The Sleeping Congregation

One of Hogarth's earliest dated works. Nearly every member of a church congregation has fallen asleep during a tedious sermon. The preacher drones from an elevated pulpit with an hourglass beside him.

The comic centerpiece: the parish clerk stays awake only because he's staring at a sleeping woman's exposed bosom. Hogarth's view that the Church's failure to engage its flock leaves a vacuum filled by earthly temptation.

Hogarth produced a more widely known engraving in 1736. The oil is at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Established the template for his later moral narratives.