William Hogarth was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic, and editorial cartoonist. Best known for his comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects",  A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode. Influenced by French and Italian painting and engraving, the works are satirical caricatures, sometimes bawdily sexual, mostly of the first rank of realistic portraiture. They became widely popular and mass-produced via prints in his lifetime, and he was by far the most significant English artist of his generation.