Hogarth

A landmark account of the great English artist's tumultuous life and times

William Hogarth (1697-1764) was perhaps London's greatest and best-known chronicler. The exuberant expansion and upheavals of city life furnished him with the subjects of the elaborate prints that made him famous, and that remain our finest and most fantastic visual record of eighteenth-century England.

Evoking Hogarth's fierce nationalism, his philanthropic vision, and his antagonistic dance with London's artists and patrons, Jenny Uglow's acclaimed biography "crackles with vitality and sparkles with insights" (Michael Holroyd). In the company of his friends and peers--Swift, Gay, Pope, and the rest--Hogarth burned to expose hypocrisy and yearned to be recognized as a painter in the grand old tradition. In decoding his work's details and damning references--to craven leaders and corrupt institutions, and the beloved, tragicomic tribulations of rakes, harlots, and common citizens--Uglow breathes life into his accomplishment and his thwarted ambition, showing herself at every turn "in sympathetic rapport with Hogarth the man" (P.N. Furbank, The New York Review of Books).