Sex and the City – Hogarth and 18th-century London

Julia Musgrave uses humour and story-telling to bring Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode and his other ‘modern moral subjects’ to life, explaining how the artist waged war against London’s sex trade, child poverty, and the French Revolution as part of his personal crusade to establish modern urban life as an appropriate subject for high art

By taking a thoughtful look at life in London in the eighteenth century, we will see how these works came to be commissioned, how Hogarth’s contemporaries would have understood them, and discover the many reasons why they remain popular today.