The Four Times of Day: Morning

Description

[Hogarth intro label]
Hogarth created several series of images, such as The Rake’s Progress and Marriage à la Mode, satirizing the mores and values of eighteenth-century England. In The Four Times of Day—a series of prints made after his paintings and intended for a wider audience—Hogarth employed humor both to comment on contemporary society and to breathe new life into the genre of images that marks the progression of time by depicting the seasons, the stages of life, or the times of day.
Turning a long tradition on its head, Hogarth’s portrayals of the times of day (morning, noon, evening, and night) are situated in specific locations in contemporary London rather than an in idealized classical past. Each of the sites he chose was considered disreputable in its day and the congested settings act as foils and contexts for the figures. In this way the pastoral, eternal, and ideal images of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses so often encountered in traditional paintings in this genre become urban, specific, and comic. In addition to creating a specifically English kind of imagery, Hogarth disrupts the tradition linking the times of day with particular seasons, i.e. morning with spring, midday with summer, evening with fall, and night with winter. Instead his cycle begins with winter, which he links to morning, and ends with autumn, which he links to night.
William Hogarth
England, 1697–1764
The Four Times of Day: Morning
1738
Etching and engraving
Museum purchase, 1971/2.56
Here the traditional figure of dawn, Aurora, is replaced by a thin woman seen in profile crossing a square in Covent Garden, a formerly aristocratic part of London that by the eighteenth century housed a fruit and vegetable market as well as taverns, theatres, and brothels. The scene is peopled with prostitutes, and the infamous tavern Tom King’s Coffee House, with a group of revelers in the doorway, eclipses the church of St. Paul. Though morning is usually linked with spring and the idea of new life, this scene is set in winter, which is indicated by the snow on the rooftops and people warming their hands over a fire.
Gallery Rotation Winter 2011
William Hogarth
England, 1697–1764
The Four Times of Day: Morning
1738
Etching and engraving
Museum purchase, 1971/2.56
Here the traditional figure of dawn, Aurora, is replaced by a thin woman seen in profile crossing a square in Covent Garden, a formerly aristocratic part of London that by the eighteenth century housed a fruit and vegetable market as well as taverns, theatres, and brothels. The scene is peopled with prostitutes, and the infamous tavern Tom King’s Coffee House, with a group of revelers in the doorway, eclipses the church of St. Paul. Though morning is usually linked with spring and the idea of new life, this scene is set in winter, which is indicated by the snow on the rooftops and people warming their hands over a fire.