William Hogarth FRSA was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic, and editorial cartoonist. His work ranges from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called “modern moral subjects”, and he is perhaps best known for his series A Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode. Knowledge of his work is so pervasive that satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as “Hogarthian”. Hogarth was born in London to a lower-middle-class family. In his youth he took up an apprenticeship with an engraver, but did not complete the apprenticeship. His father underwent periods of mixed fortune, and was at one time imprisoned in lieu of outstanding debts, an event that is thought to have informed William’s paintings and prints with a hard edge. Influenced by French and Italian painting and engraving, Hogarth’s works are mostly satirical caricatures, sometimes bawdily sexual, mostly of the first rank of realistic portraiture. They became widely popular and mass-produced via prints in his lifetime, and he was by far the most significant English artist of his generation. Charles Lamb deemed Hogarth’s images to be books, filled with “the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at; his pictures we read.” On 25 October 1764, Hogarth was conveyed from his villa in Chiswick to his home in Leicester Fields, in weak condition. He had been in a weakened state for a while by this time, but was said to be in a cheerful mood and was even still working—with some help; doing more retouches on The Bench on this same day. On 26 October, he received a letter from Benjamin Franklin and wrote up a rough draught in reply. Before going to bed that evening, he’d boasted about eating a pound of beefsteaks for dinner and reportedly looked more robust than he had in a while at this time. However, when he went to bed, he suddenly began vomiting; something that caused him to ring his bell so forcefully that it broke. Hogarth passed away around two hours later, in the arms of his servant, Mrs Mary Lewis. John Nichols claimed that he died of an aneurysm, which he said took place in the “chest.” Horace Walpole claimed that he died of “a dropsy of his breast.” Mrs Lewis, who stayed on with Jane Hogarth in Leicester Fields, was the only non-familial person acknowledged financially in Hogarth’s will and was left £100 for her “faithful services.” Hogarth was buried at St. Nicholas Church, Chiswick, now in the west of London.