An article about Hogarth which, unusually, is not critical of his membership of the Craft

Hogarth may not have been a great painter, but who cares? The world he gave us is rich, rude, teeming with life - and wonderfully familiar, says Adrian Searle.

William Hogarth was a printmaker, a genre painter, a satirist, a portraitist (or "phizmonger" as he sometimes put it), a history painter and a painter of conversation pieces. He was a polemicist and theorist, and the director of his own art school. It is just a decade since the last major Hogarth exhibition in London, when 31 of his paintings were hung at the National Gallery, and the British Museum simultaneously showed his etchings and engravings. Tate Britain's new exhibition, recently shown at the Louvre, brings the printmaker and the painter together, covering the entirety of Hogarth's career.

He was certainly a great draughtsman, but whether Hogarth was also a great painter, as painters go, I am less certain. Nor do I care. It is what Hogarth depicted that carries us along, with all the narrative and pictorial highs and lows - and one sweeps through this exhibition hungry for the stories. His works are the equivalents of the big, baggy, picaresque novels of the period. And, as with good novels, one returns to them for more than the plot, picking up details: the sex toys on the harlot's wall, the women holding a spitting contest in The Rake at the Rose Tavern (see picture above), the intimations of a child's death in the portrait of the Graham children. There are always subtexts we don't quite catch. In fact, there is too much here to take in on a single viewing; all those sides of beef, the spilled gravy and dripping, the punch and ale and shrimps begin to get the better of me. But this is as it should be. Hogarth is meant to be rich. While some of Hogarth's allusions may pass us by today, the worlds he presents appear at times all too familiar. It is a London populated by harlots, rakes, drunks, rapists, quacks, frauds, fakes, freemasons, libertines, politicians, archbishops, magistrates, nonconformists, hypocrites, yobs, social climbers, the indigent, the corrupting and corrupted, cuckolds, spinsters, yawning servants, sated lovers. Whole narratives are hinted at by nothing more than the sight of someone's wig being thrown out of a bar door in Covent Garden at seven in the morning. Hogarth's art bursts with life, and with characters fictional and real, sometimes side by side. Moll Hackabout, Tom Rakewell and the Earl of Squander rub shoulders with Colonel Francis Charteris, a notorious abuser of women, while Sir Francis Dashwood prays at an altar to lust. Hogarth's characters are as various as his age, and only rarely do they become caricatures.

Early in his career, he made a stab at illustrating Don Quixote, but gave it up - perhaps the characters and situations were already too one-dimensional. For the same reasons, one can envisage him rejecting Dickens but illustrating De Sade. I imagine him appreciating the film director Robert Altman - the weave of stories, the characters, the situations. Hogarth knew his talents were as much those of a storyteller as of a painter or a printmaker; nowadays, he would probably have written and directed movies. The brilliantly orchestrated crowd scenes in Election are crying out for animation. We recognise Hogarth's social types and situations and take them as our own, seeing crack fiends where he saw gin-sodden drunks, Aids where he saw syphilis. When we read "by Wholesale or Retail at Reasonable Rates", written on a shop card printed early in his career, we see that the familiar modern world had in many respects already arrived by the 1700s; all that's missing is an email address. We should also remember that people were still being burned at the stake, beheaded for treason, hanged, flayed, pilloried and whipped in public in London. But the endemic drunkenness and violence, the cheapness and carelessness of life that we see in Hogarth's street scenes could be any town in the UK now on a Saturday night. What might a modern Hogarth focus on?

The American painter John Currin takes something from Hogarth: many of his paintings mock the social worlds of the rich collectors who buy his work. Hogarth did much the same. What seems most modern about him is his frankness and scepticism, his wit, his worldliness, his bite. As recently as 1971, Norman Reid, then Tate director, admitted that Hogarth's popular appeal made him "slightly suspect to the connoisseur and aesthete". Connoisseurs and aesthetes were the butt of some of Hogarth's best gags - the pair of hilarious, effete 18th-century fashionistas cooing over a minuscule coffee cup in his 1742 Taste in High Life, for example - but he knew that his own paintings were also top-end luxury goods, likely to be coveted in a way that was no less ludicrous. He knew all about commodity fetishism; look at the clock-cum-candelabra, decorated with a buddha and a bestiary, and the knick-knacks ranged along the mantelpiece in the second scene of his 1735 Marriage A-la-Mode. Hogarth's were consummate in-jokes, and he rebelled in the textures of things as much as he did in physiognomies, poses, human failings.