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William Hogarth (November 10, 1697 – October
26,1764) was a major British painter, engraver,
pictorial satirist, and editorial cartoonist who
has been credited as a pioneer in western
sequential art.  His work ranged from excellent
realistic portraiture to Comic strip-like series
of pictures called “modern moral
subjects.”  Much of his work poked humorous,
at times vicious, fun at contemporary politics and
customs. 
== Life and work ==
=== Early years ===
The son of a poor schoolteacher and textbook
writer, William Hogarth was born at Bartholomew
Close in London on November 10, 1697. In his youth
he was apprenticed to the silver-plate engraver
Ellis Gamble in Leicester Fields, where he learned
to engrave shopcards and the like. Young William
also took a lively interest in the street life of
the metropolis and the London fairs, and amused
himself by sketching the characters he saw. At
around the same time, his father, who had opened
an unsuccessful Latin-speaking coffee house at St
John's Gate, was imprisoned for debt in Fleet
Prison for five years. Hogarth never talked about
the fact. By April 1720 he was engraver on his own
account, at first engraving coats of arms, shop
bills, and designing plates for booksellers. Early
satirical works included an Emblematical Print on
the South Sea Scheme (c.1721) 

The South Sea Scheme is about the disastrous stock
market crash of 1720 known as the South Sea
Bubble, where many English people lost a great
deal of money. In the bottom left corner, he shows
Protestant, Catholic and Jewish figures gambling,
while in the middle there is a huge merry-go-round
like machine, which people are getting on to ride.
At the top is a goat, written below which is
"Who'l Ride" and this shows the stupidity of
people in following the crowd in buying The South
Sea Company|South Sea Company stock, a company
which spent more time issuing stock than actually
producing anything. The people are scattered
around the picture with a real sense of disorder,
which represented the confusion. The progress of
the well dressed people towards the ride in the
middle shows how foolish some people could be,
which is not entirely their own fault.

Other early works include The Lottery (1724); The
Mystery of Masonry brought to Light by the
Gormogons (1724);  A Just View of the British
Stage (1724); some book illustrations; and the
small print, Masquerades and Operas (1724). The
latter is a satire on contemporary follies, such
as the masquerade ball|masquerades of the Swiss
impresario John James Heidegger, the popular
Italian :