The son of a schoolmaster, Hogarth was apprenticed to a silver engraver.
Beginning as book illustrator and engraver of satirical prints in 1720, he went on to portraits and conversation pieces in the 1730s. Then he produced several series of modern moral subject paintings and prints, including “A Harlot’s Progress” and “A Rake’s Progress”. He devoted himself to the Society of Arts in the 1750s and published his treatise, The Analysis of Beauty, in 1753 but fell out with the society and with other artists in the 1760s, over controversial anti-Whig political prints.
