HOGARTH AND HIS TIMES.<i> By David Bindman</i> .<i> University of California Press: 208 pp., $29.95 paper</i> : HOGARTH: A LIFE AND A WORLD.<i> By Jenny Uglow</i> .<i> Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 794 pp., $45</i>

Greatly admired today for his modern moral subjects, particularly in his engravings and paintings depicting the downward progress of his characters, “A Harlot’s Progress,” “A Rake’s Progress,” “Marriage a-la-Mode” and Industry and Idleness,” William Hogarth, the great chronicler of luxury and squalor in 18th century English society, was viewed more ambivalently in his own time. After his death in 1764 and the publication of the Rev. John Trusler’s “Hogarth Moralized” in 1768, the satirist was both admired and hated. Idealized by some as a moralist, he was vigorously attacked by Sir Joshua Reynolds as a painter of vulgar tavern scenes (an opinion seconded by Sir James Barry). He was vigorously defended by Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray for his accurate depiction of life rather than the kind of idealization of reality praised by the academy. In the heyday of Romanticism, Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt lauded him as a literary artist who succeeded, as did Shakespeare, in blending the comic and the tragic.

“Hogarthomania” swept the art world in the early 1800s as the rage for collecting every discarded Hogarth proof reached a frenzied high, but this mania slowed by 1830. Since that time, his reputation has experienced its ups and downs, producing a variety of views: Hogarth as a natural, unlearned artist; Hogarth as the true English artist; Hogarth as one of the founders of popular art.

Both “Hogarth and His Times” and “Hogarth: A Life and a World” were published to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Hogarth’s birth. David Bindman, who published an excellent study of Hogarth in 1981, has provided introductory chapters and notes to a catalog of an exhibition of Hogarth’s engravings, which opened at the British Museum in October of this year. Bindman traces the fortunes of Hogarth’s reputation during his lifetime and through the following centuries. “Hogarth and His Times” argues that Hogarth was essentially an insider--the friend of noblemen, clergymen and respectable scientists--and Bindman organizes his illustrations of Hogarth and his contemporaries to underline this point. Bindman’s Hogarth is a firm believer in the status quo, a supporter of the monarchy, of Sir Robert Walpole and, later, the Third Earl of Bute. His villains, the Idle Apprentice and the cruel Tom Nero, reflect the societal problems of the day. Bindman is certainly correct in thinking that Hogarth would have thought that Tom Nero, who in Hogarth’s series of plates, “The Four Stages of Cruelty,” progresses from animal cruelty to the murder of his girlfriend, richly deserved his end. The final print shows Nero’s body being cut apart on the surgeon’s table, his entrails being devoured by a dog. But surely the hanging of the Idle Apprentice at Tyburn, as illustrated in “Industry and Idleness,” has ambiguities that Bindman does not acknowledge.

Although there is much that is right about Bindman’s argument that Hogarth blithely accepted the status quo, supporting whoever was in power, the argument is incomplete. Hogarth was a typical Whig who feared Jacobite invasions, French tyranny and the Catholic Church. The vicious satire of the Tory Scriblerians, a group founded by Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and John Gay that, among other things, wrote scathing indictments of the government under the pseudonym Martin Scriblerus, came from a very different direction. Though not always happy with the Whig government--he issued satirical prints against Walpole--Hogarth felt compelled nonetheless to stay within its fold.

Bindman’s Hogarth was a prosperous businessman and marketer of his wares, part of the bourgeois establishment. But one need only look at his “Evening,” with its manipulated sense of reality, to understand Hogarth’s discomfort with any simplistic or idealized vision of this world. On one side, two children from a bourgeois family fight violently. In the center, the citizen carries his youngest child while his lustful, heavyset wife walks beside him. In the background, a cow is being milked, and the horns of the cow form the sign of the cuckold. So much for blissful life among the middle orders. In this engraving, the shortening of perspective that allows the cow’s horns to appear to be emerging from the head of the citizen recalls Hogarth’s Escher-like false perspective. The line of a fisherman in the foreground falls into a lake that is far in the distance, while sheep grow larger rather than smaller as they disappear into the distance. We are not always sure of what we are seeing.

In fact, any single-minded reading of Hogarth is likely to cause problems. A print such as “The Enraged Musician” is typical of Hogarth: It depicts a somewhat dandified violinist before his window, holding his hands to his ears as the sounds of the city overwhelm his music. It is a great street scene. But the musician may have a point: Bells ring, a milk maid cries her product, horns sound, cats fight on the roof, tools grind and a ballad singer tries to sing over the sound of a street musician and a boy banging his drum. Hogarth grew up near the din of Smithfield Market and lived amid the noise of Covent Garden and Leicester Fields. He was hardly likely to be horrified at the cacophony, but harmony it isn’t. Ironically, a sign attached to the musician’s building advertises a performance of John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera,” which transformed popular ballads into a mixed form, the ballad opera. The musician appears to protest too much.

In wanting to see Hogarth as a defender of order and civilization, Bindman tries to root Hogarth in classical tradition. He makes a lengthy comparison between Hogarth and the Roman satirist Juvenal, but unlike Juvenal, Hogarth often seems to revel in the possibilities of the city. And there is much in Hogarth that is not entirely proper. In “The Enraged Musician,” a boy urinates before a startled girl experiencing her first sight of the male sexual organ. Scenes like this abound in Hogarth. In “Frontis-piss,” one of his last works, a witch sitting on the moon sends down a stream of urine to drown a plague of rats. In the final bedlam scene of “A Rake’s Progress,” to the great amusement of two very proper-looking young ladies, a madman stares at his image in a mirror while masturbating.

As Jenny Uglow argues in “Hogarth: A Life and A World,” scenes in “A Harlot’s Progress” and “A Rake’s Progress” have a steamy air of sexuality, intended “to entertain, to startle, and stir.” Hogarth moralized indeed! While Hogarth moralized, he didn’t mind titillating his audience, as Daniel Defoe does in his study of a courtesan’s progress, “Roxana.”

Uglow’s Hogarth is the very opposite of Bindman’s. He is subversive even when painting “conversation pieces” for his patrons. Uglow is sensitive to the often positive role of women in Hogarth’s narrative engravings and dwells on the sensuality of his work, as displayed in the first “Before and After” painting done in 1730, with its rendering of the deflated male member. Uglow argues convincingly that Hogarth presented himself as a painter of the people and an enemy of the art establishment.

Hogarth was frequently mocked, however, for his attempts at what was regarded as the truly serious branch of art: “history painting.” That the Hogarth of conventional scholarship should often be defended as an artist capable of high seriousness is hardly surprising. Comedy can be, satire always is, subversive. Despite occasional errors in dates and facts, Uglow’s study, which lies somewhere between scholarly and popular biography, presents Hogarth as a living personality. She does this with a combination of excellent psychological insight, a thorough presentation of the world in which Hogarth moved and some brilliant readings of Hogarth’s prints and paintings. She also has a rich appreciation of Hogarth’s ability to capture the life of his time.

Hogarth painted portraits of members of the establishment, but he also painted the ordinary people around him. The art critic E.H. Gombrich has taught us to be suspicious of what might seem a painter’s effort to capture the real, yet in one Hogarth painting, the heads of servants look out from his canvas without any of the flattery common to 18th century portraiture. Over the last few decades, we have come to appreciate the complexity of his engravings; perhaps with the return of interest in Dutch realism, we will come to admire fully his talent as a painter.