Image Credit: William Hogarth, “The South Sea Scheme” (ca. 1721), The British Museum

Under a turbulent sky, a city is going mad. A public square teems with people gambling, picking pockets, beating and whipping each other. Overhead, wolves slink around.

The city is recognizable as London — that’s Guildhall on the left and St. Paul’s Cathedral in the background. But in every other respect the natural order of things is subverted. Buildings run helter-skelter through space, arranged in multiple, off-kilter perspectives that wrench the rules of artistic geometry. In the left background, a balcony swarming with women tilts crazily downward, its vanishing point impossibly high in the sky, different from that of the building to which it’s attached. The base of the monument to the right answers to another set of rules; the structures facing it, to still others.

---

Further reading