Description
William Hogarth (1697–1764) didn't just paint London — he put it on trial. England's first great native painter was also its sharpest satirist. In an age of polite portraiture, Hogarth invented a new kind of picture: the "modern moral subject," a story told in paint. His great series — A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress, Marriage A-la-Mode — follow their characters from vanity to ruin with the pacing of a novel and the bite of a pamphlet, crowding every canvas with telling details: the gambler's empty purse, the bride's lover slipping out the door.
This collection, compiled by Daniel Coenn, gathers Hogarth's paintings in one volume: the moral series that made his name, the portraits and conversation pieces, and the late works that turned his satire inward. What makes Hogarth endlessly rewarding is that his pictures repay the same attention a novel does. Spend time with a single canvas and the jokes, warnings, and small tragedies reveal themselves one by one — a detail in the corner that changes the meaning of the whole scene, a character glimpsed twice across a series, a moral judgment delivered without a single word. You will also see Georgian London whole through his eyes: its coffeehouses and prisons, its weddings and wakes, its vanities and its victims.
Here is Georgian London in all its color — its coffeehouses and prisons, its weddings and wakes — seen by the one artist who refused to flatter it. For lovers of art, history, and sharp-eyed storytelling, this is an essential volume: the birth of pictorial satire, from the hand of its inventor. Get the ebook edition at a discount from Tellebook.
Hogarth's series also changed the business of art. Tired of seeing his popular prints pirated, he campaigned for copyright protection for engravers — and won, in the law now known as Hogarth's Act. His pictures are thus the beginning of two modern ideas at once: pictorial storytelling and the artist's right to own it.
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