Program

William Hogarth. A Harlot’s Progress, Plate 4. 1732. The Lewis Walpole Library, Gift of Richard M. Greenberg

PROGRAM PDF

Symposium | William Hogarth: His Art, Life, and Times

A Tribute to Ronald Paulson

14-16 October 2026

WEDNESDAY, 14 October

YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART, LECTURE HALL

4:30-4:45 PM — Welcome Remarks

Christina Ferando, Head of Research, Yale Center for British Art

Abigail Swingen, W.S. Lewis Librarian and Executive Director, The Lewis Walpole Library

Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings & Paintings, The Lewis Walpole Library

4:45-6:15 PM —  Panel 1: Paulson’s Hogarth

Moderator: Jill Campbell, Professor of English, Yale University

Douglas Fordham, Professor of Art History, University of Virginia

Breaking and Remaking Hogarth’s Bristol Altarpiece

For someone who said so much about Hogarth’s career, Ronald Paulson was curiously reticent about Hogarth’s altarpiece for the Gothic parish church of St. Mary’s Redcliffe, Bristol. This talk argues that the Bristol Altarpiece sits uncomfortably alongside Paulson’s portrait of the artist. That said, Paulson’s view of the ‘feminized hero’ offers real interpretative potential for our understanding of this frequently overlooked work.

Caroline Patey, Chair Professor of English Literature (Professore Ordinario di Letteratura Inglese), Università degli Studi, Milano

William Hogarth, the Novel Maker

William Hogarth keeps haunting British literature, although the routes of his narrative progress diverge widely in time and mode. His role in shaping some crucial aesthetic postures among pre-modernist and modernist novelists is still largely unexplored. Not primarily focused on ideas and social context, the young and rebellious who appropriate Hogarth at the turn of the XIX century engage in his dazzling formal dynamism and his contradictions. And their aesthetic concerns resonate with Hogarthian artistic lessons, ranging from the geometries of obliquity and fall to the uneasy contiguity of visual and verbal, the multifocality of different voices and the unresolved and fertile shock between popular and sophisticated cultures.  

6:15 to 6:45 PM — Film Screening  

Hogarth, Edward Bennett, 1976 / BFI (23 mins)

Introduced by Pierre Von-Ow, Associate Lecturer in Early Modern Art History, University of St. Andrews

THURSDAY, October 15

10:15 to 11:45 AM — Panel 2: Drawing

Moderator: Laurel Peterson, Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings, Yale Center for British Art

Zoë Dostal, Visiting Assistant Professor of Art, Amherst College

Life Models, Hemp Rope, and the Line of Beauty

In The Analysis of Beauty, Hogarth identified the serpentine “line of beauty” as the fundamental form for all beauty in art and nature. The exemplary origin and expression of the line is the female body, which Hogarth places on a pedestal in his treatise. I look to Hogarth’s life drawings from the St. Martin’s Lane Academy as the origin of his line, where female models used ropes to hold their bodies in serpentine shapes. Rope, a typical tool for life drawing, was a product of a hemp industry deeply enmeshed in systems of criminal punishment and “correcting” women. In this paper, I demonstrate how women’s labor and fraught relationship with hemp rope informed Hogarth’s theory of beauty.

Stacey Sloboda, Paul H. Tucker Professor of Art History, University of Massachusetts, Boston

“Boys Peeping at Nature: Drawing and Modeling at the St. Martin’s Lane Academy”

Drawing from nature was central to Hogarth’s artistic practice and theory. This paper explores the activities of the famous, but little-understood academy that he founded in 1735. Arguing for the social and aesthetic importance of life drawing at the St. Martin’s Lane Academy, it situates the practice of drawing from the nude figure within both Hogarth’s aesthetic theory and the sex trade that flourished in the neighborhood around it.

Jennifer Tonkovich, Eugene and Clare Thaw Curator, Drawings & Prints, The Morgan Library

The Mutable Page: Hogarth’s Drawings

This talk explores Hogarth’s inventive approach to drawings related to his print series and paintings made in the 1740s and early 1750s. Close looking at these ‘model drawings’ reveals Hogarth innovating on the page as he relentlessly improved his drawings. These investigations aim to better define the role drawings played in Hogarth’s distinctly un-academic and nonlinear method of producing prints and paintings during his mature career. The focus is on new findings, novel resources, and the value of a materialist approach to the artist’s small and curious oeuvre on paper.

12:00 to 12:30 PM — Film Screening

William Hogarth by Lichtenberg, Philippe Collin, 1983 / INA (23 mins.)

Introduced by Pierre Von-Ow, Associate Lecturer in Early Modern Art History, University of St. Andrews

2:00 to 3:00 PM — Breakout sessions (sign-up required; limited capacity)

Conservation Studio: Jennifer Tonkovich, Eugene and Clare Thaw Curator, The Morgan Library, and Laurel Peterson, Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings, Yale Center for British Art 

“Hogarth’s Drawings: Materials and Techniques”

Study Room: Abigail Zitin, Director of the Writing Program and Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University 

“Analysis of Beauty”

3:15 to 4:15 PM — Breakout sessions (sign-up required; limited capacity)

Gallery: Edward Town, Associate Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, Yale Center for British Art 

Hogarth’s World? Curating William Hogarth at the Yale Center for British Art

Study Room: Jill Campbell, Professor of English, Yale University with Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings & Paintings, Lewis Walpole Library 

“Hogarth and Fielding: Characters and Caricaturas”

5:00 to 6:30 PM — Reception & Exhibition Viewing Satire, Sympathy, and Social Critique: William Hogarth’s Progress Prints

FRIDAY, 16 October

10:15 to 11:45 AM — Panel 3:  Patriotism & Empire

Moderator: Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University

Holly Shaffer, Associate Professor of Art and Architecture, and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Brown University

Columbus Breaking the Egg: Hogarth’s Invitation to Supper

This talk will consider the roles of food and empire in artists’ and philosophers’ conceptualization of aesthetics. It will focus on Hogarth’s subscription ticket, “Columbus Breaking the Egg,” and references to foodstuffs in his related Analysis of Beauty as well as other prints that concern food. Is food the “low” taste to art’s “high”? Is it a belly punch to selfhood, the visceral key that separates cultures in Europe (France/England) and across the globe? Or is it an ideal metaphor for refinement, elevating the gut to design in forms like the pineapple or parsley?

Pierre Von-Ow, Associate Lecturer in Early Modern Art History, University of St. Andrews

A New British Order: Hogarth’s Design for a Domestic Column Capital

Responding to the resurfacing of classical architecture as an ideological battleground in the United States, this talk examines the patriotic column capital depicted in the first plate of Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty. Composed of “the aukward and confin’d forms of hats and periwigs,” the style of this half-jocular capital could compete, declared Hogarth, with the Corinthian elegance inherited from Greek and Roman antiquity. Exploring this and other design projects for a native architectural order, from Inigo Jones to James Adam, this talk questions the uses and abuses of neo-classical references in Enlightenment Britain and beyond.

Catherine Roach, Associate Professor of Art History, Virginia Commonwealth University

“Purely English”: Hogarth, Nation, and Empire in the Early Nineteenth Century

In 1814 a pioneering loan show at the British Institution, London, nominated Hogarth as an exemplar of national character, praising him for inventing “a new line of art, purely English.” The elite collectors who organized the show embraced an emerging, exclusive idea of the  national school, defined as expressions of local characteristics by native-born artists. The idea of distinctive national character advanced the ends of empire in ways both blatant and subtle. This paper looks closely at the 1814 installation, its treatment of Hogarth the painter, and what it meant to be “purely” English in an age of expanding empire.

12:00 to 1:00 PM — Breakout sessions (choose two of three, sign-up required; limited capacity)

Study Room: Hannibal de Pencier, PhD Candidate, History of Art, Yale University 

Theft by Memory: Hogarth’s “A Rake’s Progress” and Its Pirates

Study Room: Jean Paik, PhD Candidate, English, Yale University 

Prisons and Political Critique

4th Floor Galleries: Archie Hamerton, PhD Candidate, English, Yale University 

Hogarth in Conversation

2:00 to 3:30 PM — Panel 4: Social and Political Critique

Moderator: Miya Tokumitsu, Donald T. Fallati and Ruth E. Pachman Curator of the Davison Art Collection

Meredith Gamer, Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University

Hogarth’s Children 

Children feature prominently in Hogarth’s work: as portrait subjects and fictional characters, as embodiments of virtue and vice, and as artists themselves. This paper considers a selection of these images alongside contemporary theories of childhood and—just as importantly—pregnancy. In particular, it attends to Hogarth’s relationship with the prominent London physician, William Hunter, whose pioneering anatomical investigations radically transformed how eighteenth-century audiences imagined and understood the fetus in utero.

Andrew Rudd, FSA, Director of Studies at Anglo Educational Services in London

Hogarth, Walpole and London’s Children’s Charities

This paper will explore overlapping, though contrasting, depictions of charity school children in works by Hogarth and Walpole. Charity school processions were a prominent feature of eighteenth-century London life and appeared in both Hogarth’s promotional images for the Foundling Hospital and Walpole’s tragedy The Mysterious Mother with illustrations by Lady Diana Beauclerk, items held in the collections of the Lewis Walpole Library.

Phil Withington, Professor of Social and Cultural History, University of Sheffield

Hogarth, Addiction, and Political Economy in Early Modern London

This paper reconstructs the discourses drawn upon by Hogarth in his famous polemical prints, Gin Lane & Beer Street (1751). Published as a coup de grace in the political campaign to regulate the consumption of ‘spiritous liquors’ (especially geneva, or gin), Hogarth presented in pictorial form two strands of thought which had been especially prominent in arguments for parliamentary legislation over the previous three decades: medical ideas about substance dependency and mercantilist political economy. Tracing the antecedents of these discourses in the seventeenth century, this paper examines their deployment in the debates about gin from the 1720s; and unpacks their visualization in Hogarth’s 1751 prints.

3:30 to 4:00 PM — Film Screening

The London of William Hogarth, directed and produced by Phil Barnard and Bruce Cornwell, 1956 / With Permission of Scott and Eric Cornwell. (26 mins.)

4:00 to 4:15 PM — Closing Remarks

Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings & Paintings, The Lewis Walpole Library