This is a post about a brief presentation I did for the core class of my programme, 18th Century Cultural History: Historiography and Archival Methods. I was to interrogate a portrait from the 18th Century as an Art Historian. I chose a satirical portrait of the poet Charles Churchill; an etching by William Hogarth entitled The Bruiser, created in 1763. The historian part of the task was easy for me, the art historian part was trickier.

The Bruiser, 1763

The Bruiser is the culmination of several years of what my flatmate referred to as a “historic bitch-fight” between the satirist and artist William Hogarth, the politician John Wilkes, and Wilkes’ friend, the poet Charles Churchill. It all began the year before, in 1762, when Wilkes began publishing a radical weekly circulation titled The North Briton, itself a reaction to a pro-government propaganda paper in circulation titled The Briton. The…