Hogarth documented the 18th-century class divide - but he was also a keen social climber.
First among the 18th century's many gifts to middle-class job-seekers - novel-writing, landscape gardening, journalism - was the art of social climbing. From Defoe's Moll Flanders to Gainsborough's portraits of London high society, writers and artists celebrated a new breed of hero and heroine: bewigged David Beckhams and Chantelles who had clawed their way up to respectability while keeping those below them firmly in their place.
Artists themselves were far from immune to such bouts of status anxiety. In 1743 William Hogarth published Characters and caricaturas, a single sheet tightly packed with engraved heads. It was not only a demonstration of his skill as a serious portraitist - a recorder of "characters" - but a put-down to his hack rivals, the "burlesque" scribblers of satirical cartoons. To overcome any lingering doubts about his credentials, Hogarth had encouraged his friend Henry Fielding to write, in the preface to his novel Joseph Andrews: "He who should call the ingenious Hogarth a burlesque painter, would, in my opinion, do him very little honour: for sure it is much easier . . . to expose [a man] in some absurd or monstrous attitude, than to express the affections of men on canvas."
In Tate Britain's survey of Hogarth's work, which opens on 7 February, the artist's preoccupation with reputation leaps from every image. The show starts with the self-portrait The Painter and his Pug, which, as the curator Christine Riding says, "captures everything you need to know about Hogarth in one painting". Gazing out of an oval frame, he appears not in formal city clothes, but in a carefully dishevelled outfit of red silk morning gown and fur-trimmed cap: the Prada biker jacket and Pete Doherty trilby of the day. His portrait rests on three leather-bound volumes - Shakespeare, Milton and Swift - which nod to both his learning and his love of variety, tradition and satire. A palette inscribed with a serpentine line, in Hogarth's phrase "the line of beauty", rests in the foreground, a reference to his ambitions as a writer on aesthetic theory. But the painting is not a humourless PR exercise. Hogarth's beloved pug Trump, who famously resembled his owner, perches cheerfully in the foreground, and a theatrical green drape recalls the endearing hamminess of the man his friends described striding about Covent Garden, "his hat cocked and stuck on one side, much in the manner of the great Frederick of Prussia".
Hogarth's playful but acute attention to status is ironic, given the accusations of populism that have dogged him ever since. Widely copied during his lifetime, his most famous works - the satirical engraving Gin Lane and serial paintings The Rake's Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode - are familiar from reproductions on pub walls and references in adverts, from theatre sets and newspaper cartoons (the exhibition includes a Steve Bell cartoon that brilliantly substitutes an underpants-clad John Major for the sozzled mother in Gin Lane). Because of his success as a satirist and his scorn for the classical themes thought proper to "high" art, Hogarth struggled to be taken seriously as an artist during his lifetime, and, until recently, art historians also remained sniffy about him. By showing the astonishing variety of his work - engravings alongside paintings, portraits alongside political satires - the Tate exhibition both confirms his "popular" links with industry, commerce and the middle classes and reveals qualities that contradict our own caricature of him.
Hogarth was particularly well qualified to observe the 18th-century interplay of aspiration, morality and manners. Like the hero of Fielding's Tom Jones, he was an entirely self-made man. Born in 1697, he was strongly influenced by his father, a hapless scholar whose attempt to run a Latin-speaking coffee house ended with the Hogarth family being imprisoned in Fleet debtors' gaol, a humiliating experience that the son refused to discuss in later life. After setting himself up as an engraver, producing first shop-cards and book frontispieces, and then more elaborate copies of paintings, Hogarth trained himself in the more "respectable" medium of paint and embarked on a parallel career as a man-about-town.
As the English middle classes expanded, bolstered by rapid economic growth, Hogarth-type rises to fortune and/or fame became a familiar story. Once enterprising individuals had secured their place in the bourgeoisie, they were expec ted to look and act the part: skills acquired and polished through the period's favourite art of "polite conversation". Painted "conversations" - group portraits showing in dividuals bound together by the key virtues of taste, tolerance and affection - were a favourite commission among members of the new middle class, and Hogarth became famous for executing them, according to a contemporary critic, "with great spirit, a lively invention & a universal agreeableness".
The Strode Family, painted in 1738 for the wealthy businessman William Strode, shows him sitting at a tea table with his aristocratic new wife, Lady Anne. Strode beckons his former tutor Dr Arthur Smyth, who sits antisocially poring over a book, to come to the table, and seems about to summon his brother Colonel Samuel Strode, standing in stiff military fashion by the door, to do the same. With great skill, Hogarth shows his patron creating a harmonious and affectionate group from a collection of ill-assorted individuals - even the Strodes' butler, Jonathan Powell, and the suspicious dogs belonging to Smyth and the colonel are about to be drawn in to the family gathering.
But Hogarth's most famous subjects were those lurking outside the oasis of the drawing room - the footpads, prostitutes, pimps, drunks and wastrels who were the despair of the new bourgeoisie. The binge drinkers of Hogarth's London were the poor victims of the 1720-51 "Gin Craze" that, more upstanding members of the population thundered, was corrupting "the meaner, though useful Part of the Nation". Hogarth fanned the flames of outrage (perhaps justified, as Londoners were consuming 2.2 gallons of gin each per year by the 1740s) with his tabloid-shocker engravings Gin Lane (1750-51) and Beer Street (1751). In camply lurid fashion - a comatose mother lets her baby fall head first over a railing; a corpulent workman fondles a barmaid - they warn of the ravages wrought by cheap Dutch gin, compared to the contentment and prosperity enjoyed by a British beer-drinking society. Along with the instructive Industry and Idleness series (1747), detailing the rewards of virtuous hard work and the dangers of sloth, these engravings proved enormously popular and were displayed prominently in taverns, coffee houses and workplaces.
The success of Gin Lane points up a fact also emphasised by the Tate exhibition: despite his ambitions as a society painter, Hogarth continued to produce, or at least design for, engravings throughout his career. Unlike paintings, his engravings were within the reach of middle-class households: a larger market that was served by the capital's many print shops and boosted by newspaper advertising, and which provided the artist with most of his income. The series The Harlot's Progress, The Rake's Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode were designed as mid-market domestic decoration, painted to "read" from right to left - in order that their mirror-image engravings, displayed alongside them here, would read in the correct direction. Plagued by pirates (rival engravers sent apprentices armed with sketch pads to spy on his workshop), Hogarth also campaigned for and secured the Engraver's Copyright Act 1735, which gave legal protection to visual art for the first time.
Despite these respectable concerns, Hogarth was no scourge of London's underclass. His famous serial paintings and engravings investigate the seamy side of the city - its brothels, gambling houses and prisons - with evident relish. The Rake at the Rose Tavern (1733) transposes a polite conversation scene to a notorious brothel in Covent Garden, showing, instead of a civilised family, a group of whores, bawds, clients, pickpockets and servants quarrelling, drinking and stealing from one another. Although the Progresses are explicitly moral tales - the Harlot, the Rake and the feuding aristocratic couple all meet gruesome ends - the humour and precision with which they are painted endow them with all the charm of the period's greatest fictional heroes.
And this is perhaps the greatest surprise of the exhibition. As Riding says, "People tend to forget that Hogarth was a great painter, as well as a great satirist." Lesser-known works of his, such as the beautiful portrait Thomas Herring, Archbishop of Canterbury (1744-47), with its dazzling rivers of white silk, remind us that Hogarth's anxieties about his reputation may, in fact, have been unnecessary.
"Hogarth" opens at Tate Britain, London SW1, on 7 February. For more information, log on to: www.tate.org.uk/britain
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