A Harlot's Progress, Plate 1

The opening plate of William Hogarth's six-part invented genre, the "modern moral subject": a country girl named Moll Hackabout steps off the York wagon into a London courtyard and, within the same engraved frame, is measured up by a procuress while a notorious rake looks on from a doorway. This impression, Metropolitan Museum of Art accession 32.35(2), is a first-state impression, pulled before Hogarth reworked the plate more than a decade after its original 1732 publication, and it entered the Museum's Department of Prints in 1932 through the Harris Brisbane Dick Fund as part of a complete first-state set of all six plates.

The engravings survive; the paintings that Hogarth made first, in 1731, do not. They burned in 1755 in a fire at Fonthill House, the Wiltshire seat of the London alderman William Beckford, and the six plates in the Museum's 32.35 series are among the closest surviving witnesses to what those paintings looked like. The print's own history carries a second, separate story: pirated copies of A Harlot's Progress appeared within weeks of its 1732 publication, with no law to stop them, and Hogarth's response reshaped English copyright law for every visual artist who followed him.

What this impression is

This is a single sheet of laid paper, 12 5/16 by 15 1/8 inches, carrying an etched and engraved image printed from a copperplate that William Hogarth cut himself. It is catalogued by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as accession 32.35(2), the first state of four states the plate went through in Hogarth's lifetime and after, and it entered the Museum's Department of Drawings and Prints in 1932, purchased with the Harris Brisbane Dick Fund as one of a complete set of all six plates of the series bought together.

Being a first-state impression matters. It was pulled at or close to the plate's original 1732 publication, before Hogarth went back to the copper more than a decade later to add a small engraved cross to the lower margin and make further minor changes for what collectors call the second state. Later states again, made from the same copper after it passed out of Hogarth's family in 1789, carry their own history of wear and re-touching. This sheet predates all of that: it is close to what a subscriber received in 1732, not a later reprint.

The scene

The setting is a coaching-inn yard at the edge of the City of London, identified in period accounts as outside the Bell Inn. A young woman, later named on a coffin lid in Plate 6 as M. Hackabout, has just climbed down from the York wagon: her clothes, a pincushion and a pair of scissors tied at her waist, mark her out as a country girl who came to town meaning to find work as a seamstress. A rose is tucked into her bosom, a period sign of virginity about to be lost.

She is being appraised, not welcomed. A well-dressed older woman leans in close, admiring her looks with one hand, while an older man watches from a doorway behind them with evident interest. Behind the whole group, entirely unaware, a clergyman on a horse lets his mount wander into a stack of pans, an emblem of religious authority looking everywhere except where the moral damage is actually happening. Every element in the print is doing narrative work: nothing in a Hogarth composition of this kind is decorative.

Two real Londoners, read into the frame

Modern curatorial practice, repeated at the Metropolitan Museum, the Royal Collection Trust and the Art Gallery of New South Wales among others, identifies the older woman as Elizabeth Needham, a London brothel-keeper notorious enough that Hogarth's own description of her - "a handsome old Procuress... well dressed in silk" - was read by contemporaries as an obvious likeness. Needham was convicted of keeping a disorderly house in April 1731 and sentenced to stand twice in the pillory; she died on 3 May 1731, reportedly of injuries from the first pillorying, before her second punishment was carried out. Hogarth was, by report, still working on the painted series when she died, so she never saw herself put into it.

The man in the doorway is conventionally identified as Colonel Francis Charteris, a Scottish soldier and gambler known in the London press as the "Rape-Master General" after his conviction, in February 1730, for the rape of his servant Anne Bond. Charteris was sentenced to death and then pardoned by George II two months later. He died in February 1732, weeks before this plate was published.

Both identifications should be held at the correct level of confidence. Neither figure is named in the engraving, and no contemporary printed key naming them for this specific plate has turned up in the sources consulted for this record. What supports the identification is convergence: Hogarth's own physical description of the procuress, the timing (both real figures were fresh in the London news in 1730-31, just as Hogarth was composing the paintings), and unbroken institutional repetition since. Ronald Paulson, the leading modern Hogarth scholar, has gone further and proposed that the real-life model behind Moll Hackabout herself may have been Anne Bond, Charteris's own victim, rather than a generic type - a reading that, if correct, would tie Plate 1 directly to the same 1730 court case that made Charteris notorious enough to put in a doorway a year later. This record treats the Needham and Charteris identifications as an argued scholarly reading with strong contemporary plausibility, not as a documented fact stated by Hogarth himself.

The paintings that came first, and are gone

The engraving reproduces a painting, not the other way round. In 1731 Hogarth painted a set of six pictures telling Moll Hackabout's story from arrival to death, apparently without a buyer lined up: this was Hogarth working on speculation, using his own money to make a product he intended to sell not as unique paintings to one patron but as an edition of engravings to hundreds of subscribers. It was, in effect, a publishing venture built around paintings rather than paintings made for a wall.

The paintings eventually passed into the collection of William Beckford, the London alderman and West India merchant, at his Wiltshire seat, Fonthill House. On 12-13 February 1755, workmen who had been finishing a new ceiling in the house's north wing left a fire unattended in a chimney that was not in regular use. The resulting blaze destroyed most of the north range, including the great hall. Hogarth's Harlot's Progress paintings were among the losses. By an accident of timing that says something about how contingent survival is, his Rake's Progress paintings, also then at Fonthill, escaped the same fire. Nobody planned for the prints to become the only complete record of the earlier series; that is simply what happened.

Selling a scandal by subscription

Hogarth did not simply have the paintings engraved and put on sale. He financed the entire project through a subscription scheme, a method already used for expensive illustrated books but not, before this, for a set of secular narrative prints aimed at a broad audience rather than scholars or bibliophiles. Subscribers paid a deposit against a first, separate print - Boys Peeping at Nature, showing three putti sketching the many-breasted statue of Diana of Ephesus, one drawing honestly from the model and one turning away to invent from imagination - which doubled as both an advertisement for the coming series and the subscriber's receipt. The full set of six plates followed on payment of the balance.

The scheme worked. Hogarth sold 1,240 sets at one guinea each, a striking commercial result for a printmaker who was, at this point in his career, still better known as a jobbing engraver of shop cards and book illustrations than as a painter. A Harlot's Progress made Hogarth's reputation and his income in one stroke, and it established a subscription-and-delivery model he would reuse, with the same Boys Peeping at Nature ticket recycled for later series in 1737.

Piracy, and the law that piracy produced

The series' commercial success drew imitators immediately. Pirated copies of the six plates were on sale within weeks of the 1732 delivery, made by other engravers who had never paid Hogarth anything and who could undercut his price because they had none of his production costs to recover. English law offered him nothing: the only copyright statute in force, the Statute of Anne of 1710, protected printed books, and nobody had extended the same protection to engraved images.

Hogarth organized the response himself. He brought together a group of fellow engravers - contemporary sources name George Vertue, George Lambert, Isaac Ware, John Pine, Gerard Vandergucht and John Goupy alongside Hogarth - and presented a petition, "the case of designers, engravers, etchers, etc.", to the House of Commons on 7 February 1735. A committee reported on 14 February that the petitioners' allegations were fully proved, and a bill followed. The resulting statute, formally "An Act for the Encouragement of the Arts of Designing, Engraving, and Etching Historical and other Prints" (8 Geo. 2, c. 13) and universally known since as Hogarth's Act, received royal assent on 15 May 1735 and came into force on 24 June 1735. It gave engravers and the inventors of original designs, for the first time in English law, a statutory property right in their own images, with a term of years during which copying without consent was unlawful.

Hogarth then made the point as visibly as he could. He had already been advertising and taking subscriptions for his next series, A Rake's Progress, since 1733, but he held its actual publication back until the Act took effect, releasing the plates on 25 June 1735, the day after the statute became law. The Rake's Progress was consequently the first series ever published under the protection of the Act that its own author had lobbied into existence. It is worth being precise about the sequence, because it is often collapsed: it was A Harlot's Progress, already printed and already pirated, that supplied the grievance and the political case; it was A Rake's Progress, not the Harlot, whose publication Hogarth deliberately timed to the new law.

States and reprints: what changed after 1732

Because the plate remained a saleable object for more than a century and a half after 1732, impressions of Plate 1 exist in several distinct forms, and knowing which one a given sheet is matters for both authenticity and value. The first state, to which this Museum impression belongs, is the plate as delivered to the original 1732 subscribers. More than ten years later Hogarth issued a second state, distinguished by a small cross engraved into the lower margin along with minor retouching elsewhere on the plate; the Metropolitan Museum's own catalogue records list further states beyond that, with a fourth and final state representing the most reworked and latest form of the plate that Hogarth himself sanctioned.

The plate's life did not end with Hogarth. His widow Jane Hogarth continued to print and sell from the original coppers until her own death in 1789, when she sold them to the print publisher John Boydell. They passed afterward to the printsellers Baldwin, Cradock and Joy in 1818, to the print dealer Henry Bohn in 1835, and were sold on by Bernard Quaritch in 1921; they are reported to survive today in a private Chicago collection. Every one of those later owners printed further impressions from the worn copper, and posthumous nineteenth-century pulls are correspondingly softer and less crisp than an impression struck in or close to 1732. The Museum's own second impression of this plate, accession 91.1.128, a gift of 1891 and catalogued as a fourth-state impression, sits at the far end of that spectrum from the sheet described in this record; the two should never be treated as interchangeable, even though they show the identical design.

Into the Metropolitan Museum

This impression's institutional history begins in 1932, when the Museum purchased a complete first-state set of all six plates of A Harlot's Progress with the Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, giving them the sequential accession numbers 32.35(2) through 32.35(7) (plate one carries the second number in that sequence for cataloguing reasons unrelated to its place in the story). The fund itself has a specific institutional history: Harris Brisbane Dick, a paper manufacturer, gave the Museum some 3,500 mostly nineteenth-century etchings in 1916 along with an endowment for further purchases, a gift substantial enough that the Museum trustees used it to justify establishing an independent Department of Prints for the first time, hiring William M. Ivins Jr. to build the collection. The 1932 Hogarth purchase falls squarely within that department's early buying programme.

What is not recoverable from the sources available for this research is who the Museum bought the set from in 1932: no dealer, auction, or intermediate private owner is named in the Museum's own public catalogue data for this object. The two centuries between the plate's original 1732 printing and its 1932 purchase are, for this specific sheet, undocumented. That is recorded here as a gap rather than bridged with a guess.

What the print is worth at market

This particular institutional impression has no market sale history: it has been Metropolitan Museum property continuously since the 1932 purchase and has not been offered for sale, deaccessioned, or exchanged since. For a sense of what impressions of this kind trade for, the closest documented comparable found in this research is a complete set of all six plates, described as fine first-state impressions, sold at Bonhams in London on 2 June 2023 (Prints and Multiples sale, lot 7) for a total price of GBP 2,048 including buyer's premium. Bonhams' published result does not separate the hammer price from the premium, a gap in the source rather than in this record's reporting of it, and the estimate is not stated in the material consulted. That figure covers a full set of six sheets, not a single plate, and single first-state impressions of individual plates from the series can be found in the market at a small fraction of that per-plate figure when sold outside a complete set, though no single documented sale of an isolated Plate 1 first-state impression, with a disclosed price, was located in this research.

The man who made it

Hogarth did not simply illustrate a story; he said, in his own words, that he built one. In notes he kept about his own working method, later published from his manuscripts, he wrote of "painting and engraving modern moral subjects... to treat my subjects as a dramatic writer; my picture was my stage." That sentence is the clearest statement of what makes this print different from earlier English narrative engraving: Hogarth conceived a sequence of scenes the way a playwright conceives acts, with recurring props, foreshadowing and a moral arc running start to finish, rather than a single static allegory. A Harlot's Progress, published a year before he turned thirty-five, was the first full outing of that idea, and its commercial success let him repeat the formula for the rest of his career.