What marks the greatness of Hogarth is his freedom from foreign and ancient influences. The eighteenth century came in as an academic age in art. Turning away from life, it spent itself in allegory and the imitation of typical figures that had been inherited from the Renaissance and petrified into academic work. Gods, in whom no one any longer believed, hovered, at least in paint, over a race which was without enthusiasm. Then came Hogarth, and his quick vision discovered the new way. He looked out upon the life surrounding him, with its manifold idiosyncrasies, and felt himself with pride to be the son of a new age, in which rigid, conventional forms were everywhere penetrated by the modern ideas of free thought, the rights of man, conformity to nature in morals and manners. This world which confronted him he depicted truly as it was, in all its beauty and its ugliness. With him was the origin of modern art. Before his paintings and engravings pale idealism disappeared. It was he who resolved and set out to bring into the world a new and independent observation of life. He was a painter who, with as little aid from foreign influences as from those of the past, went his own way and kept to it, and devoted his art, unblemished by the pallor of a borrowed ideal of beauty, soberly and exclusively to the realities of surrounding life. "It seemed to me unlikely," writes he, "that by copying old compositions I could acquire facility for those new designs which were my first and greatest ambitions." Works of old Italian masters, artistic contemplations, which went back to Raphael and the Caracci, were ignored and ridiculed by him. His rude strength of painting, directed to the living truth, was a protest against all that idealism which was the heritage of the Renaissance, and had grown quite bombastic under the hands of its imitators. Nature, he writes, is simple, plain, and true in all her works; and with this principle he has founded a strong English school on the solid foundation of truth to nature. [Illustration: HOGARTH. THE HARLOT'S PROGRESS, PLATE VI.]