William Hogarth

William Hogarth was an English painter, engraver, satirist, cartoonist and writer who lived from 1697 to 1764 and is considered by far the most significant English artist of his generation. He pioneered what he called modern moral subjects, narrative series of pictures resembling comic strips that satirized society, most famously A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode, distributed widely as prints in his lifetime. His influence was such that satirical political illustration in his manner is still called Hogarthian, and the writer Charles Lamb observed that his pictures are to be read rather than merely looked at.