Volume 54, Number 11 · June 28, 2007
The Hogarth Show
By Sanford Schwartz
Hogarth
Catalog of the exhibition by Mark Hallett and Christine Riding
an exhibition at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, October 18, 2006–January 7, 2007; Tate Britain, London, February 7–April 29, 2007; and La Caixa, Barcelona, May 29–August 26, 2007.
London: Tate Publishing, 264 pp., £40.00; £29.99 (paper)
Hogarth, France and British Art: The Rise of the Arts inEighteenth-Century Britain
by Robin Simon
London: Hogarth Arts, 313 pp., £45.00
At Tate Britain's recent William Hogarth exhibition, or in reading about him in the numerous hefty biographies and critical studies devoted to his paintings, his prints, and his era, it is easy to feel that you are in the presence of a heroic figure. In a country in which, when he came to maturity in the 1720s, there had never been any real traditions in the visual arts or even any significant native-born artists, he fashioned one type of picture-making endeavor after another. In some of his best-known work, suites of pictures called A Rake's Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode, he made genre paintings out of the hypocrisies and calamities of London life of the time. He was the first English artist to make paintings based on plays, and, in a considerable body of engravings, he dealt with issues of work ethics, drinking abuses, and social delusions of the moment.
Review, 3571 words
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