The Bench

The Bench is the title of both a 1758 oil-on-canvas painting by the English artist William Hogarth, and a print issued by him in the same year. Unlike many of Hogarth's engravings produced from painted originals, the print differs considerably from the painting. It was intended as a demonstration of the differences between character painting, caricature and outré—developing on the theme he had begun to address in Characters and Caricaturas (his subscription ticket for Marriage à-la-mode)—but Hogarth was unhappy with the result as it showed only "characters", and he continued to work on the piece until his death. Background Hogarth had often been accused of being a caricaturist, but regarded this as a slur on his work. In his book on art, The Analysis of Beauty, Hogarth claimed that the critics had branded all his women as harlots and all his men as caricatures. He complained: He had made an early attempt to address what he perceived as a mistake on the part of his critics with the subscription ticket for his 1743 series Marriage à-la-mode, on which he contrasted a number of his reproductions of classical caricatures – from Annibale Carracci, Pier Leone Ghezzi and Leonardo da Vinci – with his version of some Raphael characters (from the Cartoons) and a hundred of his own character profiles. After Hogarth's death the subscription ticket was reproduced as print in its own right, minus the subscription details for Marriage a-la-mode, and came to be known as Characters and Caricaturas (from the inscription Hogarth had added at the foot of the original).