William Hogarth
![William Hogarth, ''[[The Painter and his Pug]]'', 1745. Self-portrait with his pug, [[Trump (dog)|Trump]], in [[Tate Britain]], London.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/The_Painter_and_His_Pug_by_William_Hogarth.jpg)
Hogarth was born in the City of London into a lower-middle-class family. In his youth he took up an apprenticeship with an engraver, but did not complete the apprenticeship. His father underwent periods of mixed fortune, and was at one time imprisoned in lieu of payment of outstanding debts, an event that is thought to have informed William's paintings and prints with a hard edge.
Influenced by French and Italian painting and engraving, Hogarth's works are mostly satirical caricatures, sometimes bawdily sexual, mostly of the first rank of realistic portraiture. They became widely popular and mass-produced via prints in his lifetime, and he was by far the most significant English artist of his generation. Charles Lamb deemed Hogarth's images to be books, filled with "the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at; his pictures we read." Provided by Wikipedia
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