Lewis Walpole Library Collection of Prints after William Hogarth

The Lewis Walpole Library Collection of Prints after William Hogarth contains more than 500 eighteenth- and nineteenth-century etchings and engravings that reproduce the works of William Hogarth (1697-1764), the influential British painter and printmaker. Hogarth and his art have been a long-standing focus of debates about copying and copyright dating from his lifetime to the present day. The commercial success of his work made his images a target for both legitimate or authorized copies and piracies. His name has been associated with copyright protections for images since the Engraver’s Act of 1735, commonly known as Hogarth’s Act.

Well-known and celebrated during his lifetime, Hogarth was the focus of continued interest after his death, with numerous commentaries and catalogs of his work published in the succeeding decades. Many of these texts contained illustrations of the paintings, drawings, and engravings being discussed, and it is these plates that make up the bulk of this collection.

Generally small in format (octavo or quarto in size), the prints often show evidence of being formerly bound in volumes. Several disbound title pages and plate indexes offer additional clues as to the works from which the prints were extracted, as do the engraved imprint statements on the individual plates (when present). Nearly all the material in this collection came from the twelve publications listed below, ten of which focus exclusively on Hogarth.

1) Ireland, John. Hogarth Illustrated. 2d ed., corr. 3 vols. London: J. and J. Boydell, 1793-1804. (vols. 1-2: 1793; vol. 3: 1804) (Cited as: Ireland, J. (2nd ed.))

2) Ireland, Samuel. Graphic Illustrations of Hogarth, from Pictures, Drawings, and Scarce Prints in the Possession of Samuel Ireland, Author of This Work. … 2 vols. London: R. Faulder and J. Egerton, 1794-99. (vol. 1: 1794; vol. 2: 1799) (Cited as: Ireland, S.)

3) The Comick Magazine; or, Compleat Library of Mirth, Humour, Wit, Gaiety, and Entertainment. 10 nos. London: Harrison and Co., 1797. (Cited as: Comick Magazine)

4) Nichols, John. The Genuine Works of William Hogarth; Illustrated with Biographical Anecdotes, a Chronological Catalogue, and Commentary. 3 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808-17. (vol. 1: 1808; vol. 2: 1810; vol. 3: 1817) (Cited as: Nichols)

5) Clerk, Thomas. The Works of William Hogarth (Including the 'Analysis of beauty,') Elucidated by Descriptions, Critical, Moral, and Historical. 2 vols. London: R. Scholey, 1810. (Cited as: Clerk)

6) A Catalogue of the Celebrated Collection of Pictures of the Late John Julius Angerstein, Esq. London: J. Young [etc.], 1823. (Cited as: Angerstein Catalogue)

7) Trusler, John. Hogarth Moralized: a Complete Edition of All the Most Capital and Admired Works of William Hogarth. London: J. Major, 1831. (Cited as: Trusler (1831))

8) Trusler. John. The Works of William Hogarth: in a Series of Engravings: with Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency. London: Jones and Co., 1833. (Cited as: Trusler (1833))

9) Trusler, John. The Works of William Hogarth in a Series of One Hundred and Fifty Steel Engravings by the First Artists: with Descriptions and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency. 2 vols. London: E. T. Brain & Co., 1849. (Cited as: Trusler (1849))

10) Trusler, John. The Works of William Hogarth: in a Series of Engravings with Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency. 2 vols. London and New York: John Tallis and Company, 1853. (Cited as: Trusler (1853))

11) Trusler, John. The Works of William Hogarth: in a Series of One Hundred and Fifty Steel Engravings, by the First Artists: with Descriptions and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency. 2 vols. in 1. London: London Printing and Publishing Company, between 1856 and 1862. (Cited as: Trusler (1856))

12) Trusler, John. The Complete Works of William Hogarth: in a Series of One Hundred and Fifty Steel Engravings from the Original Pictures. London: London Printing and Publishing Company, between 1860 and 1870. (Cited as: Trusler (1860))

Some of the earliest prints in this collection are those extracted from late eighteenth-century works. Among these are plates engraved in the 1760s by Dent and Corbould, which were originally published as illustrations to John Trusler’s Hogarth Moralized (London: S. Hooper, 1768). These plates were retouched in the 1790s for John Ireland’s Hogarth Illustrated (no. 1 above) and reissued alongside plates by contemporary engravers such as Inigo Barlow, Isaac Mills, and William Skelton; a total of 100 prints from Hogarth Illustrated are found in this collection. A second large group of eighteenth-century prints comes from Samuel Ireland’s Graphic Illustrations of Hogarth (no. 2 above). Ireland himself, along with his daughters Jane and Anna Maria, engraved many of the plates for this publication, 104 of which are present here. Also included are ten prints extracted from The Comick Magazine (no. 3 above), a short-lived periodical from the 1790s that used an engraving after Hogarth as the frontispiece to each issue.

Most represented among the nineteenth-century prints in this collection are those from John Nichols’s The Genuine Works of William Hogarth (no. 4 above). The first two volumes of this work were illustrated with 160 engravings by Thomas Cook, nearly all of which are present here. The third volume contained fifty additional prints, including restrikes of plates by Richard Livesay from the 1780s; seventeen of these are found in this collection. Also present are a handful of prints extracted from other publications of the early nineteenth-century: three from Thomas Clerk’s The Works of William Hogarth (no. 5 above); six from A Catalogue of the Celebrated Collection of Pictures of the Late John Julius Angerstein (no. 6 above); and five from publisher John Major’s 1831 edition of Hogarth Moralized (no. 7 above).

Among the latest prints in this collection are a group of steel engravings after Hogarth, which had their origins in the 1830s and 1840s but were reissued by various publishers through the latter part of the century. Many of these were first published by Jones and Co. in 1833, as illustrations to The Works of William Hogarth (no. 8 above); of the 108 steel-engraved plates issued in this work, 53 are present here. By the late 1840s the plates were in the possession of the publisher E.T. Brain, who added 42 plates for a total of 150 illustrations. Brain published his own edition of The Works of William Hogarth in 1849 (no. 9 above), and 13 prints in this collection bear his imprint. Brain’s stock of engraved plates was acquired by John Tallis soon after, and the two men formed a partnership that created The London Printing and Publishing Company in 1853. New editions of The Works of William Hogarth followed, first by John Tallis and Company in 1853 (no. 10 above) and then by The London Printing and Publishing Company in the late-1850s (no. 11 above). The same 150 steel-engraved plates were reissued in each publication, with the imprints on the plates often changed to match the title page; 28 prints in this collection bear the imprint of John Tallis and Company, while 5 bear the imprint of The London Printing and Publishing Company. By the 1860s, when The Complete Works of William Hogarth (no. 12 above) was published using that same set of steel engravings, the imprints had been completely removed from the plates; this collection contains 27 such prints lacking an imprint.