He cast himself as a social critic, but Tate Britain’s Hogarth exhibition reveals the wider cruelty and prejudice of the eighteenth century

There are three self-portraits of William Hogarth in Tate Britain’s new exhibition “Hogarth and Europe” (until 20 March 2022). There’s the famous one of The Painter and His Pug (1745) and the later self-portrait, Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse (c.1757-8), but it’s the smallest that is perhaps the most revealing. In O the Roast Beef of Old England (1748) the artist includes himself as a background figure sketching beside the Gate of Calais – and thereby hangs a tale. While thus minding his artistic business on his second trip to France in 1748, Hogarth had been arrested as a spy and put on the next boat back to England.

The picture was his revenge on the French, and its nationalist and anti-Catholic sentiments contributed largely to its popularity. In front of the gate – still surmounted by English arms alongside the French – a fat French friar is feeling up a joint of prime English beef, jealously watched by starving French soldiers clutching bowls of gruel. On the right an exiled Scottish Jacobite cringes on the ground with his hands clasped in prayer, while on the left three superstitious French fishwives with crucifixes around their necks appear to be worshipping a large flatfish.