Time Smoking a Picture

England’s first satirist, William Hogarth is known for his sharp pictorial wit as he highlights hypocrisies of eighteenth-century British society. Here, he pokes fun at the intense value placed on darkening Old Master paintings by art connoisseurs. People believed that, like wine, paintings gained value as they aged and their varnish darkened. Hogarth subverts this by showing time as a supremely destructive force when it comes to art. He stabs the canvas with his scythe while actively blowing smoke on it; to even perform these destructive acts on the canvas he first had to destroy a statue to make a seat for himself. More explicitly, he points to the varnish to show the darkening and destructive capabilities of the material over time. Hogarth does not necessarily say that everything old is of poor quality, but that ultimately time is a destructive force that should not be glorified. (“Imprint/ In Print,” curated by Nancy E. Green with assistance from Christian Waibel ’17 and presented at the Johnson Museum August 8 – December 20, 2015)