Austin Osman Spare

Ex Libris Pickford Waller

1905

William Hogarth was an English painter and engraver, the outstanding British artist of his period. During his childhood, his father, a schoolteacher, was imprisoned for debt, and this early experience of the seamy side of life left a deep mark on Hogarth (much of his output is concerned with the contrast between success and failure, and he depicted prisons in several works). He trained as an engraver of silver plate and by 1720 had set up his own business in London, doing various kinds of commercial work. In his spare time he studied painting, first at the St Martin's Lane Academy and later under Sir James Thornhill, whose daughter he married in 1729. By the early 1730s he had achieved some success as a painter of conversation pieces and at about the same time he invented the idea of using a sequence of anecdotal pictures ‘similar to representations on the stage’ to point a moral and satirize social abuses. A set of 12 original engravings illustrating Industry and Idleness, after the drawings by William Hogarth, printed in 1833. The engravers are F Jordan, E Smith, C Armstrong, S Davenport, H Adlard, W H Worthington, H Fernell, A Duncan and F F Walker. The engravings, which are in excellent condition, would be mounted (matted) and ready to frame Edward Smith (fl. 1823-49) The landscape, figure, and portrait engraver Edward Smith may have been a native of Edinburgh but appears to have worked mostly in London. His earliest recorded plates...

William Hogarth was an English painter and engraver, the outstanding British artist of his period. During his childhood, his father, a schoolteacher, was imprisoned for debt, and th...

William Hogarth was an English painter and engraver, the outstanding British artist of his period. During his childhood, his father, a schoolteacher, was imprisoned for debt, and th...

William Hogarth was an English painter and engraver, the outstanding British artist of his period. During his childhood, his father, a schoolteacher, was imprisoned for debt, and th...