Satan, Sin and Death (A Scene from Milton's `Paradise Lost')

Satan, Sin and Death from Milton's Paradise Lost, painted around 1735 and now at Tate Britain, represents Hogarth's most ambitious and ultimately unsuccessful attempt at history painting in the 'grand manner.' The confrontation between Satan and Death at the gates of Hell, with Sin intervening, was one of the most celebrated episodes in English literature and an obvious subject for a painter who aspired to join the tradition of European history painting. Hogarth struggled throughout his career with the tension between his natural gift for satirical observation and his ambition to be recognized as a serious history painter in the tradition of Raphael and Rubens. His critical theory, expressed in the Analysis of Beauty (1753), argued for the superiority of native English artistic instinct over the received conventions of Continental painting — but the Milton subject required engagement with exactly those grand rhetorical conventions. The result, while powerful in its physical energy, was received with the ambivalence that greeted most of Hogarth's history painting attempts. The Tate holds this work as evidence of the tension at the heart of Hogarth's ambition: an artist of supreme original genius whose gifts were best expressed in forms of his own invention rather than in borrowed categories.

The dramatic confrontation between Satan and Death, with Sin intervening, is rendered with theatrical lighting and dynamic composition. Hogarth's characteristically robust figure painting brings physical conviction to the supernatural subject.