Analysis of beauty. plate II. Designed, engraved and published by Wm. Hogarth, 5th March 1753, according to act of Parliament (text within print)
Around the design are small numbered illustrations. The print is the second plate to Hogarth's treatise The analysis of beauty, London, 1753 and relates specifically to chapter XVII entitled "Of Action", in which he espouses a "variety of lines, chiefly serpentine". The S line can be observed in the outlines of the discarded three-cornered hats as well as in the bounding greyhound dog. The print illustrates Hogarth's notions about the movement and shape of the body, the variety of which can also be observed in the figures in the portraits on the wall: Henry VIII, Charles I, Edward VI, Duchess of Wharton and Queen Elizabeth I etc. "At the top, the extraordinary abstracted landscape and its impressionistic pendant are intended to illustrate the true gradations of aerial perspective and the disagreeable neglect of it " (Hogarth, exhibition catalogue by L. Gowing, 1972, p. 75)