Hogarth began his career as an engraver, in a city where the display of graphic art was one of the backdrops of everyday life. In making his way within London’s artistic life, Hogarth soon began to specialise in graphic satire. The detailed and theatrical satirical prints Hogarth produced in the 1720s engaged with the great social and political issues of his time, ranging from the financial collapse of 1720, called the South Sea Bubble, to the fashionable craze for masquerades. They also saw him developing a highly experimental and self-consciously allusive form of printmaking, in which he responded to and borrowed from a remarkable variety of pictorial and textual materials.

As well as pursuing his ambitions as an engraver, Hogarth quickly turned to the world of painting. During the 1720s Hogarth regularly attended the newly-formed St Martin’s Lane Academy of artists and rubbed shoulders with established painters from home and abroad. This training soon paid off, and by the end of the decade Hogarth was becoming well established as a painter. He was celebrated in particular for canvases such as Falstaff Examining his Recruits and A Scene from the Beggar’s Opera, in which, for the first time, the dramatic works of William Shakespeare and John Gay were translated into painted form.

In Gin Lane, the pawnbroker shop, the undertakers and the distillery are the only premises in good order. The rest of the townscape is marked by buildings that are toppling or derelict. In the streets the alcohol-fuelled crowds are being incited to riot or are pouring gin into their own or others’ mouths, including the very young. The central female figure seated on the stairs emphasises the ravages of alcoholism. Dishevelled, half-naked and oblivious to all but the snuff that she is taking, she allows her child to fall headlong into the stairwell of a gin-cellar and to certain death.

Laroon's interpretation of London’s bustling street commerce is solid, robust and unsentimental. The majority of the figures are seen walking or turning, their flapping clothes adding to the sense of movement. Some are shown shouting or sounding their wares with instruments, which, with the accompanying titles (e.g. ‘Crab Crab any Crab’), attempts to evoke sound. As well as street pedlars, Laroon included other urban types, including a courtesan and street performers, such as ‘The famous Dutch Woman’ (displayed nearby).

Selling shellfish in the street was normally the work of the wives or daughters of fishmongers who ran stalls in markets. The Shrimp Girl is shown balancing a characteristically large dish-shaped basket on her head, in which can be seen mussels, shrimps and a half-pint pewter jug for measuring purposes.

The painting’s scale strongly suggests that Hogarth had embarked on this work as a portrait in its own right. The individuality and expressiveness of the face also point towards a life study. The rapid, broad brushstrokes and thin layers of paint accentuate the sense of movement and spontaneity in the turning figure, as if Hogarth had captured the woman walking past him in the street.

This painting was inspired by Hogarth’s ill-fated trip to France in 1748. While waiting in Calais for a boat home, he was seized by a French soldier as he sketched the old city gate. Having convinced his captors that he was an artist rather than a secret agent, he was summarily despatched to England. Hogarth expended all his Francophobic vitriol into the creation of this image, which is dominated by an English sirloin steak being slavered over by a gluttonous friar and a pair of half-starved soldiers. Famously, Hogarth inserts a self-portrait into the painting on the left, in which he is shown just on the point of being captured.

Text copyright Tate Gallery 2007