 A young woman stands in the city street. A hand reaches out invitingly towards her face. The same woman, now sitting in an opulent room, smiles and snaps her fingers. Here, perched on the edge of a bed, in a state of semi-undress, she provocatively meets our gaze. But now, her eyes seem sorrowful. She stands in a line of dejected working figures. And here, we see only her gaunt and deathly profile, tilting upward and shrouded in drapery. Finally, we no longer see her at all. Instead, a coffin, carrying the inscription, M. Hackabout, died September the 2nd, 1731, age 23. So ends a harlot's progress, a series of six engravings published by William Hogarth in April 1732. My name is Mark Hallett, and I'd like to welcome you to the first of a series of six films organised by the Paul Mellon Centre as part of our 2021 programme of public lecture courses. All have been made in close collaboration with the filmmaker John Law. These films focus on Hogarth's work as a painter and engraver, and in particular on what he called his modern moral subjects, the first of which was a harlot's progress. These are extended pictorial series that tell rich satirical stories about Georgian society and culture. They sparkle with visual wit and invention, and in their own time, they opened up an entirely new range of possibilities for British art. In the first two films, I will explore a harlot's progress in detail, and then turn to its even more elaborate successor, a rake's progress. In our third and fourth films, Meredith Gamer will investigate Hogarth's most searing pictorial sequences, industry and idleness, and the four stages of cruelty. In the final two films of our programme, Elizabeth Robles will reveal how two distinguished contemporary artists, Yinka Shonobari and Labena Himeid, have responded to Hogarth's pictorial series in their own practice. Let us now return to Hogarth's harlot's progress. This originally enjoyed a dual existence, as a set of six paintings that the artist produced between 1730 and 1731, and then as a set of six prints he published in the spring of 1732, which faithfully reproduced the painting's contents. Sadly, the paintings were destroyed in a fire in 1755. Luckily, however, we still have the prints that Hogarth made after them, which will provide my focus in this talk. The first of these engravings introduces Maul, the harlot of Hogarth's series. She is the young woman standing in the street. At this point, she is portrayed as a beautiful but rather naive country girl who's only just arrived in London, having travelled to the city on the wagon seen on the left. She has been approached by a stranger. This older woman, despite her parent friendliness, is a brothel keeper. She's about to lure Maul into the world of prostitution. The second engraving in the progress is set some months later. Maul, having passed through the hands of the procurus, is now the kept mistress of a Jewish merchant and lives in some luxury. Hogarth implies that she has just been having sex with a young lover and that her keeper has paid her an ill-timed visit. Maul snaps her fingers and kicks over a tea table in order to distract him. This allows her lover, undetected, to tiptoe into the room. A third installment of the series depicts Maul having fallen to the status of a common prostitute and living in a ramshackle garret. She is shown being tended to by a bunter or servant and swinging a stolen watch in her hand. She smiles flirtatiously out at the viewer, entirely unaware that she's about to be arrested by the magistrate who, struck by her beauty, stares at her from the doorway. Hogarth's fourth engraving is set in London's notorious Bridewell prison. Maul, serving out her sentence for prostitution, miserably beats hemp with a hammer under the supervision of a brutal warder. A fine dress is fingered by a winking woman and beyond we can now see that the ragged line of figures are Maul's fellow prisoners, whose hammers can be imagined thudding out a desolate rhythm. The progress's penultimate print is in another bare, bleak garret. The drapery that swathes Maul's body is a sweating blanket. She is dying of venereal disease. Her illegitimate child plays next to the fire and a woman rifles through her trunk, looking for clothes to bury her in. Maul's servant, the same servant who tended her in Hogarth's third plate, swivels around in anguish while two complacent quack doctors squabble over the respective merits of their medicines. Medicines that, for Maul, have proved fatally ineffective. Finally we see not Maul, of course, but the partially open coffin which holds her corpse, lying in a room crowded with those who are attending her funeral. One young prostitute peers in as if learning a lesson from Maul's example, but around her, vice and lust, deception and delusion continue to run rampant. On the right, the undertaker makes his own one prostitute. On the left, a parson seems to have his hand up the skirt of another. In the picture's centre, meanwhile, Maul's child plays alone, ignored by all those around him. Who then was William Hogarth, the artist who produced this compelling series, and what had been his creative trajectory up until this point? By the time Hogarth began working on this pictorial series, he was in his early 30s as an especially prominent figure within the British art world. Having grown up in London, where print shops are bounded, he'd initially embarked on a career as an engraver in 1720. Over the next decade, as he began building up his reputation as a graphic artist, Hogarth turned his hand to two pictorial formats that were vital in providing him with the skills he drew upon in his later series. One was a production of pictorial satires of contemporary society. The South Sea scheme of 1721 dramatised the chaos and madness generated by one of the first global financial crushes, which came to be known as a South Sea bubble. The bad taste of the town of 1724 lampooned the fashionable taste within elite society for the foreign forms of the opera, the masquerade and the pantomime, and for continental art and architecture. These are images that are already fizzing with the scathing forms of satirical commentary, and the dense accumulation of pictorial detail that Hogarth was to repurpose in his modern moral subjects. A second important strand of Hogarth's graphic practice during the 1720s was his work as an illustrator of historical and poetical writings. One such text was Samuel Butler's poem, Hugh de Brass, first published in 1662, which satirised the political and religious conflicts of the English Civil War. In 1726, Hogarth produced a commissioned set of 12 large engravings illustrating scenes from Butler's enduringly popular work. In them, we can already see him beginning to experiment with the format of a series, and with the possibilities of telling a visual story that unfolds from one image to another. As well as honing his skills as an engraver, Hogarth in the 1720s developed a parallel practice as a painter. This culminated in a series of paintings, some for and all that depicted a climactic scene from John Gay's theatrical sensation a beggar's opera. Gay's Ballad Opera, first aged in 1728, was a multi-layered satirical extravaganza that featured numerous prostitutes, a crooked jailer and lawyer, a flamboyant and charismatic high woman, Captain McHeath. It featured scenes set in taverns and prisons, including the prison scene painted by Hogarth, who had a highly appealing female romantic lead, Polly Peachham, whose fluctuating fortunes are traced across the play's successive scenes and who we see dressed in white on the right of Hogarth's paintings. The beggar's opera was not only a huge commercial hit, but a production that was recognised by Gay's contemporaries as heralding a radically new kind of contemporary theatre, a theatre that was satirical in intent and that used the inhabitants of London's lowlife to expose the wide devices and hypocrisies of contemporary society. Hogarth, steeped in the play and recognising its huge success, seems to have been inspired what Gay had done in the field of theatre he might do in the realm of art. Hogarth's artistic breakthrough was not pre-ordained, however. It was somewhat improvised and happenstance. According to the notes of an especially well-informed contemporary artist, George Virtue, the progress had its beginnings in a painting that ended up serving as the basis for the third image in the series. This was what Virtue described as a small picture of a common harlot supposed to dwell in Drury Lane. Here he refers to a London street that was infamous as a haunt of prostitutes. Virtue goes on to say that the picture showed the prostitute, quote, just rising about noon out of bed in breakfast, a bunter waiting on her. And he adds, this whore's desabile, careless and a pretty countenance and air, this thought pleased many. These notes make it clear that Hogarth's starting point was a picture that, like earlier images of royal mistresses, courtesans and prostitutes, made an unapologetically erotic appeal in primarily at male visitors to the artist's studio. Crucially, however, Hogarth, having produced his small picture of a common harlot, did not stop there. Having seen this initial picture of Virtue reports, some advised him to make another to it as a pair which he did. Then other thoughts increased and multiplied his fruitful invention till he made six different subjects, which he painted so naturally the thoughts and striking the expressions that it drew everybody to see them. As Hogarth multiplied his sequence of pictures and began fleshing out the life of his fictional female subject, we find him tempering the appeal of his original image and telling a more complex and pitiful story about his subject. In doing so, he drew on a rich body of contemporary literature and journalism, dealing with the figure of the prostitute. Let us look again at the first plate in the series and listen to Richard Steele writing this spectator in 1712. Steele describes himself waiting at an inn in the city for some luggage and seeing the most artful procures in the town, examining a most beautiful country girl who would come up in the same wagon with my things. In the same article, Steele mournfully chronicles the typical aftermath of such encounters, in which the beautiful female victim, having been exploited by what he calls those hags of hell the boards, ends up abandoned, hungry and cold and touting sex on London street corners. Countless writers, satirists and journalists of the period told the same kind of tale. Having enjoyed the superficially glamorous life of her courtesan with the material riches of the kept mistress, the doomed and corrupted young female protagonist, typically ends up embarking on a far more precarious and dangerous career as a common prostitute. She is thereby exposed to a multitude of diseases. She is subjected to periodic bouts of imprisonment at Bridewell and dies an indominious and premature death. We can now see that Hogarth, as he developed and completed his initial set of six small paintings, inventively translated the kinds of storyline that had come to define the life and death of the prostitute in contemporary culture. If in doing so he was recycling a relatively familiar literary narrative, his move was a far more unusual and novel one in the sphere of contemporary painting. Though some of Hogarth's predecessors and contemporaries, particularly those working in the Dutch traditional genre painting, had touched on the worlds of the prostitute in the courtesan, no other modern British painter had addressed this kind of low life topic with such ambition or at such length. No wonder then that, just as it was the case with the gay's beggar's opera, this felt like something entirely new. Just as innovative in many ways was a decision that Hogarth made with this series to bring his twin identities as a painter and an engraver together. As well as painting and displaying his six canvases, Hogarth as we have seen, ended up taking on the task of engraving and publishing the series of prints that reproduced these pictures. These prints were sold by subscription at a guinea set. Virtue reported that they were soon generating 50 or 100 pounds a week. There being no day but persons of fashion and artists came to see these pictures. Hogarth it soon became clear had manufactured his own kind of artistic hit and it was one that brought in both money and fame. Yet what was it exactly that all those persons of fashion and all those fellow artists found so fascinating about his progress? And what was it that enabled this work to serve as such a successful template for Hogarth's many later pictorial series? Part of the answer I think is provided by looking at how Hogarth's pictures actually work as pictures both individually and collectively. Here I'll concentrate on the ways in which Hogarth across the harlot's progress generates a powerful pictorial dynamic of pause and flow. On the one hand, Hogarth produces pictures to pour over crowded with figures, images, texts and objects that are designed to draw us in and to hold our attention. First he crowds his pictures with people. Alongside Moll herself, a harlot's progress features no less than 40 protagonists all of whom help contribute to its satirical storyline on many of whom the viewer's eye is invited to dwell. The horse riding cleric in the first plate for example who is so preoccupied by the letter of preferment he holds in his hand that he misses the scene unfolding behind him. The bent back woman on the nearby balcony who, wearily hanging out washing alludes to one of the alternative futures that Moll might have experienced in the city. The astonished black page boy of the second plate who, like the other black servants who feature in so many 18th century British portraits is degraded to the status of a fashionable accessory. Adding to his works appeal Hogarth mixed such fictional characters with portraits of actual contemporary figures. Thus the procures in the first plate is a portrait of Elizabeth Mother Needham and an infamous brothelkeeper who during the period Hogarth was working on the series died after being pelted with stones at a pillory. Similarly the figure who lurches out of the doorway behind her and his hand slides toward his groin as he looks across at Moll is a portrait of the notorious aristocrat Francis Charterist who had recently and scandalously been pardoned having been convicted of the rape of the maid servant Anne Bond. And in the third plate the arresting magistrate is a portrait of Sir John Gonson who had been responsible for Needham's arrest and it was a scourge of prostitutes in the period. This weaving of the factual with the fictional reinforced the progress appeal as a topical iconoclastic form of visual art which traded impersonal as well as social satire. It also encouraged viewers to enjoy the ways in which the artist had stitched such figures as Dr. Richard Rock and Dr. Jean Massaba two actual quack doctors working in London into his crowded cast of characters and into his imagery's dense mesh of pictorial detail. This kind of detail also includes the internal images and texts that scattered across Hogarth scenes provide another kind of visual hook snagging the viewer's eye and inviting emblematic or symbolic interpretation. Images as humble as a street sign of the bell tavern in plate one which not only offers a visual echo of Moll's dress but hints at her status as a beautiful young bell. Images as elaborate as the Old Testament paintings on the wall in plate two which depict scenes of anger and betrayal in which prefigure the merchants later anger at Moll's own form of betrayal. Images as subtle as the wall paper patterns of this same room made up of the antlers horns that were a traditional symbol of slavery. Images as surreptitious as a graffited figure seen on the distant prison wall in plate four which shows Gonson the magistrate hanging from a gallows. And images as revealing as a pair of engraved portraits pictured hanging next to Moll's bed in plate three while one depicts the controversial clergyman Henry Sosheverell the other portrays no less than Captain McHeath the great anti-hero of the beggars opera. His presence confirms Moll's status as a kind of negative double of the play's hero in Polypitchin and as someone who similarly idolizes the flamboyant Hyewomen. Words too snake through these prints and catch our attention. A cut-off reference to the York wagon on which Moll travelled down to London. The inscription on a wig box which indicates that one of her lovers is the real-life Hyewomen James Dalton. The notice on the prison stocks proclaiming better to work than stand thus. Finally, Hogarth crowds his engravings with a multitude of depicted household objects which he sometimes arranges into tabletop still lifes tucked into the corners of his scenes. The dressing table in plate two for instance with its mirror symbolizing vanity and its mask suggesting not only deception but Moll's attendance at fashionable masquerades. The cluttered table on the right of plate three with its peeping love letter, cracked punch bowl and triangular fragment of mirror telling of past revelry and shattered pretensions. The coal scuttle in the corner of plate five on which, next to an old bowl, cup and pipe we find a scrap of paper littered with Moll's teeth lost thanks to a use of mercury, one of the prescribed treatments for syphilis. These picture corner still lifes add to the storehouse of eloquent pictorial details found in each of Hogarth's six engravings all of which invite extended scrutiny. These same three still lives in telling as they do such a clear story of Moll's decline point to the other fundamental characteristic of Hogarth's progress. The way it pictorially links one image to the next and in doing so encourages us to embark upon an extended and intricate visual journey across its six scenes. One of the ways in which Hogarth helped encourage this kind of visual continuity once he'd introduced Moll in the progress's first outdoor scene was through picturing a succession of interior scenes that are composed in strikingly similar ways. And in which we, like the members of an audience at a theatre, are given a relatively settled viewpoint. Having established his pictorial stage set Hogarth puts it to use to tell us his unfolding story. It is one crucially in which his central heroine appears in every scene but the last that's allowing us to witness her continual transformation and to trace the doomed arc of her brief London life. A process of transformation that sees her face changing in expression and address and her body being increasingly exposed to the viewer's eyes over the first half of the series and then progressively hidden from view over the second. This sense of visual flow is reinforced by other pictorial repetitions. By the recurrent presence of Moll's facially disfigured servant who serves tea in the third plate pulls in one of her mistresses stockings in the fourth cradles her dying body in the fifth and glares over at the libidinous clergyman in the sixth. By the recurrent imagery of masculine hypocrisy and vice, which is embodied most insidiously by the succession of bewigged, outwardly respectable middle aged men who will wind their way through the series and by whom Moll is variously assaulted, patronized, punished, exploited and ignored. And by the recurrent depictions of collapse and fragmentation falling buckets crashing tea tables and broken crockery. Other repeated motifs are more like faint pictorial echoes a clothesline a trunk inscribed with the initials mh or the imagery of a hat worn by Moll in the first plate and hanging like a memorial in the last. And then there is a patterning that seems almost abstract but that has its own rhythms and rhetoric that of drapery, for example the curves and folds of which ripple and repeat across Hogarth's series. Whether strident or subtle all these forms of pictorial recurrence help bind the different images of a harlots progress together into a coherent and successful visual whole. And they encourage us not only to move through the series but to track back and forth across its contents and, as we do so to discover yet more telling details and yet more examples of overlap and interconnection. There is finally another kind of pictorial flux and flow that I think helps make Hogarth's first modern moral subject or rather his engravings of this series so compelling. It is one that operates at the edges of interpretation even at the edges of the vision enjoyed by the naked eye. And it is one that can be most fully appreciated perhaps only on screen media. This is the flux and flow of the engraved and etched lines that make up the pictorial infrastructure of the progress and that trace the twists and turns of Hogarth's engraving needle or burin as it cut into the copper plate. Significantly Hogarth's engraving technique at this point in his career was neither especially polished nor disciplined. Rather it is marked by jagged edges and jolting transitions by extemporization and experimentation. And looking at his six engravings up close we encounter a crowded combination of graphic marks each of which have their own visual character but all of which are brought into busy dialogue slashing diagonals dense geometric linear grids swirling areas of cross hatching light scatterings of dots and dashes. These multitudinous marks by turns, cacophonous and delicate also contributed to the liveliness, the animation and the novelty of Hogarth's inaugural modern moral subject. Echoing the hustle and the bustle of the city that they documented they helped give the harlots progress in urban visual buzz all of its very own.