Je-sais-quoi : la représentation des formes du vivant dans l'œuvre de William Hogarth

Frédéric Ogée : Je-sais-quoi. The representation of forms of life in the works of William Hogarth. The rise of English painting and, more widely, of a visual culture in 18th-century Britain, is a remarkable manifestation of the new epistemology which, under the influence of Locke, Newton and the natural philosophers of the Royal Society, transformed the way the British perceived nature. The painter and engraver William Hogarth played a crucial role in this (re)volution. His works can be read as examples of the new 'observational' attitude, of the 'modern' modes of representation of natural phenomena. One of his most original characteristics — from which both his success and his difficulties with academic orthodoxy derived — was the attention he paid to the variety of forms of life and the way he incorporated and played upon the irregular, the proliferating and the disorderly in nature. Both instinctively and culturally empirical, he devised an aesthetics that could account for evolution and accumulation, and new forms of representation of reality which daringly describe examples of proliferation and de-composition, turning his pictures into tangible visual experiments.