William Hogarth

A Rake's Progress — painting as moral satire

The inventor of the modern narrative painting series and the first great English-born painter. A Rake's Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode tell stories of moral decline through sequential images crammed with satirical detail — visual novels a century before the comic strip.

Key works

• A Rake's Progress1735— Eight scenes from fortune to madhouse
  Sir John Soane's Museum, London
• Marriage A-la-Mode1743-1745— Arranged marriage as social catastrophe
  National Gallery, London

Connections

External