William Hogarth (1697 – 1764) was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic, and editorial cartoonist who have been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects". Knowledge of his work is so pervasive that satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as "Hogarthian". Hogarth was far and away the most important British artist of his generation. He was equally outstanding as a painter and engraver and by the force of his aggressive personality as well as by the quality and originality of his work he freed British art from its domination by foreign artists. Because so much of his work has a 'literary' element, his qualities as a painter have often been overlooked, but his more informal pictures in particular show that his brushwork could live up to his inventive genius.
