Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/634

 604 Painting 3. English Painters of the Eighteenth Century. William Hogarth, the founder of the English school of painting, was born in London in 1697. In early life he was, by his own wish, apprenticed to a silver-plate en- graver. He had naturally a good eye and a fondness for drawing, and soon found engraving shields and crests, to be too limited an employment. His dislike of academic instruction, and his natural and proper notion of seeing art through stirring life are very visible in all he says or writes. His first attempt at satire, of any merit, was the Taste of the Town, engraved in 1724, which sharply lashed the reigning follies of the day ; this was followed by his Hudibras, published in the year 1726, the illustrations of which were the first that marked him as a man above the common rank. In 1730, Hogarth married Jane, the only daughter of Sir James Thornhill, the sergeant-painter and history- painter to the king, without the consent of her father. He then commenced portrait painting; "the most ill- suited employment," says Walpole, " to a man whose turn was certainly not flattery. " Yet his facility in catching a likeness drew him a prodigious business for some time. Amongst his best portraits are Captain Coram, the pro- jector of the Foundling Hospital, David Garrick as Richard III. starting from a couch in terror, and the demagogue John Wilkes, and several portraits of Himself all of which are very like. He next turned his thoughts to painting and engraving subjects of a modern* kind and moral nature; a field, he says, not broken up in any country or any age. The first of these compositions of which he speaks, and which have