 Two young men sit at a pair of wooden silkweaver's looms. One sleeps while the other works diligently away. As time passes, their paths diverge. The diligent one goes to church and joins his master in business. He grows wealthy, marries, and settles into a lavish London home. Soon he is made sheriff of London and a banquet held in his honour. The other gambles on the Sabbath. He loses his job and is sent out to sea. When he returns it is to a ramshackle dwelling with broken floorboards and cracked ceilings. He turns to crime and is arrested. By the time the two meet again they are both grown. One now finally dressed in wig and furs averts his gaze while the other desperately pleads his case. But to no avail he is sentenced to death and taken to be hanged before a vast crowd of gawking spectators. Meanwhile his former workmate rises higher still to become Lord Mayor of London riding through town in a splendid coach upright and impassive amidst scores of drunken revelers. My name is Meredith Gamer and it's my pleasure to welcome you to the third in a series of six films organised by the Paul Mellon Centre as part of its program of public lecture courses. All have been made in collaboration with the filmmaker John Law. In this lecture and the next I pick up the story that Mark Cowlett began to tell in his explorations of Hogarth's two pioneering pictorial series a harlots progress and a rakes progress. As Mark discussed in these two series we see Hogarth forging a distinctly new kind of art form what he called his modern moral subjects which combined a boldly satirical tone with the detailed depiction of scenes and tales from everyday life. In particular I'll be focusing on two of Hogarth's more popular moral subjects which he produced in quick succession in the late 1740s and early 1750s industry and idleness and the four stages of cruelty. At first glance the stories these series tell and the style in which they are made can appear deceptively simple. Yet as we shall see and as is so often the case with Hogarth and his art they are in fact anything but. So let us turn now to industry and idleness a series of twelve prints that Hogarth published in September 1747. In the very first plate we meet our two protagonists the aptly named Francis Goodchild and Tom Idle. Francis is the one on the right, his hair neatly combed, his fair face serene and bathed in light from a nearby lattice window. Spindle in hand he is operating his loom. The reel beside him is stocked full of silk and a pristine copy of the Prentice's guide lies open at its base. Tom is to the left, brow furrowed, mouth agape, he is fast asleep. A beard tankered sits on his loom and a cat plays with his neglected spindle. The spinning wheel beside him is empty and his Prentice's guide is tattered and torn. In short this is a scene of contrasts, contrasts that Hogarth develops and deepens as the series proceeds. The second print shows Goodchild sharing a psalm book with his master's daughter in a magnificent church packed full of congregants. In the third Idle loiter is just outside in the churchyard cemetery playing a game of hustle cap with two distinctly unsabery types. By the time we encounter Goodchild again he is older. He wears a wig and holds a daybook, purse and keys as his former master, now partner, gestures grandly to the workshop floor as if to say soon all this will be yours. By contrast we find Idle having been expelled from the safe confines of his master's shop and sent away to sea. His torn indentures flutter into the choppy waves. His mother weeps while two seasoned sailors taunt him with the catanine tails and the ominous sight of a gallows in the distance. In the next plate Goodchild appears newly married to his master's daughter who nestles beside him sipping tea. Leaning out the window of his fine residence he drops a coin into the hand of one of the musicians who as was tradition are attending the couple on the day after their wedding. Idle meanwhile has returned home and now lives in a squalid garret with a prostitute. She turns away from him to examine an earring taken from a cache of valuables that Tom has just stolen. A cat chasing a rat down the chimney has startled him away leading him to think falsely for now that he's been discovered by the law. In the eighth and ninth prints Hobarth takes us to an ornately appointed hall and CD night cellar respectively. In the former the newly elected Sheriff Goodchild and his wife both seen from a far distance preside over a room full of feasting guests. In the latter Idle and his partner in crime whom we saw once before gambling with him in the earlier churchyard scene are divvying up their ill-gotten gains just as the woman he's been sleeping with betrays him to a magistrate and his men. In the tenth plate Goodchild and Idle's worlds collide again once and for all. Goodchild whose flowing fur roves and gold chain mark him now as an alderman of London sits in judgment of Idle who with clasped hands begs his favour. Nearby however Idle's eye-patched associate has already sealed his fate by swearing false testimony against him to a duplicitous official who takes the man's oath for a bribe. All of which lays the foundation for a final culminating comparison. Here the Prince Dimensions grow a bit larger and wider as well giving us two paired semi-panoramic views. In one Idle appears amidst a procession heading to Tibern, London's chief execution ground. He rides aboard a wooden cart beside a coffin bearing his initials. A Methodist preacher rides with him, exhorting him to repent and pray as they lumber toward the spotlight three-legged gallows up ahead where a pipe-smoking hangman lazily waits. The press of people around them is enormous. Some fight and argue, swill gin or pickpockets. But most have their eyes fixed on the sight at hand. They watch and wait for what's to come in eager anticipation. The final print features another procession and another crowd. This one with good child at its centre. London's annual Lord Mayor's Day Parade. Here the tone is lighter, hats and flags wave, guns salute, spectators perch on roofs and at windows. They sing, drink, kiss and carouse. But a tiny detail in the bottom corner of the composition introduces a dark note into this otherwise merry scene. A little boy turns to meet our gaze. In his hands he holds a ballad which purports to be a true account of the ghost of Tom Idle. By the time Hogarth came to produce industry and idleness, a lot had changed since the mid-1730s when he first emerged fully onto the London art scene with his celebrated harlot's progress. In this early self-portrait made around 1735, Hogarth depicts himself very much as a painter. He holds a palette in his hand, loaded with creamy blobs of pigment, salmon, pinks, vermilion and white. The very colors he would have needed to produce the fine likeness we see here. His expensive wig and elegant white blouse identify him as a gentleman. His gaze as at once intelligent, alert and yet also guarded as if he's taking our measure and perhaps his own as well. By contrast the self-portrait Hogarth completed roughly 10 years later and just shortly before he published industry and idleness is a very different affair. Here Hogarth cleverly presents his self-image as a picture within a picture. The oval canvas on which he appears is propped up on a stack of books by Shakespeare, Milton and Swift. And it is accompanied by his much-beloved pug-dog Trump who emblematically suggests the artist's own pugnacious character. Finally the palette nearby eludes not only to Hogarth's practice as an artist but also to his innovations in the realm of art theory specifically his formulation of what he called the line of beauty which we see depicted and named here. Hogarth's gaze is frank and direct qualities amplified by his choice of dress instead of the formal coat and wig of the earlier picture he is now more casually appointed in a fur cap and dressing gown. In short this Hogarth, the Hogarth of 1745 is not merely a painter but also a man of letters an intellectual with his own distinct character and philosophy of art. Indeed by the mid 1740s Hogarth had embarked on and succeeded in a wide range of artistic projects. In 1735 he had opened an academy for artists in St. Martin's Lane modeled on one started decades earlier by his father-in-law, Sir James Thornhill. And he had begun to forge a career not only as a maker of prints and portraits but also as a painter of historical subjects which were then considered the most intellectually and technically challenging and therefore the most elevated of artistic genres. In 1736 and 1737 Hogarth completed two large history paintings for the grand staircase of St. Bartholomew's hospital where they still remain today the Pool of Bethesda and the Good Samaritan. Appropriately these large multi-figure works depict scenes of healing and charity drawn from the Bible told through an august visual language of bodily gesture and expression that have been codified and promoted for centuries in the great continental art academies of Italy and France. At the same time, building on the success of his first pictorial series Hogarth continued to develop this less elite but extremely marketable art form. From 1736 to 1738 he was at work on the four times of day and then from 1743 to 45 on the marvelously sumptuous mariage à la mode. Industry and idleness which he produced next marked at once an extension of and a departure from these earlier works in ways we'll turn to now. In October 1747 the London Evening Post announced the publication of what it described as twelve prints called industry and idleness showing the advantages attending the former and the miserable effects of the latter in the different fortunes of two apprentices. The advertisement named Mr. Hogarth as the prince designer and engraver and informed buyers that the set could be purchased either at his own home and studio in Leicester Fields or at print shops around the city. This new series shared much with Hogarth's harlots and rakes progress. We have just seen industry and idleness tells a story through a sequence of carefully constructed and densely narrated images and it too centers on a familiar 18th century London type in this case the young apprentice in order to tell a story, a larger story about the follies and foibles of Georgian society. But industry and idleness also differed from Hogarth's earlier progresses in important ways. While it did not begin life as a sequence of paintings instead Hogarth worked out the plot and scenes through the quicker and less costly medium of drawing as we see here in this wonderfully energetic preliminary sketch for plate six or in this more finished version of the same composition made with pencil ink and wash to approximate the visual effect and tonal gradations of the print to be. This shift is registered in the look of Hogarth's industry and idleness prints which he etched and engraved more plainly than his earlier series in what his contemporary George Virtue evocatively described as a slight poor strong manner. We can see this well if we look closely at the first print where the two apprentices and their boxy looms take shape mainly through a highly visible latticework of hatched and cross hatched lines. Compare this to the first print of a harlot's progress where as we've seen a far more sophisticated range of illusionistic techniques are at play. The relative simplicity of these new print style meant that they were cheaper for Hogarth to produce and to sell. Where a harlot's progress had cost one guinea for a set of six prints and the rake two guineas for a set of eight industry and idleness cost a mere 12 shillings for an equivalent number of prints. Writing later Hogarth gave one reason for this new set's low price. He intended it primarily, he said, for you. Especially we might imagine young apprentices like the two the series depicts. Hogarth's comment helps to explain another distinctive feature of industry and idleness. And that is its stern moral tone. The series not only lacks the soft sensuality of the artist's earlier progresses, but also much of their subtle warmth and humor. Over and again we are told through the positive example of Good Child and the negative one of idle to do this, not that. To be like this, not that. By splitting his protagonist in two, one good, one bad. Hogarth creates a pair of characters who are each of them less rounded, less multi-dimensional than Maul Hackabout or Tom Raquel, both of whom we're invited to empathize with, even as we chide them for their many missteps. Hogarth also guides our reading of the prints with a heavier hand. Each one is headed by a title which tells us exactly what's happening below. Quotations drawn from proverbs and the Psalms and inscribed in cartouches at the print space make explicit lessons that pictures can only imply. And always framing each scene is a pair of contrasting emblematic devices, a ceremonial mace, sword of state and golden chain on one side and a whip, fetters and rope on the other. The choice here is clear and so is the answer. In these ways, Hogarth's industry and idleness built upon and contributed to myriad other visual and verbal representations circulating in London at this time, which offered models of behavior and words of warning to London's large and fast-growing population of young male workers, workers whom the city's professional and merchant classes, in which Hogarth was now firmly ensconced, were anxious to keep in check and out of trouble. In fact, we find a selection of such materials in the very first print in the series. In addition to the two apprentices' guides that we've already noted, Hogarth includes a pair of sheets pasted neatly on the wall just behind Goodchild. One of these we can tell from the woodcut at the top represents a then popular broadside which narrated the tale of a hard-working London apprentice who travels to Turkey where his feats of strength and courage are richly rewarded by marriage to the king's daughter. The other tells the real-life story of Dick Whittington who famously began his career as a Mercer's apprentice and rose to become Lord Mayor of London. For many viewers, Hogarth's industry and idleness would have also inevitably called to mind George Lillo's enormously successful play The London Merchant, which recast from modern audiences the old fable of a London apprentice named George Barnwell who falls prey to a devious prostitute and finally hangs at Tyburn. Tellingly in Lillo's reworking, Barnwell's negative example is brought into higher relief by the introduction of a new character, the hard-working Truman, who much like Hogarth's good child eventually wins the hand of his good master's virtuous daughter. The fact that Hogarth wrote the name Barnwell in the margin of one of his preparatory sketches for industry and idleness confirms beyond a doubt that he too was thinking of Lillo's play as the series took shape in his mind and on the page. Yet in fact, the story Hogarth tells in and across the plates of industry and idleness is hardly as simple or straightforward as these various sources suggest. Good child may be good in the most literal sense of the word, but he is certainly no hero. If we look back more carefully at the plates in which he is pictured, one of the most striking things we notice is that Hogarth consistently situates him rigidly and often tightly confined spaces. The loom in the first print, the pew in the second, the counting room in the fourth, the open window of his new home in the sixth, and the banqueting hall in the eighth. The unrelenting uprightness of these structures seems designed to echo and underline Good Child's own upright actions and character. He is quite literally becoming a pillar of his society, or so we might think. But is this actually the case? In these same prints, we also find that Good Child's gaze is consistently turned down, oriented toward the work before him, or a book of prayer. Later, his eyes appear half closed and heavy-litted, then as mere slits, until finally they are barely visible at all. This allows Good Child to not see many things that we do, a condition that becomes more problematic as he moves up in the world. In the marriage scene, for example, he pays a well-dressed drummer but ignores the poor disabled woman behind him, who sings a marriage ballad for the couple, no doubt in the hopes of receiving a few coins too. And in the banquet scene, his position at the far end of the room prevents or saves him from seeing the ugly contrast that Hogarth sets up in the foreground between the group of hungry men begging alms at the door and the fat and vacuous guests eating gluttonously nearby. All of this comes to a head in the 10th plate where Good Child averts his eyes from idle as he passes judgment on him. We might read this gesture in a variety of ways, as an expression of moral distress or distaste at the decision he faces, or as an allusion to the blind justice that he is meant as a magistrate to embody. However, in practical terms, it ends up meaning that Good Child actually fails to see the corruption that's taking place right before him. Clearly, the judicial system he's working within is as crooked as the thieves it condemns, a fact that he is conveniently unable or unwilling to recognize. Idle too, it's worth noting, is often depicted as unseeing, as oblivious to or mindless of crucial cues from the world around him. In the first and third print, he has his back turned initially to his master and then to the church beetle who are about to strike him for neglecting his work and religious duties. In the fifth, he's too busy returning the taunts he receives to take note of the sailor's warning. In the seventh, his eyes are wide open but unable to discern the real source of threat which turns out to be the prostitute beside him who in the next plate informs on him to the authorities, something that once again he doesn't see coming at all. And in the two very last plates appropriately enough, Idle has his back turned to the gallows ahead while Goodchild who sits in profile tucked away in his coach appears to see nothing of the festivities all around. It's no accident that Hogarth, an artist, should place such importance on the faculty of sight. Even as it relies heavily on text to convey and control meaning, industry and idleness remains like all of Hogarth's pictorial series, a fundamentally visual work. It is in and through the scenes themselves not the titles or proverbs that adorn them that the prince's real story is told. Hogarth wisely leaves that story vague. In the end it is up to us as viewers and readers to piece it together to draw our own conclusions. But one thing we can say for sure is that throughout, Hogarth shows us a society in which industry, wealth and fame, the values he seems on the surface of things to be celebrating, not only coexist with, but actively enable forms of inequity and injustice that he simultaneously subjects to scathing critique. For such a darkly satirical tale, the bold, blunt style that Hogarth adopts seems just right. The pleasures of industry and idleness lie not so much in the kinds of back and forth flux and flow that Mark observed across the plates of a harlot's and rake's progress, nor in the variety and subtlety of its many etched marks. Instead we find it, I think, in the multiplicity of semi-hidden visual puns that Hogarth plants throughout in the way that the wooden looms in plate one resemble and thus prefigure the gallows in plate eleven, or the way the masters came in this same print with which he's about to hit idle, merges with the shaft of the mace that forms part of the scene's fictional ornamental frame, or the way the snaking ropes on the other side of that frame are echoed sinisterly by the loops on the rowboat in plate five or in the noose-like cord that hangs down from a rafter in plate nine, or even in the way the butcher's arm in plate six aligns so perfectly with the handle of the emblematic sword just beside it that we're tempted to read the latter as his elbow. For all their playfulness such details carry serious implications. Over and again they call our attention to the intimate and unsettling connection between power and violence in the tale Hogarth tells, and in the 18th century world he inhabited. More unsettling still they deliberately and repeatedly blur the boundaries between different levels or registers of representation that the artist elsewhere seeks to fix quite firmly. Boundaries between image and frame, story and symbol, body and object. Perhaps they invite us to think things are not so simple after all.