He painted plain, good-natured-looking people in an unaffected and straightforward way.

But he was a humourist in paint, and as great a student of human nature as he was of art.

His insight into character and his great skill with the brush, combined with his sensitiveness to fun, make him in certain respects a unique painter.
In the National Gallery there is a picture of the heads of his six servants in a double row.

They might all be characters from Dickens, so vividly and sympathetically humorous is each.
In his engravings Hogarth satirised the lives of all classes of the society of his day.

When we look at them we live again in eighteenth-century London, and walk in streets known to fame though now destroyed, thronged with men and women, true to life.
As an artist, Hogarth occupies a position between the seventeenth-century Dutch painters of low life and the English painters that succeeded him, who expressed the ideals of a refined society.