William Hogarth: A Life and a World - Softcover

Uglow, Jenny

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571193765 ISBN 13: 9780571193769

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2002

Synopsis

Hogarth's prints hang in our pubs and leap out from our history-books. He painted the great and good but also the common people. His art is comically exuberant, 'carried away by a passion for the ridiculous', as Hazlitt said.

In this rich, immensely pleasurable biography Jenny Uglow, acclaimed author of Elizabeth Gaskell, uncovers the man, but also the worlds he sprang from and created. After striving years as an engraver and painter, Hogarth leapt into lasting fame with his progresses of the Harlot and the Rake, the fashionable Marriage à la Mode, and the violent scenes of Gin Lane and the Stages of Cruelty. An artist of flamboyant, overflowing imagination, he was a satirist with an unerring eye; a painter of vibrant colour and tenderness; an ambitious professional who broke all the art-world taboos. Never content, he wanted to excel at everything - from engraving to history painting - and a note of risk runs through his life.

In Hogarth: A Life and a World, art history comes to life in the voices of Hogarth's own age. The result is an unforgettable portrait of a great artist and a proud, stubborn, comic, vulnerable man.

About this title

Review:

Combining in-depth history with perceptive explication of the references encoded in William Hogarth's images, Jenny Uglow enables modern readers to fully understand the society that shaped the art of William Hogarth (1697-1764). Hugely popular engravings such as A Rake's Progress and Marriage A-La-Mode commented on the tumultuous changes sweeping through 18th-century English society; Hogarth was appreciated as a moralist as much as a painter. Uglow colorfully recreates a vanished world, as well as the prickly nature of a man who revolutionized the role and the status of British artists.

From the Publisher:

9 1.5-hour cassettes

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0571193765
• ISBN 13: 9780571193769
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 816