Painter of Moods, Poverties, and Professions

Abstract

Part V brings everything back to London, to its age of analysis, reason, liberty, sense, and wit. It brings the transfiguration of the commonplace back to an aesthetic discourse that drove Danto two centuries later to the extremes of rage. Bringing the wit to the early transformations of the public sphere, it ends up in the most domesticated of spaces to find the first telling of the Red Sea anecdote. Chapter 18 focuses on two pictures by William Hogarth: The Enraged Musician and The Distrest Poet. There was meant to be a third, a painter in some sort of mood. The chapter reads the two pictures to speculate about the absent third. What it finds in the two images, it finds in all of Hogarth’s art: a wit of incongruity, ambiguity, and inversion. The wit supports a satire that, drawn loosely from virtue theory, addresses liberty and justice in a society of professions feared for their foreign taste and imposture.