death) became the first president of
the new Royal Academy of Arts.
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