Hogarth's anti-progress: how the father of British painting went missing from our galleries

The scathing satirist William Hogarth put Britains painters on the map, but on the 250th anniversary of his death youll have a hard time seeing his work

It is 250 years since William Hogarth died, so I decided to visit him. I set out to Tate Britain to see his pugnacious self-portrait, painted in 1745. Hogarth depicts himself as the archetypal British painter, tougher, more streetwise and more witty than all those European daubers whose works were coveted by the aristocrat collectors of his day.

You can see those continental masters, adeptly parodied, cluttering the walls of a noble mansion in the first painting in his visual narrative Marriage à-la-Mode, at the National Gallery. Medusas head and a slathering of nudes hang in dimly lit magnificence as a marriage settlement is brokered between a noble in need of cash and a merchant who wants to give his family blue blood. All that posh art, for Hogarth, is a kind of moral poison, whose corrupting cynicism helps bring about the impotence, adultery, duelling, syphilis and deaths that unfold in the next five scathing satirical paintings.

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