So he was determined not to be impressed, and put the message in his painting. Hogarth didn't like Paris: he was jealous both of its sophisticated artistic culture and its picture trade, which supported many more artists than provincial London. However, he wanted the six pictures to be engraved, for this is how he earnt real money, and the best engravers were to be found in France. In the early 1740s he was painting the series Marriage a la mode, now in the National Gallery, which is the most achieved of his works. But of course there were influences; and though Hogarth would not admit it, most of them were French. Hogarth's two visits to France symbolise his relations with a foreign culture he personally loathed The first shows how dependent he was on the French. It's true that his only formal instruction came from a brief apprenticeship to an engraver.

He was always proud to say that he was self-taught, and that there were therefore no influences on his painting. When his career began, in the late 1720s, a list of the painters he abominated would be much longer than a list of those he admired. In fact Hogarth, one of nature's great haters, disliked quite a lot of art. He dreamt of a manner of painting that would owe nothing to the established canons laid down by foreigners: that is to say, the grand decorations of the Renaissance and Baroque traditions Classical art he equated with falsity. Britishness is indeed a theme of Hogarth's art, both in subject matter and in style Not only did he vaunt his personal patriotism. The state of the British crown meant a lot to him, but it's noticeable that his sizeable portion of the 18th century is often called "The Age of Hogarth", as though this belligerently middle-class painter represented the nation in a way that its sovereigns did not.

So he grew up under Queen Anne, lived through the reigns of George I and George II and had three years under George III. He was born in Smithfield in 1697 and died at his home in Chiswick - a house recently restored with Lottery money - in 1764. This is William Hogarth's tercentenary, and about time we looked at the feeble reasons for his popularity. Living, I discovered for the second (but really the first) time, is not about resolution; it is about the place where plague can't get you.Only once or twice did I find that place, but now I live in the knowledge of its existence.So will an entire generation.Andrew Sullivan, a senior editor at 'The New Republic', is the author of 'Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality' (Picador, pounds 6.99).. But in that, of course, it resembled merely what we all go through every day.