London Lives: Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness

22 April 2021
3:00 pm
This is the third lecture in the seven-part series titled, Artist in Focus: William Hogarth.
Online

Meredith Gamer picks up the narrative at mid-century when Hogarth – by this time a well-established artist – began producing a new kind of pictorial series, designed to reach a broad and varied audience of viewers and consumers. The first, Industry and Idleness, narrates the divergent fates of two London apprentices as they make their way in a world filled with opportunity and risk. In this lecture, Meredith explores each of the series’ twelve plates, as well as the tensions that underlie their seemingly simple moral message.

This lecture will be pre-recorded and will go live on our recordings page and our youtube channel at 3 pm GMT on 22 April 2021.

About the speaker

Meredith Gamer is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where she specializes in the art and visual culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, with a focus on Britain and the British Atlantic world. Her current book project, The Sheriff’s Picture Frame: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century Britain, examines the relationship between the visual arts and the spectacle of capital punishment in Hogarth’s London and beyond.