Four Times of the Day
Four Times of the Day is a series of four oil paintings by English artist William Hogarth. The four pictures depict scenes of daily life in various locations in London as the day progresses. It was the first set of prints that Hogarth published after his two great successes, A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake’s Progress. The images are sometimes seen as parodies of middle class life in London at the time.
About Four Times of the Day in brief
Four Times of the Day is a series of four oil paintings by English artist William Hogarth. The four pictures depict scenes of daily life in various locations in London as the day progresses. It was the first set of prints that Hogarth published after his two great successes, A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake’s Progress. The images are sometimes seen as parodies of middle class life in London at the time, but the moral judgements are not as harsh as in some of Hogarth’s other works. Often the theme is one of over-order versus chaos, but also move through the seasons: Morning is in winter, Noon in spring, Evening in summer and Night in September. The prints, along with a fifth picture, were sold by subscription for half a guinea in May 1738, but it is not known whether he engraved any of the plates. The engravings are mirror images of the paintings, which leads to problems ascertaining the times shown on the clocks in someof the scenes. The plates depict four times-liness versus the lower classes of the day, as well as a drunken freemason staggering home near Charing Cross in Night. The pictures were commissioned by Jonathan Tyers in 1736 in which he requested a number of paintings to decorate supper boxes at Vauxhall Gardens. Two of them, Evening and Night, hung at the pleasure gardens until at least 1782. The original plates were sold to other collectors, and the scenes were reproduced at Vuxhall by Francis Hayman, and two of them were reproduced by Bernard Baron, a French engraver, who was living in London and living in the countryside at the the time.
The series was published in 1738 and reproduced as a set of four engravings, which were then sold by one guinea on half-a-guinea on May 1, 1738. It has been described as one of the best-known prints of all time, and is considered to be Hogarth’s best known work of art. The paintings were painted by Hogarth between 1735 and 1736 and are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City and the National Gallery ofpainting, among other places in the world. They are about 74 cm by 61 cm each, and depict four different scenes: morning, noon, evening and night. None of the characters appears in more than one scene. Hogarth took his inspiration for the series from the classical satires of Horace and Juvenal, via their Augustan counterparts, particularly John Gay’s Trivia and Jonathan Swift’s “A Description of a City Shower” and A Description of the Morning. The gods were recast as his central characters: the churchgoing lady, a frosty Aurora in Morning; the pie-girl, a pretty London Venus in Noon; the pregnant woman, a sweaty Diana in Evening; and theFreemason, a drunken Pluto in Night; and a dyer’s family returning from Sadler’s Wells.
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This page is based on the article Four Times of the Day published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
