Hogarth Trivia Quiz

Answer: London

According to parish registers, Hogarth was a true Cockney, born in Bartholomew Close, Smithfield. His father, a struggling schoolmaster, had come to London from Westmorland (now part of Cumbria), but fared no better in the capital. When Hogarth was ten years old , his father started a long spell of imprisonment for debt.

Answer: He eloped with Thornhill's daughter

Thornhill was a highly successful painter whose work, in the grand style of continental painters like Verrio, can be seen in the dome of St Paul's Cathedral in London and the Great Hall of the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich. He was knighted in 1720 and became Serjeant-Painter to the King.

He accordingly hoped for a more eligible son-in-law than a struggling engraver of bookplates and masquerade tickets; but he was soon reconciled to the match, and quick to recognize his son-in-law's talent. Jane Hogarth (née Thornhill) is generally supposed to be the woman represented in Hogarth's "Sigismunda," painted twenty years after the marriage and now hanging in Tate Britain in London.

Answer: A Harlot's Progress

This is supposed to have been the work in which Thornhill recognized the genius of his pupil and son-in-law. Twelve hundred and forty sets of engravings were sold by Hogarth for a guinea each, bringing in the equivalent of something like £150,000 in early 21st-century money.

The original paintings were lost in a fire in the 1750s. They show how a girl from the country is lured into prostitution in London. Her career soon ends in imprisonment, disease and death. Some of the figures in the pictures would have been instantly recognizable to Hogarth's contemporaries - for example "Mother" Needham, a notorious bawd, and Colonel Charteris, a debauchee who had recently been convicted of the rape of his maidservant.

Answer: A murderess

Sarah Malcolm worked as a charwoman in the Temple in London. She was convicted of murdering a woman who employed her and the woman's two servants, the motive being theft.
Hogarth painted her in her cell in Newgate prison two days before she was publicly hanged in Fleet Street. Nine years earlier he had accompanied Thornhill to Newgate to watch Thornhill paint the famous highwayman Jack Sheppard. The painting of Miss Malcolm is in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Answer: Gave graphic artists copyright in their works

Authors had had copyright in written works since 1709, and had enjoyed rights at common law before then, but painters and engravers had no protection against pirating of their work. Hogarth's "Harlot's Progress" had been reproduced in countless sets of inferior engravings well as his own limited edition of 1,200. The Engravers' Copyright Act of 1735 extended copyright to graphic art.

Answer: Stravinsky

Stravinsky got the idea for his opera "The Rake's Progress" when he saw Hogarth's pictures at an exhibition in Chicago in 1947. The work was premiered at La Fenice in Venice in 1951: the libretto is by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman The paintings were done in 1733: the engravings were delayed until Hogarth could rely on the protection of his Copyright Act.

The original works are in Sir John Soane's Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, one of the city's lesser known attractions. This museum also has his "Election" quartet, a wonderful portrayal of democracy in action in the 1750s.

Answer: The Shrimp Girl

The Shrimp Girl hangs in the National Gallery in London. Look at a good reproduction on the web and you'll see what people mean. The "coarse, bold stroke" which Hogarth thought appropriate to this kind of subject does seem to anticipate the rapid, light brush strokes of the Impressionists. Sometimes I wonder whether some of Gainsborough's or Reynolds' subjects ever really existed, but I can't doubt the reality of Hogarth's Shrimp Girl (nor his Captain Coram for that matter.)

Answer: His dog Trump

The picture is in Tate Britain in London (which will always be simply "the Tate Gallery" to me). The dog is a pug, and Hogarth has painted himself as a portrait within a portrait, in an oval frame resting on a pile of books and guarded by the dog in the "real" world outside the oval. Hogarth's detractors and satirists naturally made the most of their opportunities to pretend to mistake the pug for the painter.

Answer: Gin Lane

Gin-drinking was a serious social problem in mid-eighteenth-century England, especially in London. For thousands of destitute men and women, the prospect of being "drunk for a penny and dead drunk for twopence" was often hard to resist. Beer Street is shown as a place where well-fed citizens merrily drink, work and flirt and only the pawnbroker is in difficulties.

In Gin Lane the buildings are crumbling (except for the pawnbroker's and the undertaker's), and the drinkers are hideously emaciated.

The recognizable church spire in the background identifies the area as the St Giles' "rookery," which was indeed for two centuries one of London's worst slums.

Answer: St Nicholas' Church, Chiswick

Hogarth spent his last years at Chiswick, then a village a little way outside the metropolis, in a house that he bought in 1749. When he died in 1764, he was buried in the parish church. If you've ever driven into London from the west, or heard London traffic reports on the radio, you'll know about the Hogarth Roundabout. Hogarth's house is nearby and it's open to the public.

It has a good selection of his prints, but his paintings are elsewhere.