Self-Portrait

This self-portrait from 1735, now in the Yale Center for British Art, shows Hogarth at his easel in working clothes, presenting himself as a craftsman rather than a gentleman-painter. The informal, working self-portrait was a deliberate statement of Hogarth's democratic, anti-aristocratic values: he rejected the convention by which painters adopted the pose and bearing of gentlemen in their self-portraits, preferring instead to assert the manual skill and practical intelligence that he saw as the true foundation of artistic achievement. His dog Trump, a pug whose features Hogarth repeatedly compared to his own, sits beside the easel — a characteristically Hogarthian touch of self-deprecating humor that simultaneously humanizes the self-presentation and signals his refusal of the pompous conventions of academic portraiture. By 1735 Hogarth was at the height of his fame, having published the Rake's Progress in 1735 and established himself as the most celebrated native painter in England. The Yale self-portrait belongs to a series of self-representations that culminate in the famous 1745 portrait with the Line of Beauty, in which Hogarth depicted himself surrounded by the visual theorems of his Analysis of Beauty. This earlier version is more intimate and personal, a working portrait rather than a theoretical manifesto.

The composition places the artist's palette and canvas prominently, asserting the manual craft of painting. The pug dog adds a characteristically Hogarthian touch of humor and personality to the self-presentation.