Art and Truth: William Hogarth and the English Enlightenment

The 28th Annual Lewis Walpole Library Lecture is presented by Frédéric Ogée, scholar of William Hogarth (1697–1764) and Emeritus Professor of British Literature and Art History at Université Paris Cité and École du Louvre. Hogarth was a pioneering English painter and engraver and is often considered as one of the most important figures in the rise of an English school of art. His art engaged in an unprecedented manner with the ideas, debates, and values of the English Enlightenment, translating them into accessible visual narratives and encouraging the development of active critical thinking. His art reflected and nourished the Enlightenment’s empiricist agenda—the idea that knowledge comes from observation and experience—to which he gave accessible visibility by bringing art into the realm of popular culture and public discourse, as well as by putting the distinctions between “high” and “low” art under serious stress. As such, his major contribution to the promotion of a “modern” (and English) conception of art is the unflinching priority he always gave to truth over beauty in his representations—a feature, remarkably, that has remained characteristic of British art ever since. 

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