The Polling, plate 3 from the series Four Prints of an Election,

1758

An assortment of infirm constituents have been brought to the polling booth to cast their votes, while, symbolically, Britannia’s coach has run aground as her inattentive coachmen play cards.

A celebrated painter of satirical commentaries on contemporary English life, William Hogarth was primarily known in the eighteenth century through his prints. Apprenticed at an early age to a London silver engraver, Hogarth was able to maintain his financial and editorial independence through the publication and subscription sale of prints he engraved himself after his painted compositions. Hogarth often designed his “Modern Moral Subjects” in narrative series. The Election series of four paintings, together with the four prints he engraved after them, represents the most substantial accomplishment of the artist’s later years. As a group, Four Prints of an Election lampoons the 1754 parliamentary elections for the Tory stronghold of Oxfordshire: an election notorious in eighteenth-century English politics for the unbridled levels of bribery committed by liberal Whigs and conservative Tories alike.