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 an assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where she specialises in the art and visual culture of Britain and the Atlantic world. Her work has appeared in Sculpture Journal and Journal18 and in a number of edited volumes and exhibition catalogues, including William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum (2018) and Hogarth and Europe (2022). In 2014, she co-curated, with Esther Chadwick and Cyra Levenson, the exhibition Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain at the Yale Center for British Art. Her first monograph, “City of the Gallows: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century London”, is forthcoming with the Paul Mellon Centre (PMC)/Yale University Press. With the support of a PMC Mid-Career Fellowship, she is currently at work on a new book-length project, which focuses on the intersection of art, medicine and gender in the British Atlantic world.