I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM
The Bad Taste of the Town
▶ Listen · narrated
A small British Museum print by William Hogarth attacks the fashion for Italian opera, masquerades and Palladian building. It is among his earliest public satires, and the quarrel still lands.
At a glance
- Date
- 1724 (sometimes given as 1723)
- Creator
- William Hogarth
- Type
- Print (etching and engraving)
- Collection
- British Museum, London
- Size
- About 5 by 6 inches (13 by 15 cm (6 in))
Look closer
Two names, one plate
The print is known both as The Bad Taste of the Town and as Masquerades and Operas. Neither title is idle. One names the diagnosis — a public failure of judgment — and the other names the chief symptoms Hogarth wanted viewers to recognise on sight: the masked ball and the Italian opera night, both still new enough in London to feel like a foreign occupation of the calendar.
Etching joined to engraving
The plate is not a single process. Hogarth combined etching, in which lines are bitten by acid, with engraving, in which a burin cuts the metal directly. On a sheet this small the mix matters: etched lines can run quickly and freely, while engraved strokes hold denser, more deliberate accents. The satire is carried as much by that hybrid mark-making as by the subject matter.
A catalogue of borrowed taste
What the print gathers into one view is a short list of fashionable imports: Palladian architecture, pantomimes drawn from the Italian commedia dell'arte, masquerades, and Italian opera. The attack is not on any one diversion alone but on the habit of preferring them together, as if London's own stages and builders had nothing worth attending to.
The story
The Bad Taste of the Town is a small satirical print by William Hogarth, held in the British Museum in London. Sources disagree slightly on the year: the work is often tied to February 1723 in narrative accounts, while catalogue data give an inception of 1724. Either way it belongs to the beginning of Hogarth's public career, before the larger narrative series with which he is now more widely associated.
The sheet is modest in size — about five by six inches — and was made with two printmaking techniques used together. Etched lines were opened in the plate by acid; engraved lines were cut with a burin. That combination let Hogarth mix a relatively free etched line with the firmer emphasis of engraving, useful on a crowded design meant to be read as argument as well as picture.
Its subject is London's appetite for foreign cultural fashion. The print mocks the vogue for Palladian architecture, for pantomimes built on the Italian commedia dell'arte, for masquerades — masked public balls — and for Italian opera. The alternative title, Masquerades and Operas, points straight at two of those targets. The primary title frames them as evidence of a broader failure of local judgment: bad taste as a civic habit, not a private foible.
Nothing in the surviving record required this to be a grand history plate or a commissioned portrait. It functions instead as a pocket polemic. Viewers are invited to recognise types and venues they already knew from the town, and to feel the sting of being counted among the fashionable crowd the artist is ridiculing. The print does not separate architecture from theatre from music; it treats them as one imported package.
That package was not imaginary. Early eighteenth-century London was absorbing Italian opera, Continental architectural models, and forms of masked assembly that carried a whiff of licence as well as glamour. Hogarth's response was to compress the complaint into a single, portable image that could circulate among the very public it criticised. The British Museum's impression keeps that early intervention available as an object, not only as a story about the artist.
Why it mattered then
In the early 1720s the quarrel over what London ought to watch, hear and build was live politics of taste. Italian opera drew aristocratic money and foreign stars; masquerades offered anonymity and display; Palladian design advertised a classical pedigree that sidelined older English habits of building. A print that bundled those fashions together spoke to people who felt the capital was outsourcing its pleasures. Hogarth's small format suited that moment: it could be sold, passed round and argued over without the cost or solemnity of a painting. It also announced him as an artist willing to take the town itself as his subject, using satire rather than flattery.
Why it matters now
The print still matters because the structure of its complaint has not disappeared. Cities still argue over imported prestige culture versus local work, over whether a public that pays for foreign spectacle is cosmopolitan or merely insecure. Hogarth's plate is an early, compressed document of that anxiety, made by an artist who would spend much of his career policing the morals and manners of his own city. As a museum object it also shows how a technical hybrid — etching plus engraving — could carry a social argument on a sheet small enough to hold in one hand. Looking at it now is less about recovering a forgotten joke than about watching an early modern media form do the work that opinion pages and short videos do today.
The surprising detail
For a print this small — only about five by six inches — the ambition is outsized. Hogarth did not pick a single offender. He stacked opera, masquerade, pantomime and Palladian building into one charge sheet and issued it under a title that indicts the whole town. The plate also refuses a single technique: acid-bitten etched line and burin engraving share the same copper, a hybrid method that already treats satire as something that needs more than one kind of mark.
What is disputed
The date is not settled in a single figure. Narrative accounts often place first publication in February 1723, while catalogue data give an inception of 1724. The double title — The Bad Taste of the Town and Masquerades and Operas — is secure; which wording circulated first on any given impression is a finer point for specialists.
Remember this
A pocket-sized Hogarth print from the mid-1720s that treats Italian opera, masquerades and Palladian fashion as one civic failure of taste.
Test yourself
Why does it matter that Hogarth combined etching and engraving on a plate this small, rather than relying on one process alone?
Because the two techniques behave differently on the copper. Etching, bitten by acid, can run with relative speed and freedom; engraving, cut with a burin, holds denser and more deliberate accents. On a sheet only inches across, that mix lets a crowded satirical design stay legible: broader etched work can map the scene while engraved strokes pick out emphasis. The method matches the aim — a portable polemic that has to be read quickly but not carelessly.
Go deeper
Image: William Hogarth, Public domain. Licence: Public domain. Source.