The Bench.

William Hogarth

The Bench.

London, J. Boydell 1805

Copper engraving

372x214mm

£220

Hogarth’s caricature of legal corruption. The top rank shows a row of grotesquely caricatured heads, and beneath them the central figure is the enormously bloated figure of Sir John Willes, Chief Justice, flanked on either side by two sleeping judges. 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.  Paulson 205.