BY DESIGN : An Era of Dress : At a Time When Fashion Was Thought Frivolous, William Hogarth’s Art Found Meaning and Beauty in Women’s Wear

William Hogarth relished women and their clothes. He loved the curves of their skirts and the things they did with their hair.

As is clear in “Depictions of Women by William Hogarth and His Contemporaries,” a delightful little show at the Huntington, the great English artist and satirist was not disgusted by women, nor bored by them, as so many 18th-Century men were. Instead, he was fascinated by women of every social class and occupation--from grand ladies to girls who sold shrimp.

Women are at the center of many of Hogarth’s oils and the prints he and others made from them, art historian Patricia Crown points out. “He thinks women are interesting; he thinks they are worth looking at, and he seems to like them,” says Crown, the curator of the show and a professor of art history at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Such views were rare indeed, Crown says. While Hogarth was doing objective, even affectionate portraits of women, his contemporaries often dismissed them as silly geese--or worse. (Jonathan Swift’s “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,” with its description of a rent-a-goddess stripping off her fake eyebrows made of mouse hide and wiping off her glass eye, offers unsettling insight into the majority view, Crown says.)

Rarer still was Hogarth’s enthusiasm for female fashion. Most 18th-Century thinkers believed fashion was frivolous, if not wicked. The standard take on women’s clothes was, Crown says: “Ha, ha, aren’t they ridiculous. Bad, bad, aren’t they expensive. You’re wasting your husband’s money--and they don’t make you look very good anyway.”

Hogarth thought otherwise. Clothes were delightful to see. The body clothed was more beautiful than the body exposed. Clothes made the body articulate, where the nude form was mute. Clothes gave the body a rich and changing language.

“He approved of artifice,” says Crown, who speculates that Hogarth thought of women arranging their skirts and hats, ruffles and bows, as artists, just as he was with his paints and copper plates.

The reasons behind Hogarth’s affection for women and their clothes may have been simple. He had a happy marriage. He knew the “needle trades” from childhood. And his sisters Mary and Ann owned a shop that sold children’s clothes. One of the most charming pieces in the show is a shop card he made for their store. With Hogarth, every picture tells a story, even a shop card. It shows an 18th-Century coming of age: a little boy of about 3, still dressed in skirts, about to get his first big-boy breeches.

There’s a marked difference between Hogarth’s oils and his engravings. He usually painted his images first, then made engravings of them that had much more detail. The medium often changes the emotional message. The painting of “The Savoyard Girl” (1749), recently acquired by the Huntington, shows an intriguing beauty, dark and mysterious in her allure. The same image in the print becomes an acid lampoon of the scandalous affair between the roly-poly Duke of Cumberland and a humble street performer.

Hogarth documented the teeming life of one of the great cities of the world. Part of the appeal of the show is that his London is so like our Los Angeles. In the 18th Century, England’s small towns must have seemed like Purgatory compared to life in the metropolis of which Samuel Johnson could say, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” Such cities are always magnets for the gifted, the lovely, the hungry, the weird.

A girl who has been told she is pretty takes a deep breath and decides to take a chance on fame and fortune in the big city. Does this sound familiar? No, we are not talking about some tragic little Nebraska cheerleader turned Hollywood sleaze queen. We are talking about Hogarth’s immortal “A Harlot’s Progress” (1732), a visual essay in six chapters (all on display in San Marino) of the rise and fall of Kate Hackabout.

You can look at a Hogarth print and smile and think you understand, but, the truth is, without a guide you will miss everything but the topic sentence. Hogarth had the eye of an artist--keen, ruthless--but he had the soul of a novelist, an expansive novelist who would rather leave in than leave out. “I think he was easily bored,” Crown says. “He couldn’t just do straight pictures. He had to put in 552 extra things.”

The uninitiated are unlikely to figure out that the plump singer in Plate IV of “Marriage a la Mode” (1745) is a castrato, one who has paid for his sweet voice with the removal of his testicles. Or to notice in Plate I of “A Rake’s Progress” that the young man has cut a patch for his shoe from the family Bible. “He’s more interested in his sole than in his soul, “ Crown explains, with a laugh. “Get it?”

If Hogarth were working today, it seems certain he would be a filmmaker. As Crown points out, Hogarth believed motion was a critical element in defining the beautiful. (He laid out his aesthetic theory in 1753 in an illustrated treatise, “The Analysis of Beauty.”) The eye was happiest when it moved, whether along the curves created by a clever corset or among the figures in one of his crowded street scenes.

Without a motion-picture camera, without color in the prints, Hogarth manages to imply both movement and all the senses: the splash of hot tea on the silken clothes of the cuckold; the refined but tinny sound of the harpsichord; the stink of Gin Alley in a city where dram shops promised “Drunk for a Penny, Dead Drunk for Two Pence.”

Peter Quennell, one of Hogarth’s biographers, observed that the artist differed from Swift in that “while he deplored its ugly manifestations, he never learned to hate life.” Hogarth believed that what was, was miracle enough. He feasted on his city, with all its defects.

Like Los Angeles, London was, above all, a center of commerce. Hogarth understood trade. He was proud of pressing for anti-pirating laws that protected his financial interest in his images. And because he knew business, Hogarth knew that what women most often had to sell, one way or another, was themselves.

In “A Harlot’s Progress,” Kate comes to town in stiff, old-fashioned stays and a charming straw hat, a country rose pinned to her clothes. (Crown explains that women’s clothes often were crudely basted and pinned together--”thus, the term ‘pin money’ ”). A few plates later, the girl is dead of some venereal plague, age 23. Her country hat, poignant emblem of her fate, hangs on the wall above the corpse. Meanwhile, the cleric isn’t eulogizing her. He’s fumbling furtively beneath the skirt of another working girl.

Swamped as we are with images in the age of MTV, it’s easy to forget the enormous impact of Hogarth’s relatively inexpensive prints at a time when even the privileged eye was starved for fresh visual information. Obviously, there were no cameras to turn on the notorious court cases of the day. So when Sarah Malcolm was sentenced to death for three murders, Hogarth went to Newgate Gaol and painted her portrait. The public snapped up the engraving of the woman, whose stern looks give little clue to what was in her heart.

Since Hogarth’s favorite themes are sex and commerce, he inevitably shows us clothes. In the paintings “Before” and “After” (1730-31), borrowed from the Getty, you can almost hear the shift of power from the reluctant woman to the triumphant man. Her frantic remorse is written in her disordered dress.

Or look at the debauch in Plate III of “A Rake’s Progress.” Hogarth captures the grace with which one of the woman peels off her forward finery. If we were contemporaries of Hogarth’s, able to read all the commentary, allusions and attitude crammed into each of these prints, along with the fashions, we would recognize her as a posture woman. Soon, she will stand naked on the table on a polished tray and strike revealing poses. Did you think this stuff started with “Showgirls”?

Hogarth rarely satirized fashion, as he does in “Taste in High Life” (1742), commissioned by a woman patron said to like eccentric clothes. Hogarth tended to treat style respectfully, acknowledging its power. In Hogarth’s world, as in ours, women wore clothes to charm men and then had to live with the consequences. Beauty often led to tragedy in Hogarth’s London. But sometimes women managed quite nicely, thank you. Look at Sarah Young, the loyal young woman in “A Rake’s Progress.” She is unique in the art of the time, Crown says.

Seduced and abandoned by the rake, Sarah avoids the harlot’s pathetic fate. She takes the money with which the rake buys her off and becomes a milliner. He ends up in Bedlam, a madman, nearly naked. She ends up a respectable businesswoman, dressed for success.

* The show continues through Jan. 7, 1996. The Huntington is at 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. It is open to the public Tuesday through Friday from 1 to 4:30 p.m., Saturday and Sunday from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Call (818) 405-2141.