Rotund bellies and double chins: Hogarth’s bodies

Abstract

In his choice of subjects as in his painting technique, William Hogarth’s rendering of ‘life’ is remarkable for its tangible physicality. Be it for the materiality of its settings or for the variety of human characters, his pictures try to offer some kind of total ‘show’, with a view to representing Nature ‘as it is’ and in action, in opposition to the rarefied delusions of ‘high’ art which tended to show it as it ought to be, and ‘abstracted’. While some forms were certainly more ‘polite’ than others, a true representation of mankind had to allow for the presence of all its specimens. By composing ‘modern history paintings’ in which the most elegant forms converse with the plainest lines, Hogarth endowed variety with a new epistemological and aesthetic status that meant the inclusion of the ones and of ‘the others’. In all his pictures, it is always the human body which, from painful distortions to graceful curves, endows his art with its textural, formal and rhythmic qualities. Hogarthian beauty and grace, far from being abstract concepts, emerge as transient, “living”, physical phenomena, apprehended by the beholder through visual representations of the bodies’ natural and ‘peculiar’ movements.