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Lust in Hogarth’s Sleeping Congregation – Or, How to Waste Time in Post‐Puritan England
Author(s) -
Krysmanski Bernd W.
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8365.00115
Subject(s) - lust , worship , sermon , patience , art , theme (computing) , order (exchange) , feeling , irony , literature , indulgence , history , art history , philosophy , theology , economics , operating system , epistemology , finance , computer science
The intention of this essay is to explore the complex literary and pictorial background to William Hogarth’s engraving The Sleeping Congregation (1736) in order to deepen our understanding of its satirical point. The print ironically castigates three faults of the Anglican Church of the time: boring sermons (which put everyone to sleep), lewd feelings in places of worship, and the sorry state of Church art. The essay suggests, however, that the overriding theme of the engraving is Hogarth’s post‐Puritan view of the old vice of Acedia , or indolence. The print, in Hogarth’s typical irony, updates a long pictorial tradition of sleep in church during a sermon; sleep, the characteristic mark of indolence connected with lustful thoughts, a vice with which a hard‐working member of the rising middle class like Hogarth would have had little patience.