Portrait of a Woman

This portrait of a woman from around 1727 is an early work by William Hogarth, painted when the young artist was establishing himself in London. Hogarth would go on to become Britain's most influential 18th-century painter, revolutionizing British art with his satirical moral narratives and penetrating portraits. William Hogarth, the most original British painter of the eighteenth century, combined the traditions of Flemish and Dutch genre painting with a specifically English tradition of social observation and moral satire to create a body of work unlike anything previously produced in British art. His portraits — frank, specific, unflattering in their psychological directness — belong to a tradition of honest observation that owed more to Rembrandt than to the idealized English portrait convention of his time. His invention of the narrative painting series — paintings designed to be read together, telling a moral story across multiple images — was a contribution to European art that has no precedent and established the tradition of British narrative painting that would culminate in Victorian genre art.

The early portrait shows Hogarth developing the direct, naturalistic approach to characterization that would distinguish his portraits from the more idealized manner of court painters.