Characters and Caricaturas

Label

William Hogarth is one of the first artists who made visual satire a staple of his artistic practice. This print, however, demonstrates his ideas about the difference between the higher and lower forms of depicting faces, one based on the quality of the person’s face and character (on the lower left) and the other demonstrating a tendency toward exaggeration and the grotesque (on the lower right).

In the caption to this print, Hogarth references the novel Joseph Andrews by his friend Henry Fielding. In his preface to that novel published the year before, Fielding writes of Hogarth: "It hath been thought a vast Commendation of a Painter, to say his Figures seem to breathe; but surely it is much greater nobler Applause, that they appear to think." It has been suggested that the two laughing figures facing each other in the center of the print may be the two friends.

From the 2021 exhibition A Legacy for Learning: The Jane and Raphael Bernstein Collection, curated by Jami C. Powell, Curator of Indigenous Art; Katherine W. Hart, Senior Curator of Collections and Barbara C. & Harvey P. Hood 1918 Curator of Academic Programming; John R. Stomberg Ph.D, Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director; Jessica Hong, Associate Curator of Global Contemporary Art; and Melissa McCormick, Professor of Japanese Art and Culture at Harvard University

Course History

ENGL 20, Age of Satire, Alysia Garrison, Winter 2014

ENGL 22, The Rise of the Novel, Alysia Garrison, Spring 2015

ENGL 22, Rise of the Novel, Alysia Garrison, Spring 2019

Exhibition History

Pinpricks and Pomposity: The Inventiveness of English Visual Satire, A Legacy for Learning: The Jane and Raphael Bernstein Collection, Class of 1967 Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, Hanover, New Hampshire, April 17–August 28, 2021.

Publication History

John R. Stomberg, A Legacy for Learning: The Jane and Raphael Bernstein collection; Hanover, New Hampshire, Dartmouth College, Hood Museum of Art, 2021, Plate 17, p.34, listed p.99.

Provenance

Andrew Edmunds, London, England; sold to Jane and Raphael Bernstein, Ridgewood, New Jersey; lent to present collection, 2010; given to present collection, 2014.

Catalogue Raisonne

Paulson 156

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