Plate 2 from the series A Harlot's Progress,

1732

A celebrated painter of satirical commentaries on contemporary English life, Hogarth was primarily known in the eighteenth century through the publication and subscription sale of prints he personally engraved after his own painted compositions. Hogarth often designed his “Modern Moral Subjects” in narrative series in which he lampooned the foibles of his fellow Englishmen and women throughout society—including people of African descent.

Hogarth achieved his first great success with A Harlot’s Progress, a narrative cycle of six scenes depicting the moral dissolution of a once-innocent country girl through a life of prostitution in London. In this scene, a black servant-boy, fashionably dressed in Oriental costume, is shocked by the scandalous behavior of his mistress with her lovers.

In Noon, the second plate from the series Four Times of the Day, people from both high and low society pass by on opposite sides of a street in London’s slum district, as a milkmaid enjoys the provocative caresses of a black man standing outside a raucous eating establishment. Seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury painters of classical subjects would occasionally depict black men rather than satyrs to represent unrestrained sensual appetite in their bacchanalian scenes.

Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn satirizes passage of the Licensing Act of 1737, a notorious censorship law that required new plays produced in England to be licensed and performed at patented theaters, thus ending the itinerant actor’s former way of life. Here, a roving troupe of actresses, surrounded by fanciful costumes and props, dresses in a provincial barn before their final performance of a play. In the foreground, a young black seamstress calmly plies her skill amid the colorful chaos of the troupe.