72 pages, paperback, 282 x 240 mm, 103 illustrations
PRICE: £15.00
ISBN: 9780954904135
A Rake’s Progress (1734-5) and An Election (1755) are the most famous of William Hogarth’s series of ‘modern moral subjects’. Hazlitt described Hogarth’s paintings as ‘A perpetual collision of eccentricities, a tilt and tournament of absurdities, the prejudices and caprices of mankind let loose’ and they still delight, interest and amuse as much today as two hundred years ago and the biting quality of their moral satire is undiminished.
The two series were purchased in the early nineteenth century by the architect Sir John Soane, who regarded them as amongst his greatest treasures. The only other complete Hogarth series to survive is Marriage A-la-mode, in the National Gallery, London.
In this book Christina Scull sets the paintings in the context of Hogarth’s life and times and of his other moral series, A Harlot’s Progress and Marriage A-la-mode and gives a detailed account of their narrative and contents. The eight paintings of A Rake’s Progress and the four paintings of An Election are all illustrated in colour, together with many of the engravings - authorised as well as pirate editions - based on them.
Since this volume was first published in 1991, the celebrity status of the Soane Hogarths has continued to grow. In 1997 A Rake’s Progress featured in a special exhibition at the Museum together with the precursors and successors of Hogarth’s great social satire. The crowds flocked to the Gallery and the catalogue sold out within weeks. In 2001, General Election year in Britain, An Election was given its own show which proved a soothing tonic for a nation weary of politicians and their antics.
The continued popularity of the paintings is a testament to Hogarth’s genius both as an artist and as a storyteller. The scenes from each series are packed full of pungent detail, humour and pathos. The characters are plucked straight from the streets and taverns of 18th-century England, and the streets and taverns are there too, together with their smell and noise. Tom, the rake, is shown drunk, amid the clamour of a Covent Garden brothel, the room permeated by the smell of candle-smoke and sweat. The first painting in An Election depicts a similar scene, except this time the orgy is a culinary one, enhanced by lavish helpings of beer, wine and oysters, as the politicians attempt to seduce wavering voters. Both the jokes and the moral messages are as pertinent today as they were in Hogarth’s time and the paintings continue to amuse, fascinate and inspire.
The spirit of William Hogarth is very much alive and well in 21st-century Britain. It is fitting that the first revised edition of this volume should appear in the year of the greatest Hogarth exhibition to date, at Tate Britain, which featured both sets of Soane’s Hogarths. All this would amaze and delight Hogarth who struggled throughout his career to achieve just recognition as a painter.
This book is about a family tree: the line of descent that can be traced from Perugino in Italy in the fifteenth century to Edouard Manet in France in the nineteenth. It is not the usual kind of genealogy, of those connected by blood, more an ‘apostolic succession’, following the way in which art in Europe was taught, from one generation to the next, from 1480 to 1880. More
Over the course of the last forty years art historian Jonathan Brown has done more than anyone to reform our approach to the art of the Hispanic world between the age of El Greco and Velazquez and that of Goya. More
The group of about one hundred French bronzes in the Wallace Collection is justly considered one of the finest such collections in the world. Fifty-one of the best are featured in this book, the first in-depth study of the subject in English. More
Celebrating the 250th anniversary of the opening of the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow in 2007, this book provides a full study both of William Hunter - the many-faceted surgeon/connoisseur - and of his collection of art, which not only contains a number of outstanding masterpieces, such as a Rembrandt, but also provides a revealing snapshot of the taste of the period. While illuminating this crucial transitional period in British art, the book is at the same time a catalogue of the Hunterian collection. More
This book is first published to accompany the major exhibition at Compton Verney, ‘The Artist’s Studio’, staged at this great Adam-designed country house in Warwickshire. This rarely studied subject is covered in expert essays based upon new research from the late sixteenth century to the present day, focusing upon artists from Rembrandt and Courbet, via Rossetti and Cézanne to Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. More
Seldom has there been a gift of equal magnificence. In 1947 the 7th Duke of Wellington presented to the nation his London residence – Apsley House – together with a large part of its contents, the collection of the 1st Duke. Among the paintings are some of the finest canvases from the Spanish Royal Collection, captured by the 1st Duke of Wellington from Joseph Bonaparte in 1813. There are also important seventeenth-century Dutch paintings bought by the 1st Duke himself, as well as a series of French and British portraits of his illustrious contemporaries and depictions of battle scenes, which provide a visual record of the Napoleonic period. More
Celebrating the Beckett Centenary. Awarded third prize by The Art Newspaper/Axa Art Prize for best catalogue of the year published in the UK - "admired for the quantity of new material it presented about Beckett himself and the worlds of literature and visual arts". More