William Hogarth

In 1732 William Hogarth published A Harlot's Progress, a series of six engravings following a country girl's ruin in London, and watched print shops across the city sell cheap pirated copies within weeks, undercutting his own sales before he had recouped the cost of the plates. He spent much of the next three years lobbying Parliament rather than painting, and in 1735 got the Engraving Copyright Act passed, the first British law giving visual artists ownership of their own printed images. It is still known informally as Hogarth's Act.

Protected at last, he released A Rake's Progress that same year and, in the early 1740s, painted Marriage A-la-Mode, six canvases commissioned by the wealthy patron Mary Edwards to expose the arranged marriages then common among the aristocracy and the merchant class, tracing a nobleman's son and a merchant's daughter through a loveless match that ends in duelling, syphilis, and suicide.

The engravings sold well by subscription, a guinea a set, reaching a far wider public than the paintings could in a gallery. Hogarth kept the six original canvases for years, unable to find a buyer at his asking price, and they finally sold in 1751 at auction for far less than he had wanted, bought as a job lot along with their frames.