WILLIAM HOGARTH’S 18th-century morality tale A Rake’s Progress has been reworked by the Chapman brothers, the controversial artists.

Jake and Dinos Chapman, who are best known for their mutilated dolls and obscene mannequins, have taken Hogarth’s cycle of eight etchings and changed the faces from human form to those of grotesques and animals.

Hogarth’s series depicted the decline and fall of Tom Rakewell, the spendthrift son of a rich merchant who comes to London before wasting all his inheritance on wine, women and song. He is thrown into a debtors’ prison and ends up in Bedlam, the mental asylum.

The pictures, painted by Hogarth in 1733 before print versions were made, are widely regarded as a great Georgian social commentary.

So why take Hogarth’s original prints and “deface” them? “It is about caricature. We think the faces we’ve given them make them more relevant to today,” said Jake Chapman, who with his brother previously reworked a series of Goya etchings.

The eight new works have been retitled Dinos and Jake’s Progress. So are the brothers alluding to any dissolute behaviour in their own lives? “No, this is not our own progress,” said Jake. “But maybe it reflects what is happening now.”

Done in pen and watercolour, the eight works will be unveiled for a new exhibition, Laughing in a Foreign Language, which opens at London’s Hayward gallery on January 25.

The Chapmans are still best known for mannequins of children, sometimes fused together, with genitalia in place of facial features. Their work Hell, which consisted of a large number of tiny figures of Nazis, was destroyed in May 2004 in a fire at a London warehouse.

Much of their work has caused offence, though “black humour” is how they describe it. “Yes, we have deliberately imported monstrosity into our figures, which become antihuman,” said Jake. “And, yes, we risk the wrath of our critics. But we’re not bothered. Many of our objectors get no further than reading Country Life and have a view of the world from that magazine. We do art because we are interested in experimenting.”

The Hogarth paintings are owned by the Sir John Soane Museum in London. His original prints, done in 1735, are in the British Museum.

“I think the reworkings are very funny,” said Julie Brock, secretary of the Soane Museum.

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