On The Narrative In William Hogarth's Satirical Paintings

William Hogarth was the most famous English painter of the late 17 th and early 18 th centuries and the first to create social satire.He left a deep imprint on the history of western painting and made a bold breakthrough in the narrative of western painting.In fact,western painting has long been charged with the mission of narration.Whether it was the ancient Greeks more than 2,500 years ago,or the Romans later,or the middle ages later,artists were required to use paintings to tell tales of mythology,history or religion and to evoke the memory of the audience.The viewer only needs to imagine to complement the content of the painting,resulting in a complete and familiar story.Until the emergence of Hogarth,the inherent narrative framework of western painting was broken.He did not choose the old story as the content of reproduction,instead,he used painting to tell a new story,using unique graphic language to convey his moral criticism and moral reflection to the audience.In Hogarth's view,the moral state of England at that time was so bad that he tried to satirize current events with the brush in his hand,so he consciously changed his painting techniques with this goal in mind.Hogarth believed that dramatic stories could better shape the characters' characters,highlight the moral thoughts behind them and arouse people's moral consciousness.In order to construct a relatively complete story,Hogarth attached great importance to the narrative effect of painting.He tries his best to explore the narrative potential of satirical paintings in order to give viewers a profound moral education.Therefore,this paper will start from the narrative function of Hogarth's satirical paintings,combine the specific works,respectively through the story theme,aesthetic theory and narrative skills of these three aspects to discuss.In addition,this paper will use Freud's interpretation of jokes to observe Hogarth's satirical paintings,point out the tendentious jokes in Hogarth's satirical paintings,and explore the similarities between language jokes and picture jokes,in order to understand the uniqueness of Hogarth's satirical paintings.This not only helps us to understand the mystery of Hogarth's works,but also deepens our thinking on western satirical narrative paintings,thus helping us to better and more comprehensively understand the development of western art history.