pittori che raccontano storie – William Hogarth

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                                          Beer Street                   Gin Lane 

Also painters told stories in 1700. They portrayed the scenes they saw in streets, the tales they heard and represented them with great realism. Their art described as well as a written paper what was going on in that period ….and could be read by anyone, even by uneducated people.
An example is William Hogarth (1697 –1764) a pictorial satirist and social critic who pioneered (=iniziò) western sequential art.
One of the most famous of his realistic portrait is

Gin Lane

about the unpleasant consequences of alcoholism in London (1751).  Gin Lane is usually opposed to another Hogarth’s picture, Beer Street. In Beer Street people are healthy, happy and prosperous because they drink beer; in Gin Lane the painter shows the effects of drinking a hard liquor as gin which caused more problems for society. People in

Gin Lane

are depicted very thin, lazy and careless. The woman at the front of the picture lets her baby fall to its death. The image probably refers to the story of  Judith Dufour, a woman who killed her baby and sold his clothes to buy gin.

Curiosity: this painting was published to support campaign against alcoholism and the issuing (=emanazione)of the  Gin Act in 1751.

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