Happy Belated Birthday Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa, happy post-Thanksgiving, and holidays to all.

 

Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa or simply Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (24 November 1864 – 9 September 1901) was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and illustrator, whose immersion in the colorful and theatrical life of Paris in the late 1800s yielded a collection of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern and sometimes decadent life of those times. Toulouse-Lautrec is known along with Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin as one of the greatest painters of the Post-Impressionist period.

He was an aristocrat, the son and heir of Comte Alphonse-Charles de Toulouse and last in line of a family that dated back a thousand years. Henri's father was rich, handsome, and eccentric. His mother was overly devoted to her only living child who weak and often sick (another product of centuries of inbreeding). By the time he was 10 he had begun to draw and paint.

 Mr. Toulouse paints Mr. Lautrec (ca. 1891)

At 12 young Toulouse-Lautrec broke his left leg and at 14 his right leg. Due to extreme inbreeding, (both his grandmothers were sisters and his parents were first cousins), his bones failed to heal properly, and his legs stopped growing. He reached young adulthood with a body trunk of normal size but with abnormally short legs. He is reported to have had hypertrophied genitals which did not prevent him frequenting the brothels of Paris when he lived there. 

Deprived of the kind of life that a normal body would have permitted, Toulouse-Lautrec lived wholly for his art, drink, fun, lots and lots of fun and parties. He lived in the Montmartre section of Paris, the center of the cabaret entertainment and bohemian life that he loved to paint. Circuses, dance halls and nightclubs, racetracks--all these spectacles were set down on canvas or made into lithographs.

 In the Restaurant La Mie

 Toulouse-Lautrec was very much a part of all this activity. He would sit at a nightclub table, enjoying the show, drinking, and constantly sketching. The next morning in his studio he would expand the sketches into bright-colored paintings.

 In Bed

In order to become a part of the Montmartre life--as well as to protect himself against the crowd's ridicule of his appearance--Toulouse-Lautrec began to drink heavily. The invention of the cocktail "Earthquake" or Tremblement de Terre is attributed to Toulouse-Lautrec: a potent mixture containing half absinthe and half cognac (in a wine goblet, 3 parts Absinthe and 3 parts Cognac, sometimes served with ice cubes or shaken in a cocktail shaker filled with ice).

The style and content of Lautrec's posters were heavily influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e prints. Areas of flat color bound by strong outlines, silhouettes, cropped compositions, and oblique angles are all typical of woodblock prints by artists like Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) and Ando Hiroshige (1797–1858) . Likewise, Lautrec's promotion of individual performers is very similar to the depictions of famous actors, actresses, and courtesans from the so-called "floating world" of Edo-period Japan

 La Goule

 His size also prevented him from having a "normal" relationship with a woman and from early on, he frequented brothels. Some of his most compassionate and powerful work is of the prostitutes of 19th century Paris. Since he was a cripple himself, he could look at these women as fellow-sufferers, wounded and brutalized and suffering underneath the power and rouge that they donned for their customers.

La Toilette, 1889

In the 1890s the drinking and syphilis started to affect his health. He was confined to a sanatorium and to his mother's care at home, but he could not stay away from alcohol.

Woman before a Mirror, 1897. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864–1901)

Toulouse-Lautrec died on Sept. 9, 1901, at the family chateau of Malrome. Since then his paintings and posters--particularly theMoulin Rouge group--have been in great demand and bring high prices at auctions and art sales.

References: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/laut/hd_laut.htm
Artchive: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/T/toulouse-lautrec.htmlToulouse-Lautrec: The Soul of Montmartre (Pegasus Library)
Toulouse Lautrec, A life by Julie Frey

Caturday. Cats by Morikazu Kumagai

 

I am never tired of looking at a stone or a scrap of paper” – Kumagai Morikazu

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.” – William Blake

Kumagai Morikazu, known as the “Hermit Painter”, was as legendary as he was mysterious in the history of Japanese modern art. He lived an uneventful life, and from the 1950s until his death at the age of 97 he spent three decades at home, quietly contemplating in his private garden. In 1967, Japan awarded him the Order of Culture, the highest honor in the world of Japanese art, only to have him turn down the award. He only painted at night, and spent the days in his garden observing nature’s creations.

Morikazu’s creative career spanning seven decades was filled with hardships and setbacks, and his iconic zen style was not formed until after his 70s as marked by Camellia . In 1880, he was born of a wealthy family in Gifu province, and because of his love of nature and disinterest in business he studied Western painting at Tokyo University of the Arts, affording him masterful control over light and realism. Upon his father’s unexpected death after graduation, however, Morikazu was forced to work multiple jobs to support his family. In the 1920s, his style gradually turned from precise realism to wild and passionate Fauvism. He lost three children in the wars, and the experience of death and valediction pushed Morikazu’s paintings towards plainness and simplicity, and his style also became increasingly effortless and returned to the fundamentals.

In the 1950s, Morikazu’s health suffered after a stroke, and from his 70s onwards he became unable to travel to mountains and seas like before. As a result, he made it a daily routine to stay in different corners of his garden, following the trails of ants, studying the growth and withering of plants, and listening to birdsong and insects; he would only paint in his studio in the small and quiet hours of the night. This pure and uncomplicated lifestyle was reflected in his paintings: Camellia vividly describes the plumpness and fulsomeness of the flower in bloom with exceedingly simple lines and straightforward colours, reminding one of the ornithological and floral works of Bada Shanren, overflowing with the sense of returning to basics and an embrace of nature.

Morikazu’s work may seem simple, flat, and effortless, but each stroke was in fact the result of meticulous planning. He was fastidious about calculating sound frequencies and light spectrums, and one learns from his diaries that Morikazu studied German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz’s research in sensory physiology at length, and that he was deeply curious about the use of complementary frequencies of sound and colours to achieve harmony. Morikazu wrote numerous times that “after looking at the morning sun, traces of purple and yellow appear in front of my eyes”, or that “when you look at one colour and switch your gaze to another, the colour changes”. In Camellia , he substituted light and shadows with light and dark colours, starting from the bright stamen at the centre and expanding outwards and turning dark green, rose red, and apricot yellow with delightful rhythm; combined with undulating brushstrokes which remind one of the ripples on a pond, one sees clearly the artist’s unique grasp of the theory between colours and rhythms.

Despite a monastic life of zen and solitude, Morikazu’s paintings exhibits an extraordinarily avant-garde style. The clearly delineated lines and handful of straightforward monochromatic surfaces are enough to make the subject leap off the panel in exceptional clarity like the works by British Pop artist Patrick Caulfield. However, while Pop artists make simple use of commercial colour schemes to achieve a popularized aesthetic, in Morikazu’s painting the flower face demurely down, harmonizing with the elegant wood-tone background to preserve the subtle and natural aesthetic of Eastern art.

Morikazu’s backyard was merely several dozen square meters in size, but in this microcosm he still managed to apprehend the grand beauty of nature. His paintings are usually just the size of notebook pages, but they are still filled with his detailed observations of nature and his sincere love for it. He said that “I want to live as long as I possibly can. You’ll have to excuse me, but I’m far from ready to bid everyone farewell.” Today, his residence has been converted into the Kumagai Morikazu Art Museum in Tokyo. As the world marked four decades since his passing last year, The Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art hosted a retrospective in his honour titled “Kumagai Morikazu: The Joy of Life”. 2018 also saw his story turned into film in "Mori, The Artist’s Habitat”. 

http://www.artnet.com/artists/morikazu-kumagai/

Artist Paula Modersohn-Becker’s art was ahead of its time (1876-1907)

 

Half-Length Portrait of a Peasant, His Head Resting on His Right Hand, oil tempera on cardboard, c. 1903. The artist created the work at an art colony in Germany. ©Museumsbund Nordfriesland, Husum / Germany: Foto: Sönke Ehler

Talented, rebellious, and utterly honest, Paula Modersohn-Becker's groundbreaking life and work expose the scandalous restrictions imposed on women at the turn of the twentieth century, in turn sowing a primary seed for radical change. Inspired stylistically by the Post-Impressionists, Modersohn-Becker's starting point was simple, seeking to investigate, learn from, and to elevate everyday life, with a particular focus on female experience. Painting un-idealized and therefore revolutionary pictures of girls, older ladies, and new mothers she stands as a pioneer exploring transitions of age and maternal identity. Luckily leaving behind a vast correspondence with artist friends and many diary entries, we are given a valuable insight into a woman's desire to be respected in her multiplicity. Sadly killed by the role of being a mother that she was intent on re-envisioning, Modersohn-Becker's last word was schade ("what a pity"), as she died entirely too early, shortly after giving birth. 

Self-Portrait With Red Flower Wreath and Chain, 1906-07. Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover, Rutund Klaus-Bahlsen-Stiftung, © Landesmuseum Hannover – ARTOTHEK

Old Peasant Woman, 1905. The Detroit Institute of Arts, © Detroit Institute of Arts, Gift of Robert H. Tannahill

Today, she is regarded as a pioneer of the artistic movement that would become known as Expressionism, with a style that was years ahead of her contemporaries. “I am still an incomplete person and should so like to become someone,” she wrote. “Then again, I also feel that whoever thinks of me as incomplete needn’t really bother to look in my direction.” 

 https://www.theartstory.org/artist/modersohn-becker-paula/

Beaver Moon and Partial Lunar Eclipse

 

When to See November's Full Moon

The Beaver Moon reaches peak illumination in the early morning hours of Friday, November 19, at 3:59 A.M. EST. Of course, it will be very close to full the night before, so plan to look for it starting on Thursday, November 18, just after sunset!

Find out exactly what time the full Moon will appear above the horizon in your area with our Moonrise and Moonset Calculator.

See a Near-Total Lunar Eclipse

This year, November's Beaver Moon is accompanied by a partial lunar eclipse that will be just shy of total—98% of the Moon will be covered by Earth's shadow at the height of the eclipse! During a lunar eclipse, the Moon, Sun, and Earth stand in a line with the Earth in the middle, causing the planet's shadow to be cast onto the Moon. This gives the full Moon a reddish, coppery hue, as well as the nickname "Blood Moon." But is this Moon truly a Blood Moon? Read more about what a Blood Moon is—and isn't.

This near-total lunar eclipse will be visible from most of North America, reaching its maximum at approximately 4:00 A.M. Eastern Time on Friday, November 19. Be sure to convert to your local time zone to find out when to look for the eclipse!

Why Is It Called the Beaver Moon?

For decades, the Almanac has referenced the monthly full Moons with names tied to early Native American, Colonial American, and European folklore. Traditionally, each full Moon name was applied to the entire lunar month in which it occurred and through all of the Moon’s phases—not only the full Moon.

The Beaver Moon

Why the "Beaver" Moon? This is the time of year when beavers begin to take shelter in their lodges, having laid up sufficient stores of food for the long winter ahead. During the time of the fur trade in North America, it was also the season to trap beavers for their thick, winter-ready pelts. 

Alternative November Moon Names

November's Moon names highlight the actions of animals preparing for winter and the onset of the colder days ahead. Digging (or Scratching) Moon, a Tlingit name, evokes the image of animals foraging for fallen nuts and shoots of green foliage, and of bears digging their winter dens. The Dakota and Lakota term Deer Rutting Moon refers to the time when deer are seeking out mates and the Algonquin Whitefish Moon describes the spawning time for this fish.

In reference to the seasonal change of November, this Moon has been called the Frost Moon by the Cree and Assiniboine peoples and the Freezing Moon by the Anishinaabe—for good reason, as winter is right around the corner!

→ See more Full Moon names and their meanings.

Image: Moonrise over the Syr Darya river, Sunday, Nov. 13, 2016, Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls 

Georgia O'Keeffe. Feminist, painter, creator of America modernism.

 

To look at a Georgia O’Keeffe painting is to see America. Throughout her career, from her first show in 1916 to the late 1970s, the indomitable artist was concerned with what it meant to paint her country – and she became captivated by the wide plains, rocky outcrops and bold blue skies of New Mexico, her adopted home.

O’Keeffe’s first show was at the 291 Gallery in New York, 100 years ago this May 2016– a fact that was celebrated in a major retrospective of her work at Tate Modern in London. Alfred Stieglitz,(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Stieglitz)  who ran the most modern and influential gallery in New York , was shown her charcoal work by a mutual friend in 1916, and, impressed, included it in a group show without asking O’Keeffe’s permission. She wrote to ask him to take it down, he refused; a lively, flirtatious correspondence began.

Alfred Stieglitz took hundreds of pictures of O’Keeffe, who became his wife (Credit: Alfred Stieglitz/The J Paul Getty Trust)

By 1918, he’d tempted O’Keeffe away from a teaching job in Texas, with the offer of a flat financed by him in New York; within a month, he’d left his wife and moved in with her. There followed a creatively fertile period in both their lives, with O’Keeffe painting the city and their summer residence at Lake George in upstate New York, and Stieglitz taking hundreds of pictures of the woman who would become his wife in 1924.

But it wasn’t until their relationship ran into difficulties (due to her boredom with NY Life and their various affairs), and O’Keeffe took off west, that she really found her own distinct vision of the US landscape. The air crackles with static. Every shadow seems laser-cut.

It’s easy to imagine how inspiring it must have been for the artist. The high altitude and dry climate result in a crystalline light that seems to bring out astonishing colors: the chalky ochre and pepper-red of the rocks and the sun-bleached grey-gold of the prairie grasses flicker against the famous New Mexico skies, whose dark, rich blueness it would be easy to become addicted to. The air crackles with static. Every shadow seems laser-cut.

O’Keeffe first visited northern New Mexico in 1929, staying in the tiny town of Taos with friends. She needed to get away from Stieglitz, who was in the midst of an affair with the heiress Dorothy Norman and following her own numerous affairs. The trip proved a good idea creatively as well as emotionally: O’Keeffe was revitalized by the landscape, and fascinated by the Pueblo culture and architecture of the Native American tribes of the area.

She had found her place. O’Keeffe began to spend her summers alone in New Mexico, renting remote properties and ‘tramping’ around the countryside, taking her paints with her; in 1940 she bought an Adobe house called Ghost Ranch, and in 1945, another in the little village of Abiquiú, 48 miles north of Santa Fe. Stieglitz never visited: New Mexico remained hers alone.

The area around Sante Fe in New Mexico where the artist settled is known as ‘O’Keeffe country’ (Credit: Georgia O'Keeffe House, Abiquiu 5, View from House)

She had also found her own form of Modernism. In the 1920s, living in New York and hanging out with Stieglitz’s masculine art crowd – Paul Strand, John Marin, Arthur Dove, Edward Steichen – she complained that the US lagged behind Europe, because American Modernists failed to engage with their own country. No wonder no-one was writing ‘the Great American Novel’ or painting the ‘Great American Vision’. “I was excited over our country [but] I knew that at that time almost any of those great minds would have been in Europe if it was possible for them,” she commented. “They didn’t even want to live in New York – how was the Great American Thing going to happen?”

O’Keeffe grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, which is “why the landscape is important to her, becomes symbolic for her,” says Tanya Barson, curator of the Tate show. But it was when she went Southwest and discovered New Mexico, that O’Keeffe found her Great American Thing. Like her more famous close-up paintings of flowers, her vision of the Southern skies and mountains wavers between figurative and abstract; she crops in on a view, like a photographer, finding the abstract shapes and simplifying line and form, heightening color until it has an emotive effect. 

Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1 1932 fetched the highest price ever for a work by a female artist in 2014 (Credit: 2016 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/DACS, London)

Showing many landscapes within a chronological survey of her work, the show at the Tate moved from the clichéd perception of O’Keeffe as ‘that famous female artist who painted swirling vagina flowers’. Such a Freudian reading was encouraged by Stieglitz from her earliest exhibitions, and later enthusiastically taken up by 1970s feminist critics – but O’Keeffe “consistently denied” such interpretations throughout her entire career. One could say that this was an example of "see what I tell you, not what is there in front of your eyes." 

Still, her close-up flowers images are beloved the world over. Her smooth painting style and huge popularity has seen O’Keeffe often reduced and sneered at by critics; she’s too easy.

Her smooth painting style and huge popularity has seen O’Keeffe often reduced and sneered at by critics

“Many of her works visually seem very simple; they’re approachable,” acknowledges Cody Hartley, Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Georgia O’Keeffe museum. “They also reproduce very well; they make good posters. The work appeals to a lot of people – it has an accessibility that a Jackson Pollock does not have. But actually to paint that way, so there’s not a lot of evidence of the labour involved, is very difficult. Her technique is amazing – long, continuous, smooth brushstrokes - but it’s hard to appreciate how much work and thought went into her paintings because they don’t make that obvious.”

O’Keeffe painted several pictures at her other home, Ghost Ranch, including My Backyard (Credit: 2016 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/DACS, London)

 O’Keeffe moved there permanently in 1949, following Stieglitz’s death. She painted the distinctive, indigenous Adobe architecture of the region: low buildings of wide, softly curved walls made of straw and mud, that bake hard into a bright, distinctive red-brown finish. Both her homes were in this style, although she put in huge, plate-glass windows too.

She converted a car into a mobile studio so she could work in the landscape - as well as painting from memory back in her studios. She painted several pictures of the White Place, softly flattening out the jagged fingers of rocks, white-on-blue. Her form of abstraction is about “color and composition” suggests Caroline Kastner, curator of the O’Keeffe Museum: “she’s rejecting perspective… reducing and editing what you’re seeing in the landscape to the flat surface of a painting.”

Some critics say the skull paintings are a comment on the Depression, while for others they simply represent the realities of frontier country (Credit: The Brooklyn Museum)

Her ‘back yard’, meanwhile, looks towards striking cliffs where the different strata of rock - some dating back 200 million years – make a pastel layer-cake of colors, with improbable spires and spindly chimneys of stone jutting up towards the sky. O’Keeffe captured their varied tones, in sweeping landscapes and abstracted close-ups: elephantine mauve lumps, creamy yellow cliffs, braiding slopes of peach and pistachio, red-raw streaked rock-faces.

Her many paintings of these views seem smoothly stylized, exaggerated, too bright – but visiting, you can see how the contrasts do come from the land itself. These views also form a backdrop for her 1930s still lives of skulls and bones, sometimes floating – Surrealist-fashion – in the air; critics have suggested the morbid symbols against the desert landscape symbolize the Dust Bowl and the Depression, while for others they simply represent frontier country, O’Keeffe’s Modernist vision of the American West.

O’Keeffe painted what Barson calls “the chromatic landscape of Ghost Ranch” enough to fill a whole room of the Tate’s exhibition. Usually, she painted a subject – say, horse skulls - for around a decade, then moved on. But there was one image she never grew tired of: the Pedernal mountain. She just kept painting it, with later paintings framing the summit through the holes in sun-bleached pelvis bones.

O’Keeffe felt a profound emotional and artistic attachment to this landscape; after her death in 1986, the Pedernal was where her ashes were scattered. Not long before she died, she deemed the distant, blue-hazed summit her private mountain: “God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_O'Keeffe

https://collections.okeeffemuseum.org/

Rodin. Regarded as the father of modern sculpture

 

Rilke was the first to see that Rodin can be understood through the details of his work and methods far better than through his grandiose ideas. Of course, the sculptor made ambitious plans—The Gates of Hell are populated by The Thinker, Adam and The Three Shades in the High Romantic style of the Eroica Symphony. But most of Rodin’s vast monumental projects remained incomplete, and some of them are apt to exasperate, where they do not actually disappoint. Rodin trusted the great traditional “subjects,” the noble categories and “missions” of High Art. A man of the people, he never questioned the popular belief in the artist’s responsibility to history nor his rather naïve faith in messages. He was comforted by these sentimental theories in the long period of material difficulty at the beginning of his career. When he became a success—and wore the bearded face of Inspired Genius—fame lent confirmation to his candid faith, and he became the rather shallow priest of a neo-paganism for which the handsome Nijinsky supplied the apparitions of a living god. Rodin was self-educated; a few trips abroad and contacts with Italian and Classic works gave him an enthusiasm which was more intuitive than informed. In fact, Rodin’s utterances were never far from the stereotypes of his time, and, paradoxically, the artist finished his career as a rich bourgeois, which his palace in Paris, country houses, collections, mistresses, a cellar-full of excellent burgundies. His “power” was worldly, but, luckily, he was always temperamentally attracted to what he thought was the intellectual and metaphysical life.

https://www.rodinmuseum.org/

Hogarth. Born November 10, 1697.. the greatest British satirical artist of his age, maybe any age.

 

The Shrimp Girl 

William Hogarth, (born November 10, 1697, London, England—died October 26, 1764, London), the first great English-born artist to attract admiration abroad, best known for his moral and satirical engravings and paintings—e.g., A Rake’s Progress (eight scenes,1733). His attempts to build a reputation as a history painter and portraitist, however, met with financial disappointment, and his aesthetic theories had more influence in Romantic literature than in painting. 

The Beggar's Opera VI, 1731, Tate Britain's version

The great twentieth-century cartoonist David Low described William Hogarth as the grandfather of the political cartoon. What he meant was that while Hogarth didn't quite set the template for political cartoons as we now recognize them (Gillray did that a generation later), the medium wouldn't be the same without him. There's a great deal of truth in this, but not necessarily for the obvious reasons. Hogarth refined a pre-existing tradition of visual satire, taking it to previously unscaled heights of sophistication and skill. And, through the popularity of his output, he placed visual satire shoulder to shoulder with the textual satire of the times (the elderly Swift wrote a poem to the young Hogarth, praising him and proposing that they collaborate). But he also established a journalistic tradition that's still flourishing today. (from a review of his show at the Tate, 2007). Hogarth cared passionately about both, primarily for personal reasons but also because he believed in art as a vital creative force in society. 

A Rake's Progress, Plate 8, 1735, and retouched by Hogarth in 1763 by adding the Britannia emblem

Marriage à-la-mode, Shortly After the Marriage (scene two of six).

He despised the connoisseurs’ exclusive admiration for the Old Masters and their prejudice in favor of foreign artists. In his first major work, Masquerades and Operas, published independently of the booksellers in 1724, Hogarth attacked contemporary taste and expressed attitudes that were vigorously sustained throughout his life. Boldly questioning the standards of a powerful clique that was supported by the 3rd earl of Burlington, an influential art patron and architect, Hogarth’s first blow with the connoisseurs was shrewdly designed to appeal to his hero, Thornhill, who was himself suffering from Burlington’s Neoclassical revival. Thus, Hogarth made powerful enemies at the start of his career, and, when they retaliated about 1730 by nullifying royal interest in his work, he was cruelly disappointed. Indeed, despite his own intransigent frankness, Hogarth was always discouraged and offended when his opponents hit back.

First print in the series "A Harlot's Progress" Complete series on line at Wikipedia

Hogarth married in 1792 and while his marriage was childless, it was a happy union.. 

In the next few years, small paintings, which acknowledged a great debt to the early 18th-century painter Antoine Watteau and the elegance of French Rococo art, brought Hogarth an appreciative and wealthy clientele. Hogarth soon got tired of this and turned to works which showed the depth and breadth of contemporary life, all the good, the bad and the ugly.

A harlot's progress 

Hogarth wanted to extract entertaining and instructive incidents from life. In telling the story of a young country girl’s corruption in London and her consequent miseries, he not only ridiculed the viciousness and follies of society but painted an obvious moral. The engravings were aimed at a wide public, and their tremendous success immediately established Hogarth’s financial and artistic independence. He was henceforth free, unlike most of his colleagues, to follow his own creative inclinations. To safeguard his livelihood from unscrupulously pirated editions, he fought to obtain legislation protecting artist’s copyright and held back the eight-part Rake’s Progress until a law of that nature, known as the Hogarth Act, was passed in 1735. In the following year Hogarth moved into the house in Leicester Fields that he was to occupy until his death.

Gin Lane

London becomes a hell on earth as the poor drink themselves to death. 

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/picture/2012/sep/12/william-hogarth-gin-lane 

Beer Street

Hogarth was in many ways a contradictory figure: a satirist who wanted to be part of the Establishment; a popular engraver who wished to be recognized as a serious artist. He succeeded in being all these things (although, in the first instance, at great personal cost). But first and foremost he was a polemicist. That may seem to be a pretty obvious thing to say when you look at A Rake's Progress (1735), or A Harlot's Progress (1732), or The Idle and Industrious Apprentice (1747), or Stages of Cruelty (1751). But what's truly interesting is the way he did it, because it was essentially contradictory. 

Take his most famous print, Gin Lane (1751). At face value it is identical, in intention and effect, to a modern tabloid headline. It was inspired by a news story Hogarth heard about a woman who murdered her infant daughter so she could sell her clothes to buy gin - the equivalent of a banner headline today about teenagers killing someone for money to buy crack. It's meant to shock; moreover, it's meant to shock the viewer into better behavior. Thus its companion piece, Beer Street (also 1751), showing the advantages of honest English ale over evil foreign gin. To this end it was sold cheaply in order to reach as wide an audience as possible. In other words, it was a kind of proto-popular journalism, the first glimmer of the developing mass media.

From the Art Bible: William Hogarth will be remembered as the father of satirical caricatures and moral paintings, a genre which would later develop into cartoons. His determination and stout middle-class values made him one of the most innovative artists of his generation and he brought art to the common man for the first time in history.

Biographical information from the Encyclopedia Britannica. 
Information on the print Gin Lane 
Gin Lane vs Beer Street.
144 art works: https://www.wikiart.org/en/william-hogarth
What was missed in history class: 

https://www.missedinhistory.com/podcasts/william-hogarth.htm
Art Bible: https://www.artble.com/artists/william_hogarth