Engraving as a Technique

Hogarth, The Engraver

In the eighteenth century, painting, especially portraiture, was popular among the aristocracy. A popular, sought-after portrait artist could easily achieve financial security, even wealth. While engravers could also gain steady employment through commissions, they were often seen as imitators or glorified copy machines as they frequently “engraved after” a painting; the painting itself was considered the more “pure” and original art form. Apprenticed to a silversmith, Hogarth, in addition to being an engraver, was also a painter; many of his popular engravings series existed first as paintings. The answer to why Hogarth would ultimately select engraving as a form of distribution for his art shifts depending on one’s perspective and level of cynicism. If one believes Hogarth’s own accounts, his prints (often produced and sold as cheaply as possible) allow him to reach as wide an audience as possible and to convey his condemnations of immorality to all classes. Others see Hogarth as profit hungry, eagerly embracing and authorizing debasement of his own work so he could increase his income. Whatever one’s view, it is clear that Hogarth walked a narrow line in his attempts to keep his subscribers happy and feeling they received an exclusive and quality product while also making his message and art available to people regardless of social class. Most biographers attribute his concern with the poor to his own impoverished childhood punctuated by his father’s debt problems and stint in a debtor’s prison.

Techniques of Engraving and Etching

In Hogarth’s time, engravings were usually produced intaglio. Intaglio printmaking is the opposite of the kind of relief printing that had been used with wood blocks for centuries. Instead of cutting away parts of the surface and printing what remains, the engraver incises the images themselves into a metal plate (usually copper in this period, later steel) with tools or acids. In true line engraving, a handled tool (called the burin or graver) is used to scratch the image onto the plate--literally to shave the metal. In silver and copper engraving, the surface of the metal was polished so thoroughly that any scratch would be realized in the printed version. Deeper scratches create darker lines. The prints are then reproduced using a cylinder press where pressure is applied to an inked plate to create the picture.

Other engravers used a similar, but distinct, technique called etching where the image is more freely “drawn” (or, more accurately, etched), using needles crafted for that purpose, directly onto the surface of a plate covered with a protective ground. The plates are then exposed to an acid bath or “bitten,” and the areas exposed by the needle, when inked, form the print. In both of these techniques, the artist has more freedom to experiment than in relief printing.

Hogarth used a combination of these methods where fine, more freeform lines were etched into the plate with the burin being used to create shading effects. The Northwestern Library Special Collections area has assembled an excellent reenactment of the techniques used by Hogarth and other engravers of this time: Northwestern Library Special Collections

One interesting feature that the viewer will note in Hogarth’s prints, and with other examples of line engraving, is that shading is often achieved with a series of crossed lines. An example of this effect can be seen in this detail from plate 3 of The Four Stages of Cruelty, where a clear distinction is made between the heavily cross-hatched darkness of the background and the relative whiteness of Ann Gill’s dress, pregnant corpse and even her shoes, perhaps emphasizing her innocence and thus making Tom Nero’s crime even more brutal:

Another effect that can be created by the burin is “stippling,” the use of the tip of the tool to create dots. Hogarth often uses stippling in the engraving of people, as in this example of Moll Hackabout from A Harlot’s Progress where the effect contrasts with the surrounding image, drawing the viewer’s eye voyeuristically to Moll’s exposed breast:

Clearly, Hogarth often uses the various techniques of his craft to illuminate his themes. While the engraver does not have the palette of colors available to the painter, an accomplished artist can similarly use line and shading to create complexity in meaning.

The works examined on this site were produced as follows:

• A Harlot’s Progress was etched and engraved by Hogarth after his paintings.

• A Rake’s Progress was etched and engraved by Hogarth after his paintings.

• Before and After were etched and engraved by Hogarth after his paintings.

• The Four Stages of Cruelty was etched and engraved by Hogarth after his drawings.

• The Four Times of the Day was etched and engraved after Hogarth’s paintings. Hogarth engraved plates 1,2 and 4 and solicited Bernard Baron to engrave plate 3.

• Beer Street and Gin Lane were etched and engraved by Hogarth after his drawings.

• Marriage à la Mode was etched and engraved by hired engravers after Hogarth’s paintings.

Production and Response

The paintings for A Harlot’s Progress were lost in a 1755 fire but are believed to have been composed around 1730-1731. When Hogarth engraved, advertised and distributed the print series in 1732, Jenny Uglow reports that “all of the 1240 subscription sets were sold” (212). At least some of the audience attention was very likely provoked by the number of (in)famous figures who appeared in the series; Notorious procuress Mother Needham, convicted and pardoned rapist Colonel Charteris, notorious quack Doctor Rock and others were featured and immediately identified. Even more interest was generated by updated on the status of the plates. Uglow writes that Hogarth first advertised the series in January and informed audiences that it was “nearly ready” in March before finally running an announcement of the completion of the work on 10 April, giving the A Harlot’s Progress an “aura of something new, important and newsworthy” (211).

The series was popular across the social strata, due mainly to Hogarth’s willingness to allow cheaper editions of the work to be distributed. However, Jenny Uglow notes that Hogarth’s apparent concern for the poor receiving his message was also possibly a cleverly disguised way for him to earn more cash:

Each class could derive a useful message: the lower classes were lectured on the inevitably tragic consequences of prostitution; the middle and upper classes could giggle at the appearance of celebrities while considering themselves warned on the dangers posed by their vices.

Hogarth’s works were also pirated—with phantom engravers copying the prints and printsellers taking advantage of the lack of copyright protection available to engravers and other visual artists. Uglow reports that one Harlot’s Progress pirate edition was “a softened, green-tinted mezzotint version by the engraver Elisha Kirkall” (212). In the eighteenth century, mezzotinting was a common technique among engravers. In addition to the usual engraving tools, the mezzotint rocker is employed. The rocker is an instrument with a serrated edge that, when moved over the plate, leaves “teeth” marks. Covering the plate with these marks creates a solid black background. A burin is then used to create images. This step eliminates many of the teeth created by the rocker. When the plate is printed, an interesting contrast is produced between the blackness of the teeth-marked areas and the whiteness created by the burin.

Although pirating cost Hogarth money, it spoke to the astounding popularity of the work, which quickly leapt into the popular consciousness. Moll Hackabout was featured on fans, in pantomimes and as the subject of burlesques and a ballad opera. George Vertue’s notebooks reveal that the work “captivated the Minds of most persons of all ranks and conditions from the greatest Quality to the meanest” (qtd. in Shesgreen 18). Hogarth and his narrative picture series on “modern moral subjects” became household names.

Although Hogarth did authorize cheaper versions of his plate series to be produced, he became increasingly indignant about these unauthorized, or pirated, versions of his work. Faced with potential lost profits and likely embarrassed by poor quality unauthorized reproductions, Hogarth delayed the Rake’s Progress prints because of these piracy concerns and determined that he would seek copyright protection for engravers. Uglow reports that he “had decided to petition Parliament for an Act that would give designers and engravers the same statutory copyright that authors had won in 1709. . . a Bill that would give them an exclusive right to their work for fourteen years from the time of publication” (268). The legislation, which became known as “Hogarth’s Act,” passed (and was expanded in 1767) but apparently had little immediate effect on the rabid printsellers who sometimes even attempted break-ins at Hogarth’s studio to memorize the details of prints so that they could get ahead of the engraver’s official editions.

After a delay while Hogarth awaited the outcome of his legislation, the Rake’s Progress prints were finally released on 25 June 1735—the day after his law was passed--with subscribers’ sets, followed by smaller, cheaper impressions (as became his custom) sold at a little over two shillings for the series . While not the sensation that the Harlot became, Rake was also popular.

On 2 April 1742, the following appeared in the London Daily Post and Advertiser:

Hogarth had completed the paintings for the series in 1743 and hired, as Shesgreen reports, three French engravers--G. Scotin, Bernard Baron and S.F. Ravenet—an act which he later felt caused an “obscuration” of his reputation as an artist (xxvii). Shesgreen claims that this plate series, in marked contrast to Hogarth’s other engravings, was “aimed at the upper middle class and the aristocracy, a smaller, more select audience than the artist usually addressed in this genre” (51). It warns of the dangers of aristocratic decadence and blindly ambitious social climbing among the middle classes.

Although the engravings sold well, Hogarth’s 1751 attempt to capitalize on their popularity by selling the original paintings was a failure. Vertue records the episode:

One can only assume that his audience, accustomed to being able to obtain the same message in a cheaper format, was unwilling to pay a premium for the paintings. Uglow agrees, commenting that Hogarth’s popular print series had “diluted” the concept of the “original, unique canvas as containing all worth,” ultimately leading to the conclusion that “mass production as not seen as a slippage, a stigma, but as another legitimate route for an artist to take” (271). Thus, while Hogarth succeeded in making engraving a more acceptable art form, his plan worked too well, eliminating the market for his original oils.

Hogarth had also solicited Bernard Baron’s help with the Four Times of the Day series. Baron engraved the third plate while Hogarth engraved the other three after his own paintings, commissioned by the proprietor of the Vauxhall Gardens amusement park. Before and After were also done after commissioned paintings. There were actually two distinct versions of the paintings. The “outdoor scenes” were composed for MP John Thomson and the “indoor” versions, the ones that became the basis for the engravings were for the Duke of Montagu (Uglow 178).

Hogarth was a master of creating publicity, advertising almost every artistic move he made. The 13 February 1751 General Advertiser featured the following notice:

Hogarth more specifically records his intentions concerning Beer Street and Gin Lane’s goal of “reforming” these “Vices particular to the lower Class” in his Autobiographical Notes:

Hogarth’s concern that the message of the social evils promoted by the abuse of gin reach the widest possible audience dictated his low print prices for the pair of plates.

Austin Dobson mentions that Hogarth also sought to keep the price of Four Stages of Cruelty low: “The price of the ordinary impressions was a shilling per plate, and an unsuccessful attempt was made to sell them even more cheaply by roughly cutting them on a large scale in wood” (105-106). His audience for the print series was likely the servant class of which the prominent figure of the series, charity-school-boy-gone-wrong Tom Nero, was a member. Hogarth himself discusses his purpose:

Uglow concurs, commenting that Hogarth sought both to frighten and enrage the lower classes: “Aiming at the poor, Hogarth played on their fears of hanging and dissection: but with his characteristic, unnerving, doubleness he also invited their outrage. . . . Given the riots at Tyburn when relatives attempted to rescue felons’ bodies from the anatomists, Hogarth’s ‘ordinary viewers’ might well have been on Tom’s side” (Uglow 505). While Hogarth had always sought to appeal to an array of socioeconomic groups (with the possible exception of Marriage à la Mode as discussed above), Beer Street/Gin Lane and The Four Stages of Cruelty are examples of an attempt to appeal exclusively to the lower classes.

All of Hogarth’s famous engravings reveal him to be not only a pioneer of the narrative picture series, but also a social-minded artist who sought to bring his message to all social classes. Masterful at moving between media to adjust affordability, Hogarth sought to distribute his “modern moral subjects” to as wide an audience as possible. With almost exclusively urban concerns, Hogarth’s images remain the best resource for recalling the reality of eighteenth-century London life, from its streets, to its taverns, to its private bedrooms.