Four Times of the Day

It was among the first of his prints to be published after the Engraving Copyright Act 1734 (which Hogarth had helped push through Parliament); A Rake's Progress had taken early advantage of the protection afforded by the new law.

He also drew on the Flemish "Times of Day" style known as points du jour, in which the gods floated above pastoral scenes of idealised shepherds and shepherdesses,[3] but in Hogarth's works the gods were recast as his central characters: the churchgoing lady, a frosty Aurora in Morning; the pie-girl, a pretty London Venus in Noon; the pregnant woman, a sweaty Diana in Evening; and the freemason, a drunken Pluto in Night.

[1] Hogarth designed the series for an original commission by Jonathan Tyers in 1736 in which he requested a number of paintings to decorate supper boxes at Vauxhall Gardens.

The originals of Four Times of the Day were sold to other collectors, but the scenes were reproduced at Vauxhall by Francis Hayman, and two of them, Evening and Night, hung at the pleasure gardens until at least 1782.

[6] The four plates depict four times of day, but they also move through the seasons: Morning is set in winter, Noon in spring, and Evening in summer.

[10] Sir William Heathcote purchased Morning and Night for 20 guineas and £20 6s respectively (£ 4,400 and £ 4,200 in 2025), and the Duke of Ancaster bought Noon for £38 17s (£ 8,100 in 2025) and Evening for £39 18s (£ 8,300 in 2025).

[11] In Morning, a lady makes her way to church, shielding herself with her fan from the shocking view of two men pawing at the market girls.

The scene is the west side of the piazza at Covent Garden, indicated by a part of the Palladian portico of Inigo Jones's Church of St Paul visible behind Tom King's Coffee House, a notorious venue celebrated in pamphlets of the time.

At the time Hogarth produced this picture, the coffee house was being run by Tom's widow, Moll King, but its reputation had not diminished.

In the picture, it is early morning and some revellers are ending their evening: a fight has broken out in the coffee house and, in the melée, a wig flies out of the door.

The shepherds and shepherdesses become the beggars and prostitutes, the sun overhead is replaced by the clock on the church, the snow-capped mountains become the snowy rooftops.

[4] She is commonly described as a spinster, and considered to be a hypocrite, ostentatiously attending church and carrying a fashionable ermine muff while displaying no charity to her freezing footboy or the half-seen beggar before her.

[12] A trail of peculiar footprints shows the path trodden by the woman on her pattens to avoid putting her good shoes in the snow and filth of the street.

[14] A small object hangs at her side, interpreted variously as a nutcracker or a pair of scissors in the form of a skeleton or a miniature portrait, hinting, perhaps, at a romantic disappointment.

[15] Hogarth's opinion of Rock is made clear in the penultimate plate of A Harlot's Progress where he is seen arguing over treatments with Dr Misaubin while Moll Hackabout dies unattended in the corner.

[17] The Huguenot refugees had arrived in the 1680s and established themselves as tradesmen and artisans, particularly in the silk trade; and the French Church was their first place of worship.

[20] Confusion over whether the law permitted slavery in England, and pressure from abolitionists, meant that by the mid-eighteenth century there was a sizeable population of free black Londoners; but the status of this man is not clear.

[21] The black man, the girl and bawling boy fill the roles of Mars, Venus and Cupid which would have appeared in the pastoral scenes that Hogarth is aping.

The boy's features are modelled on those of a child in the foreground of Poussin's first version of The Abduction of the Sabine Women (now held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art).

[22] The composition of the scene juxtaposes the prim and proper Huguenot man and his immaculately dressed wife and son with these three, as they form their own "family group" across the other side of the gutter.

Below this sign are the embracing couple, extending the metaphor of good eating beyond a mere plate of food, and still further down the street girl greedily scoops up the pie, carrying the theme to the foot of the picture.

In the early nineteenth century, Cooke and Davenport suggested that in this scene Hogarth's sympathies seem to be with the lower classes and more specifically with the English.

By the time Hogarth produced this series the theatre had lost any vestiges of fashionability and was satirised as having an audience consisting of tradesmen and their pretentious wives.

Behind the couple, their children replay the scene: the father's cane protrudes between the son's legs, doubling as a hobby horse, while the daughter is clearly in charge, demanding that he hand over his gingerbread.

Inside the shop, the barber, who may be drunk,[34] haphazardly shaves a customer, holding his nose like that of a pig, while spots of blood darken the cloth under his chin.

[35] In the foreground, a drunken freemason, identified by his apron and set square medallion as the Worshipful Master of a lodge, is being helped home by his Tyler, as the contents of a chamber pot are emptied onto his head from a window.

[32] My uncle, rest his soul, when living, Might have contriv'd me ways of thriving; Taught me with cider to replenish My vats, or ebbing tide of Rhenish.

[38] John Ireland suggests that the overturned "Salisbury Flying Coach" below the "Earl of Cardigan" sign was a gentle mockery of the Grand Master 4th Earl of Cardigan, George Brudenell, later Duke of Montagu, who was also renowned for his reckless carriage driving;[39] and it also mirrors the ending of Gay's Trivia in which the coach is overturned and wrecked at night.

At the auction of 1745, the paintings of Four Times of the Day raised more than those of the Rake; and Night, which is generally regarded as the worst of the series, fetched the highest single total.

In 1708, E. Hatton recorded the inscription below the clock as Ex hoc Momento pendat Eternitas in his New View of London and did not mention a figure above it.