Presence in print: William Hogarth in British North America
Date
2014
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation addresses the ways in which the artist William Hogarth (British, 1697-1764) was present in eighteenth-century British North America without ever setting foot on its shores. Newspaper articles and advertisements, diaries and probate inventories all reveal the extent to which Hogarth's prints and aesthetic treatise took hold of the British-American imagination in the years surrounding the Revolutionary War. These objects clearly contributed to the development of humor, morality, and the American artistic scene more generally, yet their presence in America is virtually unexplored in both the scholarship on eighteenth-century American art and that related specifically to the British artist and his preeminent role in establishing a British school of art. In its evaluation of Hogarth's presence in the original thirteen colonies from as early as 1739, the dissertation considers the significance of this presence in the lives, material circumstances, and cultural outlook of colonials and early national Americans in British America into the early years of the nineteenth century. It gives special consideration to the reproducible role of print, both as text and image, in imbuing Hogarth with a currency extending far beyond the artist's natural sphere of influence. Just as newspapers from London made the journey across the Atlantic at the request of British-American merchants and statesmen, so too did cargoes made up of prints, and among them were engravings by Hogarth. Through cultures of print, Hogarth's name attained a level of familiarity in British North America so profound that it was adopted into the lingua franca with associations of narrative humor. I make a case for the importance of Hogarth's prints in the history of American art and their role in the formation of American cultural identities.