The Painter and his Pug (Self-portrait)

Hogarth's self-portrait with his dog Trump of 1745 is one of the most unusual and revealing self-portraits in British art, depicting the painter beside his pug dog on an oval canvas placed on top of three illustrated books — Swift, Shakespeare, and Milton — that constitute his literary ancestry. The oval portrait-within-a-picture device distances Hogarth from conventional self-presentation while the pug's loyal presence suggests companionship. The books assert his place in a British intellectual tradition that he claimed as the basis for a distinctly national school of painting.

Hogarth renders his own features with unflinching honesty, while the pug's face mirrors his master's pugnacious expression. The painting-within-a-painting format and the careful rendering of the symbolic books create a layered self-portrait of unusual intellectual sophistication.