William Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse

This humorous print is a self-portrait of William Hogarth in the midst of painting Thalia, the muse of comedy and artistic inspiration. Despite his subject—the comic muse—the painter looks serious and a loose page of his theoretical treatise The Analysis of Beauty peeps out from a portfolio at his feet. Nonetheless, the pot behind him contains his engraving tools. Perhaps this and his subject, comedy, was a sly dig at the hierarchy of painting in which comedy was ranked lower than tragedy, and prints lower than painting.

Katherine Welch '21

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