La venditrice di gamberetti

This is a London shrimp seller, the kind of woman who carried a basket of shellfish on her head through the streets and called out her wares, painted around 1743. Hogarth had made his name on biting satirical series, but here he wanted none of that, only a living face caught from life, her mouth half open mid-cry. He never finished it. The paint is thin and quick, the bare ground still showing through, the brushwork left broad and rough, because Hogarth held that a bold stroke carried more life than careful polish. He kept the little sketch in his studio for the rest of his life and never added another touch. It stayed with his widow, unsold, until her death in 1789.