Hogarth's Harlot

William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress is a series of masterfully crafted engravings which contain an unbelievable amount of detail. As one of the founders of comics, Hogarth saw the opportunity that visual narratives presented. Even more so, he understood the power of the panel, and the needlessness of a description; although he did provide a short, one-sentence summary of each engraving, the illustrations could and certainly do stand on their own two feet, so to speak. I have seen this series several times over the last few years, but I am still discovering new details and subtle symbols that Hogarth was able to sneak into the compositions in order to enrich the visuals, support the story, and even hint towards offshoots of the main storyline that would elaborate on secondary and even tertiary characters. As all comics should be in some measure, A Harlot’s Progress is visually pleasing enough to draw readers into the space of the characters, and, once there, audience members are hardly able to extract themselves from it as they discover layer upon layer of story, character, culture, and environment. In this series, it can be said that there is a “gutter” of sorts, not between panels (as with conventional comics) but between pages, or the time that passes between the viewing of the different illustrations. There, just as in modern comics, people are invited to fill in the gaps of the Harlot’s narrative. Through A Harlot’s Progress, Hogarth made many concepts of modern comics and graphic novels mainstream.