Hogarth, France and British Art is a radical reappraisal of the art and achievement of William Hogarth (1697-1764). Hogarth has long been viewed as an insular and chauvinistic individual, with a particular aversion to all things French. On the contrary, while Hogarth himself liked to project this image, his effective invention of British art was founded upon a profound knowledge of contemporary French art and theory. This lavishly illustrated book conjures up in great detail the French and wider European context within which Hogarth's art was formed. The author examines the ways in which Hogarth interacted with and influenced his contemporaries not only in painting and print-making, but also in sculpture, poetry, the novel, the theatre, public life, art education, copyright law, music, and opera. In this wide-ranging but richly detailed book, full of analyses of individual works, Robin Simon draws upon a mass of new material, with fresh considerations of Hogarth's most famous and less well-known works alike, opening a window on to one of the most creative and formative periods in British life.

William Hogarth (1697-1764) was among the first British-born artists to rise to international recognition and acclaim and to this day he is considered one of the country's most celebrated and innovative masters. His output encompassed engravings, paintings, prints, and editorial cartoons that presaged western sequential art. This comprehensive catalogue of his paintings brings together over twenty years of scholarly research and expertise on the artist, and serves to highlight the remarkable diversity of his accomplishments in this medium. Portraits, history paintings, theater pictures, and genre pieces are lavishly reproduced alongside detailed entries on each painting, including much previously unpublished material relating to his oeuvre. This deeply informed publication affirms Hogarth's legacy and testifies to the artist's enduring reputation. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Hogarth was one of the great 18th-century painters, a marvellous colourist and innovator at all levels of artistic expression. Art historian David Bindman surveys the works of this artist whose wry humour and sharp wit were reflected in his prolific paintings and prints including The Rakes Progress and Marriage-A-la-Mode. Hogarth was also a master of pictorial satire, highlighting the moral and political hypocrisies of the day with delightful detail and comedy themes that resonate deeply with our times. The artist was a keen observer of class and society; this new edition has been specially updated to include a discussion of Hogarths many representations of Black people in 18th-century Britain, a subject that has long been overlooked. Now revised with additional material and illustrated in colour throughout, this is a vivid and incisive study of the man and his art.

Traces the career of the English artist and satirist, and depicts life in eighteenth-century England

Between the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and the American Declaration of Independence, London artists transformed themselves from loosely organized professionals into one of the most progressive schools of art in Europe. In British Art and the Seven Years' War Douglas Fordham argues that war and political dissent provided potent catalysts for the creation of a national school of art. Over the course of three tumultuous decades marked by foreign wars and domestic political dissent, metropolitan artists—especially the founding members of the Royal Academy, including Joshua Reynolds, Paul Sandby, Joseph Wilton, Francis Hayman, and Benjamin West—creatively and assiduously placed fine art on a solid footing within an expansive British state. London artists entered into a golden age of art as they established strategic alliances with the state, even while insisting on the autonomy of fine art. The active marginalization of William Hogarth's mercantile aesthetic reflects this sea change as a newer generation sought to represent the British state in a series of guises and genres, including monumental sculpture, history painting, graphic satire, and state portraiture. In these allegories of state formation, artists struggled to give form to shifting notions of national, religious, and political allegiance in the British Empire. These allegiances found provocative expression in the contemporary history paintings of the American-born artists Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, who managed to carve a patriotic niche out of the apolitical mandate of the Royal Academy of Arts.