The Amazing Adventures of Archibald Esq.

Hogarth’s Pugs

William Hogarth is often hailed as the quintessentially English artist of the eighteenth century.

Hogarth had the ability and the stamina to challenge the status quo of art’s exclusive link to ’society’. He portrayed not only the toffs but their hangers-on, retainers and servants, tradesmen and workmen, pimps and whores, beggars and destitute.

An engraver, he saw that prints of his paintings would be more affordable across a wide social range. Indeed, they sold well throughout Britain and the colonies. It is fair to guess that by the middle of the century most literate Virginians would at least have recognized his name.

Best known are his prints on such themes as The Harlot’s Progress, The Rake’s Progress, Marriage á-la-mode, and Industry and Idleness. Each print teems with the life of the times, not always wholly literal, but carefully composed for narrative clarity and visual impact. In them, Hogarth shows us some of the idyllic and a lot of the earthy side of the Augustan age. And dogs abound.

Hogarth had three pet dogs over the years, all pugs, named Pugg, Trump, and Crab. For someone described in his own day as short and pugnacious, it is apropos that he had pugs. In 1745, at the height of his career he engraved a self-portrait, a bust-length view of himself in informal dress, with his pug Trump seated on a ledge in front of him.

Dogs, dogs dogs — urinating, defecating, or copulating—doing the animal things that polite society also did, though mostly behind closed doors. Dogs after all are symbols of the animal self, of natural instincts, of all those things our natures make us want to do before our applied manners exert their constraints.

Notice how in this 1745 self-portrait (held by the Tate), Hogarth places his pug Trump before himself.

Awoof! Archie

Posted 17 May 08

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