London was the crucible of the visual arts in eighteenth-century Britain. In order to succeed financially and socially, artists needed a foothold in the capital. Even so, the precise locus for success in the metropolis was undergoing fundamental change by the 1730s, when Johnson himself settled in the city. A generation earlier, the most successful and sought-after artists were those whose circles of patronage were centered on the court. They included, notably, Sir Godfrey Kneller, the German-born portraitist and history painter, who, from 1691 until his death, held the post of Principal Painter to the King. For the most part, those who prospered in the early decades of the eighteenth century were Continental artists, such as Louis Laguerre and Jacopo Amigoni, who were skilled in painting allegorical murals in the Baroque style for the palaces and mansions of the royalty and leading aristocracy. An exception was the Englishman James Thornhill, who by his death in 1734 had assumed the mantle of Britain’s leading decorative painter. Even so, at this very time the taste for the Baroque was in decline. Nor was King George II interested in patronizing the visual arts, stating, memorably, that he had no use for “bainting or boetry.” In such unpropitious circumstances, it was Thornhill’s son-in-law, William Hogarth, who pioneered a new and very different art form. It is fair to state that Samuel Johnson’s arrival in London in the late 1730s coincided with the rise of Hogarth to a position of preeminence in the capital’s art world.

Hogarth

During the 1730s, Hogarth, who had been trained as an engraver, began to produce a highly original and influential series of artworks that he called “modern moral subjects.” The first of these, The Harlot’s Progress (1732), was followed three years later by The Rake’s Progress, a series of eight paintings (now in Sir John Soane’s Museum, London) which Hogarth disseminated widely in the form of engravings – inexpensive black-and-white prints that made paintings available to a wide public. In these and similar works, Hogarth wished to produce a form of modern history painting which would address contemporary manners and mores, issues of social injustice, and political corruption. Hogarth also tackled mainstream subjects, based on the works of English writers, notably Milton and Shakespeare, in order to promote British history painting and the indigenous literary tradition. At the same time, Hogarth’s promotion of a consciously modern and Anglophile art did not mean that he ignored the art of Continental Old Master painters. Rather, as he affirmed, it was the snobbish taste of collectors and connoisseurs that he disdained.