Puggs Graces Etched from his Original Daubing

Sandby made this satire early in his career when a bitter dispute had erupted amongst the artist-members of London's St. Martin's Lane Academy. When one proposed establishing a new, more formally organized institution, and left Hogarth off the list of potential professors, Hogarth published a piece in the "Public Advertiser" that outlined "Reasons against a Public Academy" (1753). Sandby took the other side since he already resented Hogarth for art works that disparaged the Duke of Cumberland, Sandby's chief patron. The appearance of Hogarth's treatise "The Ananlysis of Beauty" in December of 1753 gave Sandy fuel for a series of savage images mocking aesthetic arguments in that book, with eight satires issued by 1754, collectively titled "The Analysis of Deformity."

In this example Hogarth sits in a studio strewn with mocking references to the sculpture yard found in plate 1 of his "Analysis of Beauty." He is at work on the painting "Moses brought before Pharoah's Daughter" (1746, Foundling Hospital) and has posed three nude women, whose bodies depart markedly from the classical ideal, in a grouping that recalls a Judgment of Paris.

Sandby suggests that aesthetic ideas presented in Hogarth's treatise, centered on his idea of a serpentine "Line of Beauty," undermine standards handed down since the Renaissance. It is implied that contemporaries who accept Hogarth's ideas will no longer be able to judge aesthetic quality, while busts of a lawyer, judge and a minister displayed on a shelf at upper left indicate that other British institutions are also at risk.