With subjects ranged from political corruption to loveless marriages, drunkenness to sexually transmitted diseases, Hogarth delighted and disgusted his 18th century contemporaries with some of the most biting satirical paintings ever produced.

Now the full power of his surviving series of painted masterpieces of corruption, greed and vanity are to be brought together for the first time for a major London exhibition.

Sir John Soane’s Museum will announce this week that it is to stage Hogarth: Place and Progress, an exhibition of 50 or so works in which Hogarth observed the morals of contemporary life, conveying the comedy and tragedy of all human frailty.

Series such as A Rake’s Progress and The Humours of an Election – purchased in the 19th century by the museum’s founder, the architect Soane – will be joined by important loans from the National Gallery and National Trust, among other sources.

Painter and his Pug, 1745, is a

self-portrait by William Hogarth. Photograph: Universal Images Group/Getty

David Bindman, a leading Hogarth scholar who is curating the exhibition, said Hogarth had long been perceived as a radical social critic and champion of the lower classes, but that this exhibition would present a more complex relationship with privilege and poverty.

“He was a social critic but he wasn’t against the establishment or in any way politically radical,” he said. “The paintings are often seen as an attack on pretension and the aristocracy. It’s not actually the case. He had a lot of friends who were aristocrats. He simply picked up on contemporary literary ideas that the aristocracy and the merchant class had a number of people who didn’t live up to their ideals.”

Bindman, emeritus professor of history of art at University College London, said: “Hogarth was not a rebel against society, but he did have a strong sense of human weaknesses, which he perceived in all classes.”

In A Rake’s Progress, Hogarth depicts the fictional story of Tom Rakewell, a young man who squanders an inherited fortune, descending into madness and incarceration in Bethlem Hospital, or Bedlam as it was known. There, his fellow inmates include a naked man who thinks he’s a king, carrying a straw crown and sceptre while urinating. Bedlam was open to the public and Hogarth heightened its horrors by depicting two fashionable ladies enjoying a day out observing the “lunatics”.

The National Gallery is lending Marriage A-la-Mode, a series of six paintings about marriage and morals. Its narrative begins with negotiations between the Earl of Squanderfield, who needs money for his extravagant lifestyle, and a rich merchant who wants to marry his daughter into the aristocracy. The son – whose black spot on his neck indicates syphilis – is to be married to the merchant’s daughter, who is being comforted by a lawyer called Silvertongue. Two chained dogs reinforce the loveless marriage facing the couple.

An Election Entertainment, 1754, part of the series The Humours of an Election by William Hogarth. Photograph: Lordprice Collection/Alamy

Other loans include The Four Times of Day from two National Trust houses, and the three surviving paintings of The Happy Marriage – an unfinished series – from the Tate and the Royal Cornwall Museum, as well as the prints Beer Street and Gin Lane depicting the dangers of stong spirits.

In the four paintings of The Humours of an Election, Hogarth took aim at political corruption and chicanery at its worst. In one, The Polling, he showed the infirm and the dying being dragged to vote.

Bindman said: “What you’ve got in Hogarth’s Election series is open bribery. Elections weren’t held in secret and the corruption was more blatant. But there is that sense of a plague on both houses in Hogarth.”

He believes that the turmoil of today’s political events would have inspired the artist’s imagination. But he added: “His tendency to despair might have got the better of him.”

Hogarth: Place and Progress will run from 9 October until 5 January

The father of today’s cartoons



In William Hogarth’s 1751 print Gin Lane, a drunk mother neglects her baby, which falls to its death in a stairwell. Another mother doses her child with alcohol for a bit of peace. The men are blind drunk and skeletal, pawning their last rags to fund their gin habit.

Schoolchildren today looking at Hogarth’s most famous print are chilled by the falling baby and the teenage addict sharing a bone with his dog. They recognise the truth of this 18th-century satire in horrifying present-day storiestoday’s Daily Mail. For Hogarth is evergreen. Almost everything he depicted is relevant today: riotous taverns, corrupt politicians, lascivious plutocrats, unbridled greed and loveless lust.

Detail from Gin Lane, 1751. Photograph: Barney Burstein/Burstein Collection/CORBIS

He was our first genius of the before-and-after visual narrative in his various print series: boy inherits trust fund, gives up studies and falls into debauchery; girl marries rich old man, then finds herself replaced by younger model. Hogarth’s earliest targets were the state lottery, and the ruinous insider trading of the South Sea Bubble. His art is full of these gorge-and-puke sequences, a perfect model for future eras of rampant capitalism followed by crash.

And each scene is stuffed with telltale details – a wig thrown out of a Covent Garden pub at dawn; a furious pig tripping up a Tory candidate’s sedan in The Humours of an Election; the signs for beauty products that can never stop time. In his prodigious imagination never an inch of a print is wasted; even the vases, sculptures and tapestries speak of moral calamities to come – and they keep on coming. No wonder contemporary cartoonists hark back to Hogarth.

Gin Lane, A Rake’s Progress, Marriage A-la Mode: proverbial images, proverbial stories, farcically repeated over and again in modern times. Laura Cumming, Observer art critic