The Bench

Hogarth painted this in 1758 to make an argument. He had spent years insisting that what he did was character, the real study of a face, and that caricature, the trick of pulling a likeness out of a few exaggerated lines, was a different and lesser thing. This little picture is his demonstration. Four judges of the Court of Common Pleas sit along the bench, with Chief Justice Sir John Willes in the middle, a man with a hard reputation for hanging, and Hogarth records their faces instead of distorting them.

The canvas is tiny, roughly 15 by 18 centimetres. He issued a print from it the same year with a long explanatory sheet about the difference.

In October 1764 he went back to the plate to add a row of comparative heads along the top. A note on a late state of the print says he was working on them the day before he died, on 26 October, and they were left unfinished.