Lectures & Conferences

28th Lewis Walpole Library Lecture

Thursday, February 12, 2026

5:30 pm

Yale University Art Gallery Auditorium, 1111 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT 06510

Art and Truth: William Hogarth and the English Enlightenment

Frédéric Ogée, Emeritus Professor of British Literature and Art History at Université Paris Cité and École du Louvre 

William Hogarth was a pioneering painter and engraver of 18th-century Britain 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, encouraging the development of active critical thinking. As such his art reflected and nourished the English 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, and putting the distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art under serious stress. 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.

Image:  William Hogarth, born in London, England, 1697; active in England; died in London, England, 1764, Self-Portrait, ca. 1735, Oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1981.25.360

Frédéric Ogée is Emeritus Professor of British Literature and Art History at Université Paris Cité and Ecole du Louvre. His main period of research is the long 18th-century, and his publications include two collections of essays on William Hogarth, as well as ‘Better in France’? The circulation of ideas across the Channel in the 18th century (Lewisburg, 2005), Diderot and European Culture (Oxford, 2006; repr.2009), J.M.W. Turner, Les Paysages absolus (Paris, 2010) and Jardins et Civilisations (Valenciennes, 2019), following a conference at the European Institute for Gardens and Landscapes in Caen. In 2006-07, he curated the first-ever exhibition of Hogarth for the Louvre Museum. He is currently working on a series of four large monographs in French on 18th- and 19th-century British artists. The first one, Thomas Lawrence–Le genie du portrait anglais came out in December 2022. The second one, on J.M.W.Turner, will be published early 2026. From 2014 to 2017 he was a member of Tate Britain’s Advisory Council in London, and from 2014 to 2021 a member of the City of Paris Scientific Council. In 2018-19 he was Kress Fellow in the Literature of Art at the Clark Art Institute and then the William Allan Neilson Professor at Smith College, both in Massachusetts, USA. From September 2025 he will serve as member of the Paul Mellon Centre’s Advisory Council in London.