Seminars, Workshops & Panel Discussions
The Lewis Walpole Library has organized and will present a seminar on William Hogarth at the Yale Center for British Art on Wednesday, February 11. Attendance is open to current Yale graduate students working in all areas of the humanities. The seminar will be led by Prof. Frédéric Ogée, Emeritus Professor of English Literature and Art History, Université Paris Cité and École du Louvre.
Yale Graduate Student Seminar on William Hogarth (1697–1764)
Prof. Frédéric Ogée - 11 February 2026, 10 am to 12:30 pm, Yale Center for British Art
A Midnight Modern Conversation, 1733, print made by William Hogarth, etching and engraving; Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1981.25.1409.
Description
‘Pursuing is the business of our lives’
[William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (London, 1753), p.25]
As one of the founding fathers of the English school of art, William Hogarth left an indelible mark on the nation’s visual culture, and the narrative and empirical component in his work, sometimes perceived as a form of insular resistance to continental and conceptual ‘high art’, has become a distinctive, idiomatic feature in the production of numerous subsequent artists, from Augustus Egg, William Frith and the first Pre-Raphaelites to Walter Sickert, David Hockney, Yinka Shonibare, Paula Rego or Grayson Perry.
In this seminar, we will examine the various aspects and implications—aesthetic, social, political—of Hogarth’s ‘love of pursuit’, and the narrativity in his works. In all aspects of his art one sees him giving pride of place to the experience and operation of perception and inviting beholders to play an active part in the realization of the work by devising their own course within it. The serpentine line of beauty, the emblem of his theory, perfectly encapsulates his idea that aesthetic pleasure results from the dynamic variety of each beholder’s perceptive pursuits.
Advance registration required
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