# A Harlot's Progress, Plate 1 > William Hogarth - before April 1732 (first state); designed 1731 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/william-hogarth/hogarth-harlots-progress-plate-1-met/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-30 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** William Hogarth - **Date:** before April 1732 (first state); designed 1731 - **Medium:** Etching and engraving on laid paper - **Dimensions:** Sheet 12 5/16 x 15 1/8 in. (31.3 x 38.4 cm) - **Object type:** Print - **Period:** British, eighteenth century - **Current location:** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Department of Drawings and Prints - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary 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. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1731** William Hogarth `[documented]` (origin (painted series, now lost)) Hogarth painted a series of six pictures illustrating the fall of a country girl into London prostitution and her death, his first venture into what he later called the "modern moral subject". The paintings were his invention entire: no commission is recorded, and the series appears to have been made speculatively, ahead of any buyer, specifically so that it could be engraved and sold by subscription. Elizabeth Needham, the London brothel-keeper long identified with the procuress in Plate 1, died on 3 May 1731, apparently of injuries from a public pillorying; Hogarth was reportedly still finishing the series when she died, which places the paintings' completion in the same year. - **1731-1732** William Hogarth `[documented]` (engraving and publication by subscription) Hogarth etched and engraved all six plates himself, working from his own paintings, combining etched outline with engraved shading. He advertised a subscription: 1,240 sets of six plates were sold at one guinea each, with a further half-guinea due on delivery. Subscribers first received a separate print, Boys Peeping at Nature, as their receipt and admission ticket; the finished plates were delivered in April 1732. This impression, accession 32.35(2), is described by the Metropolitan Museum as a first-state impression, meaning it predates Hogarth's later reworking of the plate. - **1732-1735** William Hogarth (rights holder, unprotected) `[documented]` (piracy and Hogarth's campaign for the Engraving Copyright Act) Unauthorized copies of A Harlot's Progress reached the market almost immediately after the 1732 delivery, undercutting Hogarth's subscription price and returning him no income. There was no legal remedy: English copyright statute covered books, not engraved images. Hogarth organized a petition of designers, engravers and etchers presented to the House of Commons on 7 February 1735; a committee reported the allegations proven on 14 February 1735; the resulting Act (8 Geo. 2, c. 13), popularly called Hogarth's Act, received royal assent on 15 May 1735 and came into force on 24 June 1735. Hogarth deliberately withheld his next series, A Rake's Progress, already advertised for subscription in 1733, until the Act was law, publishing it the day after the Act took effect so that it would be the first series protected by the statute he had lobbied for. - **1744-1764** William Hogarth, then his widow Jane Hogarth `[documented]` (later states of the copperplate) Hogarth issued a second state of the series more than a decade after first publication, distinguished chiefly by a small cross added to the lower margin of each plate along with other minor retouching; this impression, being first state, predates that change. Hogarth died on 26 October 1764; his widow Jane Hogarth (nee Thornhill) continued to print and sell impressions from the original stock and the original coppers for the rest of her life. - **1755** William Beckford (1709-1770), Fonthill House, Wiltshire `[documented]` (destruction of the original 1731 paintings) The original Harlot's Progress paintings had by this date passed into the collection of Alderman William Beckford at Fonthill House. On 12-13 February 1755 workmen finishing a new ceiling in the north wing left a fire unattended in a disused chimney; the resulting blaze destroyed most of the north range including the great hall. The Harlot's Progress paintings were lost in the fire. Hogarth's own Rake's Progress paintings, also at Fonthill at the time, survived. This event has no bearing on the print itself, which by 1755 existed independently in thousands of engraved impressions, but it is the reason the print is now the only complete record of the original composition. - **1789-1921** John Boydell, then Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, then Henry Bohn, then Bernard Quaritch `[documented]` (sale and resale of the original copperplates (not this impression)) This chain concerns the physical copperplates, not the paper impression described in this record, and is included because it explains why later-state and posthumous impressions of the series exist and circulate alongside first-state impressions like this one. Jane Hogarth sold the plates to the print publisher John Boydell in 1789; they passed to the printsellers Baldwin, Cradock and Joy in 1818; Henry Bohn acquired them in 1835 and issued further pulls; Bernard Quaritch sold them in 1921. They are reported to be in the Edison Dick collection, Chicago. No restrikes from this later ownership are part of the object described in this record. - **1732-1932** unrecorded `[unknown]` (gap) No owner, dealer or intermediate sale is recorded in the sources available for this research for the specific two-hundred-year span between the plate's first printing and its 1932 purchase by the Metropolitan Museum. The Museum's public catalogue record gives the acquisition fund and year but does not name a seller or an intervening collection. Given that the sheet is a first-state impression pulled at or close to the 1732 publication, it in principle could descend from an original 1732 subscriber's set, but this is not documented and should not be asserted. - **1932-present** Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (acquisition) Purchased in 1932 with the Harris Brisbane Dick Fund as one of six plates (accessions 32.35(2) through 32.35(7)) acquired together as a first-state set. The Fund derives from the 1916 gift and bequest of the paper manufacturer Harris Brisbane Dick, whose donation of some 3,500 prints and an accompanying purchase endowment led directly to the Museum establishing its own independent Department of Prints under William M. Ivins Jr. The plate has remained in the Museum's Department of Drawings and Prints without recorded exhibition loan or deaccession since 1932. ## Auction results Hammer and buyer's premium are stated separately. Where a source conflates them this record says so. - **2023-06-02** Bonhams, Prints and Multiples, Knightsbridge, London, lot 7, lot 7 - Estimate: not stated in the source consulted - Hammer: not disclosed separately - With premium: GBP 2,048 total price including buyer's premium - This sale is a market comparable for the print type and state, not a sale of the Metropolitan Museum's impression. It was a complete set of all six plates of A Harlot's Progress, described by the house as fine first-state impressions trimmed to the image and engraved text. Bonhams' published result gives only the all-in total price; the hammer and premium are not broken out separately in the source consulted, and that conflation is noted rather than resolved. The Metropolitan Museum's own impression, accession 32.35(2), has been institutional property since 1932 and has no market sale history: it has not been offered, sold, deaccessioned or exchanged since the Museum's 1932 purchase, so far as the sources available to this research show. ## Open questions - Who did the Metropolitan Museum purchase this impression from in 1932? No dealer, auction, or intermediate owner is named in the Museum's available public catalogue data. - Where was this specific sheet between its original printing (before April 1732) and its 1932 purchase? Two centuries are undocumented for this exact impression. - Is the identification of the procuress with Elizabeth Needham and of the doorway figure with Francis Charteris a reading Hogarth himself intended, or a contemporary inference later generations have simply repeated without independent verification against a printed key? - Did Hogarth or his publisher issue any contemporary printed key naming the real-life figures in Plate 1, of the kind known to exist for some other satirical prints of the period? None was located in the sources consulted for this record. - What did the lost 1731 Harlot's Progress paintings actually look like in passages where the engraving process (reversal, line simplification, loss of colour) might have departed from the paintings? With the paintings destroyed in 1755, this cannot now be checked against the original. ## Sources - [1] Wikipedia, 'A Harlot's Progress', consolidating the 1731 paintings, the Fonthill fire, the subscription publication, the copperplate ownership chain after Hogarth's death, and the identification of Moll Hackabout, Elizabeth Needham and Francis Charteris. Flagged for replacement with Ronald Paulson's Hogarth's Graphic Works catalogue raisonne. - [2] Wikipedia, 'Elizabeth Needham', for her dates, her 1731 conviction and death, and the scholarly status of her identification with the procuress of Plate 1, including the alternative model proposed by Ronald Paulson. - [3] Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection API, object record for accession 32.35(2), object ID 401166, queried 2026-08-30: accession number, date, medium, state, dimensions, credit line and public domain status. - [4] Wikimedia Commons, File:William Hogarth - Boys Peeping at Nature (2nd state).jpg, British Museum, for the subscription-ticket mechanism used to sell A Harlot's Progress by subscription in 1731-32. - [5] Metropolitan Museum of Art, object page for accession 32.35(2) (object ID 401166), for the acquisition credit line (Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932) and catalogue description. - [6] Art Gallery of New South Wales, catalogue entry for A Harlot's Progress: Plate 1, accession 324.2006.1, for the scene description (Bell Inn, York stagecoach, the clergyman's oblivious horse) and dimensions. - [7] Wikipedia, 'Engraving Copyright Act 1734' (also known as Hogarth's Act, 8 Geo. 2 c. 13), for the petition date, committee report, royal assent and commencement dates, and the Act's legal scope. - [8] Britannica-derived and secondary summaries of the Hogarth Act and its relationship to the piracy of A Harlot's Progress and the deliberate delay of A Rake's Progress until the Act's commencement, cross-checked against the Wikipedia Engraving Copyright Act entry. - [9] Open Book Publishers, 'Circulation and Control', chapter on the first copyright case under the 1735 Engravings Act, for context on how the Act was tested and used shortly after passage. Consulted via search summary; the full chapter text could not be retrieved directly in this research session (HTTP 405) and should be checked directly before further reliance. - [10] Wikipedia, 'William Hogarth', for the subscription mechanics (1,240 sets at one guinea), the 'modern moral subject' formulation, his engraving apprenticeship under Ellis Gamble, his training under James Thornhill, his marriage to Jane Thornhill in 1729, The Analysis of Beauty (1753), his Foundling Hospital governorship, his Freemasonry, and the direct quotation on treating his pictures as a dramatic stage. Flagged for replacement with a scholarly biography (e.g. Paulson's three-volume life). - [11] Search-summarized museum curatorial descriptions (Art Institute of Chicago and National Gallery of Victoria collection notes) describing the small cross added to the lower margin of each plate for the second state of the series, issued more than a decade after the first 1732 publication. - [12] Apollo Magazine, 'Hogarth's paintings fail to go the whole hog', and related search-summarized accounts of the February 1755 Fonthill House fire, its cause (an unattended fire left by workmen completing a ceiling), and the loss of the Harlot's Progress paintings alongside the survival of the Rake's Progress paintings from the same fire. - [13] Wikipedia, 'Fonthill Splendens', for background on the Beckford family's Wiltshire house referred to as Fonthill House at the time of the 1755 fire, distinct from the later Fonthill Abbey built by William Thomas Beckford. - [14] Wikipedia, 'Francis Charteris (rake)' (also catalogued as 'Francis Charteris (rapist)'), for his baptism and death dates, the 1729 assault on Anne Bond, his February 1730 Old Bailey conviction and royal pardon, his nickname 'the Rape-Master General', and his identification with the leering figure in the doorway of Plate 1. - [15] Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection API, object record for accession 91.1.128, object ID 399540, queried 2026-08-30, used only to confirm that this is a distinct impression (fourth state, Gift of Sarah Lazarus, 1891) from the accession 32.35(2) impression that is the subject of this record, and not to source any claim made about this record's object. - [16] Search-summarized institutional history of the Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, established from Dick's 1916 gift of prints and an accompanying purchase endowment, which led the Metropolitan Museum to establish an independent Department of Prints under William M. Ivins Jr. - [17] Bonhams, Prints and Multiples sale, Knightsbridge, London, 2 June 2023, lot 7: William Hogarth, A Harlot's Progress, the complete set of six etchings and engravings, first state, sold for GBP 2,048 total including buyer's premium. - [18] Wikimedia Commons file description page for File:A Harlot's Progress, Plate 1 MET DP826942.jpg, confirming accession 32.35(2), credit line 'Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932', first-state description, and CC0 1.0 Universal licensing independent of the Museum's own API flag. - [19] Wikimedia Commons file description page for File:A Harlot's Progress, Plate 1 MET DP825199.jpg, confirming accession 91.1.128, credit line 'Gift of Sarah Lazarus, 1891', fourth-state description, and CC0 1.0 Universal licensing, used only to distinguish this second Met impression from the object of this record. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. 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