Satire on False Perspective

Hogarth designed this drawing to be the frontispiece to a treatise on the theory and practice of perspective drawing, published by Joshua Kirby in 1754 (on view nearby). It is filled with humorous visual examples of false perspective. A woman leans out of a window to light the pipe of a man standing on a hill some distance behind her. A signpost on a building in the foreground is partially obscured by trees growing in the middle ground. The fishing line of a figure in the foreground dips into a stream in the middle distance. In depicting the wrong way to draw, Hogarth’s satiric image reveals his mastery of perspective and his ability to construct complex spatial relationships (2022).