The Bench.

William Hogarth

The Bench.

London, J. & J. Boydell ca 1806

Copper engraving

310 x 215mm

£280

From the collection of George Morant, (1770 – 1846) of 95 Wimpole St, London. A very fine set on mostly uncut sheets kept loose in a folio. Carefully printed and in very good condition.

Morant was a collector and Founder of a business of paper hangers, carvers, gilders and picture frame makers.

The company had offices at 88 Old Bond St,  from 1814, and was appointed as ‘house decorator, carver, gilder & picture-frame-maker to His Majesty’. From 1832 he was appointed again by Her majesty Queen Victoria

Hogarth’s caricature of legal corruption. The central figure is the enormously bloated figure of Sir John Willes, Chief Justice, flanked on either side by two sleeping judges and a bespectacled colleague surreptitiously reading a (love ?) letter. Above them is the Royal Escutcheon partially obscured behind a curtain. A political turncoat, Willes was a man whose intelligence and learning were dimmed by his reputation for immorality (he is also Hogarth’s model for the seducer in Before and After). He was thought to have fathered 26 illegitimate children and George III subsequently refused him both the Chancellorship and a peerage on moral grounds.