Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. WILLIAM HOGARTH. The great Founder of the English School?His personal Appearance and Character?The true Originality of his Art?The " Marriage a la Mode " described?Its clever Accessaries and Storied Back-grounds?The First and Last Scenes analysed?His great Merits as an Artist? Invention?Colour and Characterstic Drawing?Description of an Interesting Work in Hogarth's Manner hitherto overlooked. In the preceding chapter, reserving one great name for separate consideration in this, we have traced the progress of art, and have described the state into which, during the first part of the last century, it had fallen in this country?fallen step by step lower and lower as each succeeding painter studied his predecessor rather than nature?either painting by the yard on the walls of hall or palace worn-out allegories, compounded of vapid commonplaces which had formed the stock properties of a long succession of mere decorators; or, in portrait, striving to catch the fashionable manner, the stale airs and graces of poor humanity, rather than honest individual expression, which, be it noble or mean, has in its native truth a charm that fashion cannot improve, but surely destroys. "When things are at the worst they will mend," and truly things were at the worst, so far as art goes, when sturdy William Hogarth (born in London in 1697), HOGARTH, THE REFORMER OF ART. 45 after passing honestly through his seven years' apprenticeship as an engraver on silver plate, began to think for himself, and found that copper, under the influence of true art, far transcended silver merely graven with fine lines and dead repetitions. Began to think for himself !?here is the true master-key?began to look at the world around him instead of at dark canvases, pictures over which Time h...