 Leicester Square was one of the smartest residential quarters of early Georgian London. On its north side stood Leicester House, occupied by members of the British royal family. On its west and east sides, elegant, terraced houses looked out over the square's exquisitely manicured communal garden. It was into one of these houses on the south-east corner of the square that the artist William Hogarth and his wife Jane moved in the spring of 1733. Hogarth, now 35 years old, was flush with money and fame thanks to the phenomenal success he had enjoyed the previous year, with his pictorial series A Harnet's Progress. The sequence of six paintings and engravings had chronicled the London life and death of a fictional prostitute, Moll Haggabout, in vivid detail with a compelling combination of satire, sensuality and sympathy. A Harnet's Progress caused a sensation and sets of Hogarth's engravings sold in the hundreds. In the words of the contemporary engraver George Virtue, they had the greatest subscription and public esteem that any prince ever had. It was the profits he made from a Harnet's Progress that, at least in part, financed Hogarth's move to Leicester Square. It enabled him, the son of an itinerant and often impoverished schoolteacher, to start imagining a new kind of future for himself, as not only a famous artist, but an affluent one. But such overnight success brings its own challenges. As he settled into his expensive new house and studio and looked out at the Gentile Square beyond his windows, Hogarth would have known that he couldn't afford to rest on his laurels. How, he would have asked himself, was he going to be able to repeat the success he'd enjoyed with A Harnet's Progress? What kind of new work might once again attract hundreds of visitors to his studio and persuade them to part with their money? The answer, it turns out, was what became his second major pictorial series, or modern moral subject, a rake's progress. My name is Mark Hallett and I'm delighted to welcome you to the second in a series of six films devoted to William Hogarth, produced as part of the Paul Mellon Centre's 2021 Public Lecture Series programme. All have been made in close collaboration with the filmmaker John Law. In this film I'll be focusing on a rake's progress, which took the form of eight paintings that Hogarth executed and exhibited in his new studio over 1733 and 1734, and that he then reproduced as a series of engravings. Let's start by quickly introducing ourselves to the eight painted instalments of the progress, which are today housed at the Sir John Sones Museum in London. Hogarth's series tells a story of a young man called Tom Raquel, and it begins by showing him being measured for a suit soon after inheriting his miserly father's fortune. His hand cradling a pile of coins, he tries to buy off a pregnant young woman, Sarah Young, who has appeared at his door with her angry mother, having been seduced with promises of marriage, while Tom was a student at Oxford. The second canvas depicts Tom standing at the centre of a crowded retinue of servants and lackeys in a newly acquired London townhouse, playing the role of an aristocratic man of fashion. The third, very differently, shows him at the Rose Tavern in Drury Lane, sprawling open-legged amongst a riotous group of prostitutes, two of whom surreptitiously steal his pocket watch. The fourth canvas shows Tom about to be arrested for debt, having been ambushed by bailiffs on his way to a grand royal reception at the court in St. James's. However, he is temporarily rescued by the loyal figure of Sarah Young, who you'll remember from the first picture, and who offers her purse to secure Tom's freedom. Her efforts are in vain. The next painting shows Tom marrying a rich old woman purely for her money. In the background of the church, we once again see Sarah and her mother protesting at the door. The former now carrying the child she conceived with Tom. The sixth painting in the series is set in a gloomy gambling den, and pictures Tom having thrown away his newly gained wealth in a game of cards. Kneeling on the ground, stripped of his wig, and shaking a fist in despair, he rails against his misfortune. O'Gar's penultimate painting shows Tom sitting dejectedly in the fleet, the debtor's prison. His cron-like wife shats in his ear, while Sarah Young, visiting with her child, swoons away in an anguished faint. Finally, we're taken into Bedlam Hospital for the Insane, where the near-naked figure of Tom, his ankle and wrist clamped in chains, rise across the floor, accompanied once again by the long-suffering figure of Sarah. The handkerchief with which she dabs her eye is a replica of that she uses in the first painting. Precisely the same purposes. This is a series bracketed by the imagery of tears. Such details testify to the visual subtlety and artistic invention of O'Gar's new pictorial sequence. Qualities that carry through to his eight engravings of the progress, which he published in the summer of 1735. In this talk, I'll be exploring a rake's progress's status as an especially interesting case study in the history, dynamics, and logic of the artistic sequel. In this case, of course, a sequel to O'Gar's first huge artistic hit, a harlot's progress. In doing so, I'll be looking at a rake's progress not only as a work of art, but as a commodity. Here it is worth noting that O'Gar was astute and creative and entrepreneur as he was a painter and engraver. He was constantly thinking about how he might craft novel kinds of product or repackage those that had already been profitable. The rake's progress, as we shall see, was shaped by these concerns, which, for O'Garth, were inseparable from his artistic practice. But the history of this second modern moral subject was also shaped by another very particular commercial preoccupation of the artist at this point in his career. His seething anger with his competitors in London's print trade. Over the spring and summer of 1732, O'Garth had watched powerless as numerous print publishers and engravers had profited from the popularity of a harlot's progress by producing rapidly executed plagiaries of his prints of the series. There was no law of copyright for engravers in early 18th century England and this kind of plagiarism was not in itself, especially unusual. However, the sheer scale of this unauthorized form of copying in the case of a harlot's progress, the pictorial vandalism that the artist perceived as having been done to his images, and, crucially, the fact that he himself did not gain a single penny from the process drove him to distraction. In the years that immediately followed, the years he was working on a rake's progress, O'Garth, with the help of some like-minded fellow practitioners, campaigned to persuade Parliament to change the law so as to protect the copyright of independent engravers like himself. And, as this campaign seemed ever more likely to succeed, so O'Garth began to hope that the rake would not suffer the same kind of fate experienced by his first great artistic breakthrough. As we shall see, however, things didn't turn out quite as he planned. Let's now return to the challenges that faced O'Garth in the winter of 1732-33, as he mulled upon what he might produce as his follow-up to a harlot's progress. His greatest challenge, like all those who have had a huge hit with an early piece of work, was that of creating something that reproduced all the elements that had made that work so successful, whilst avoiding the dangers of repetitiousness and over familiarity and thereby frittering away the sense of novelty and excitement that had greeted the original. Furthermore, he faced the problem that the heroine of his first series, Moll Hackabout, had died at its conclusion. It was thus impossible to produce what would have amounted to a harlot's progress too. What O'Garth gambled upon, however, was that he might find success by returning not so much to the heroine of his original series, but to its fundamental narrative arc and pictorial format. Once again he decided he was going to use a sequence of pictures to tell a story that traced the doomed trajectory of a young newcomer to the city. Someone who, just like Moll Hackabout, initially pursues a superficially fashionable and luxurious lifestyle before descending into sexual promiscuity, disease, punishment and death. In this sequel, however, the fictional figure O'Garth chose to play this role was not a prostitute, but a rake. That is, a disloot male libertine. His choice was not especially surprising, for in this period rakes were often depicted as both the masculine counterparts too and the natural companions of the courtesan and the prostitute. But his choice was an extremely astute one, for O'Garth recognized that there was a great appetite for stories of such figures in contemporary culture. Numerous books, pamphlets and commentaries of the day traced the rake's life in gleefully voyeuristic and sometimes highly moralistic detail. Moreover, perfectly for O'Garth's purposes, they tended to tell what had become a stereotypical story of rise and fall. In these texts, the rake is repeatedly introduced as a young man who arrives in the city following his wealthy father's death and who runs through his inheritance with reckless abandon, cutting a riotous, extravagant and increasingly seedy path through the city's nightlife and places of ill repute. In such accounts, the rake is sometimes shown recognising the error of his ways and given the chance to reform himself. But often, these figures remain incorrigibly disillute till they meet a lonely, diseased and miserable end. Such is the case in an illustrated poem called significantly The Rake's Progress or Templar's Exit, which was published in 1732 and advertised alongside O'Garth's engravings of a harlot's progress. In this poetic predecessor to O'Garth's work, the eponymous protagonist breaks down in his garret, bemoaning his fate. Ah, woeful, miserable me, that can't one grain of comfort see. Where now are all my whores, false friends? Now they have secured the devil's ends. He goes on to commit suicide, hanging himself in an eerie of telling detail from a nail that pins the third print from O'Garth's harlot's progress on the wall. O'Garth, in adopting a fictional rake as his new pictorial protagonist and deciding to tell the story of a similar decline into dissolution and despair, was thus unable to craft a work that might fulfil the twin demands of a successful sequel. It would recycle many of the elements of the first series. Indeed, it was at work that he could once again call, ironically, a progress, but it would also be very different. Enjoying as it did, an entirely new anti-hero. As this idea began to develop, we can see O'Garth making a number of other artistic and commercial choices that were shaped by the rake's progress status as a sequel. Crucially, O'Garth saw that he could hide an interest in his new artistic project, even while reprising the formula that he had used in the harlot. By casting the rake's progress as a work of art, it operated on a larger and more ambitious scale than its predecessor. He did this, first of all, through making his second series longer than the first. Rather than the sequence of six pictures he had deployed for the harlot, O'Garth, in the rake, decided to provide visitors to his studio with eight canvases to peruse and a set of eight engravings to purchase. The latter of which, significantly, was somewhat larger than those he had made for his first progress. O'Garth, following this logic of expansion, made his new series not only longer than the first, but busier. First of all, he gives us far more people. The harlot was crowded enough, featuring as it did some 40 protagonists other than Maul herself. The rake, however, swarms with almost a hundred different figures. This, as O'Garth knew, was important. One of the great attractions of his first series was how it encouraged viewers to dwell upon its many different participants and to enjoy the ways they contributed to its narratives and meanings. He thereby ensured in the rake that such pleasures were even more readily on offer. Thus, just to give one example, the progress his gaming house scene is packed with 16 figures other than Tom, including a night watchman who races in to raise the alarm about a fire that breaks out in the background. And a cluster of gamblers, aristocrats, a clergyman, a high woman who sits gloomily by the fire, who run the gamut from exhilarated anticipation to crazed abjection. Tellingly, O'Garth added extra figures to his eight paintings even after they had first been put on display in his studio. Thus, in November 1734, he excused the late delivery of his set of prints by noting that he had, quote, found it necessary to introduce several additional characters in his paintings of the rake's progress. In a parallel move, O'Garth also significantly increased the weight of pictorial detail in this series when compared to its predecessor. In doing so, he was building upon one of the other features of the harlot's progress that had made it so successful. Its accumulation of symbolically charged objects, texts and images, scattered across the spaces which Mal passes through. In the rake, we're confronted by a blizzard of such things. Look, for instance, at the first engraving, which is unusual in featuring a relatively modest gathering of seven figures, including the sly lawyer who steals money from behind Tom's back. As if to compensate, O'Garth provides us with a cornucopia of visual details. At the centre of the image, he has piled up a mountain of inscribed papers, which were invited to visually sift through and decipher one by one. He also adds a painting on the wall that, in effect, serves as an internal pictorial prequel to the series, showing as it does Tom's father hunched over a table, counting his money. And O'Garth turns the image as a whole into something akin to an advent calendar, full of open doorways, cupboards and boxes, all of which invite us to peer inside and to inspect their contents. This relentless form of pictorial and textual addition is just as evident if we turn to the second image of the series, which Tom is surrounded by a cluster of hangers on. In the painting, the space behind the seated harpsichordist is left empty, but in the engraving, it is newly dominated by another long, unfurled scroll of text, inscribed with a satirical list of gifts to the fashionable castrato singer, Farinelli. Inserting another detail into his engraving's foreground, O'Garth pictures an engraved title page for a poem dedicated to T. Rayquilla's Squire lying on the floor. Nearby, meanwhile, we encounter the extended poetic caption commissioned from the dramatist John Hoadley which comes under this and all the other prints in the set that provides yet another layer of textual commentary within the series. The harlot prints had enjoyed no such supplement. There is a final form of a pictorial expansion that marks the Rayquilla's progress. This is the addition of a second important protagonist, the figure of Sarah Young. In the harlot, the closest we come to such a figure is the bunter or common servant who accompanies Marl from the third plate onwards but enjoys a relatively subdued presence within the series's overall narratives. In the Rayquilla, O'Garth decided to introduce a far more prominent character into his story right from the beginning. Sarah indeed features a no less than five of the progress's eight scenes and plays a crucial role right at the works heart when her outstretched purse offers Tom the possibility of redemption. In giving her this kind of visibility, O'Garth provided viewers of his new series not only with an added point of interest but with a character who have offered those same viewers a reassuringly sympathetic and virtuous counterpoint to the disreputable figure of Tom himself. Characteristically, however, O'Garth also ensured that his second series was populated with female figures who, like Mulhack about before them, could provide a more titillating and provocative pictorial focus. One such figure perhaps is the young bridesmaid whom Tom shifterly and lasciviously inspects in the marriage scene. Another, more obviously, is a striptease artist known as a posture maker who is pictured undressing in the rose tavern. She is shown preparing for an act that will see her spinning nakedly on the silver platter that is being brought into the room. O'Garth knew that the voyeuristic appreciation of such sexually loaded figures had been one of the key factors in the harlot's success particularly amongst its male consumers. Denied to his clientele, he made sure that his sequel provided more of the same, rather scurrilous pleasures. Thanks to all of these strategies, O'Garth must have hoped that with a rake's progress, he would once again strike gold. Leaving as little to chance as possible, he also embarked on an ingenious and ambitious marketing campaign for his prince, one that itself represented the more elaborate version of the campaign he had conducted for the harlot. As in the case of that work, he sold his new series by subscription and issued an engraved receipt for subscribers that provided them with a collectible work of art in its own right. That for the harlot's progress recorded a straightforward form of exchange in which the subscriber paid half a guinea up front and half a guinea on the completion of the engraved set. Interestingly, that for the rake outlined a different kind of transaction. First of all, it's worth noting that subscribers were asked to pay a substantially higher amount for O'Garth's new set of prints, one and a half guineas rather than a single guinea. They're also told that after the subscription period had closed, the set would cost no less than two guineas, that is twice the price of the harlot's progress. If this information about a future price rise provided one kind of incentive to would-be subscribers, so did another of O'Garth's marketing strategies. His offer of what amounted to a pictorial bonus, a ninth print depicting the humus of the fair, which he promised more over to deliver well in advance the rake's progress engravings themselves. Commit to paying me your one and a half guineas, he says, and I'll give you an extraordinarily crowded, entertaining and witty piece of graphic art to enjoy while you wait for the main set of engravings to be finished. O'Garth had one last card to play in ensuring the success of his sequel. Following his and his fellow engravers extended campaign for parliamentary legislation to protect their work, the spring of 1735 finally saw the engravers act being passed, giving practitioners like O'Garth exclusive rights to their designs for 14 years from the time of publication. The act received the royal assent in June of that year. To O'Garth's eyes, the prospect of this act being passed led to a crucial change of plan regarding the publication of his rake's progress engravings. Having already delayed their advertised date of publication, thanks to the changes he kept making to the paintings, O'Garth then delayed their publication still further to the date of the engravers act itself, that is to June the 25th, 1735. In the newspaper notice announcing this final delay which he issued in May, he certified his decision by noting that this would prevent, quote, the scandalous and unjust custom hitherto practiced with impunity of making and vending base copies of original prints to the manifest discouragement of the arts of painting and engraving. This time he must have thought the engravers and print sellers who had so flagrantly cannibalized that Harlett's progress would be stopped in their tracks. He was not to be so lucky. In what can almost be admired as a stroke of malevolent genius, a group of London's print publishers conspired together to send a succession of spies into O'Garth's studio in Leicester Square. There, these spies presented themselves as potential subscribers to the engravings and closely inspected the eight paintings on display. Their job, however, was not to admire these canvases, but to memorize them. Having done this to the best of their capacity, they then seemed to have travelled to the workshops of a clutch of engravers employed by the print publishers and told them in detail what they had seen. These engravers quickly proceeded to produce a set of eight prints based on these verbal descriptions and, we can surmise, on accompanying diagrams or sketches prepared by the informants. The resultant engravings were then advertised and sold in the first weeks of June, just weeks before O'Garth's original prints were due to be released and before the engravers' act came into effect. These plagiarists, which were themselves instantly plagiarized, are exceptionally intriguing images in their own right. Offering as they do, fascinating demonstration of, amongst other things, the strengths and weaknesses of visual memory. But to O'Garth, these prints were nothing short of nightmarish. Their contents disseminating a distorted and grotesque version of his series, a cross-contemporary graphic culture like a terrifyingly bad dream. All of his best-laid plans he must have worried were in danger of falling apart. His sequel, just like its predecessor, was going to be eaten alive. Happily and perhaps predictably, these pre-emptive plagiarists ultimately seemed not to have had too great an effect on either the sales or impact of O'Garth's second great modern moral subject. Indeed, in their own way, they only served to reinforce his contemporary reputation as London's most important and interesting artist. Nevertheless, their brazen form of pictorial theft offered O'Garth yet another demonstration of the challenges, even the dangers he faced as someone who, having crafted a successful product, in his case the new kind of satirical pictorial series embodied by the harlot's progress, had endeavoured in a rake's progress to both recycle and upgrade that product, and to assert his rights over it. It is no wonder, perhaps, that over the rest of his career O'Garth was to remain prickly and protective in regard to all those of his modern moral subjects that served as sequels to the rake's progress itself. For him, the vultures were always circling even above the cloistered grounds of Leicester Square.