New Hogarth Studies

Matthew Craske. William Hogarth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Pp. 80. Illus. $14.95.

Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal, eds. The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Pp. viii + 320. illus. $65.00. $27.95 paper.

Mark Hallett. Hogarth (London: Phaidon Press, 2000). Pp. 352. illus. $19.95 paper.

Dixhuitiémistes are fortunate in having the window of Hogarth's engravings to look through. Like Salvator Rosa, Hogarth liberated graphic art from the traditional themes of painting. He turned his gaze on contemporary life and enlarged the scope of graphic satire. Admiring novelists Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett drew upon his trove of images for their fiction, and Hazlitt awarded him honorary status as a British comic writer. The tercentenary of Hogarth's birth in 1997 provided the occasion to appreciate his cultural insights yet again. A new collection of essays by various hands, a life-and-letters volume meant for wide readership, and a brief introductory study are in different ways part of the harvest of that year. They offer interesting and at times wholly unexpected glimpses into the art.

The collection by Fort and Rosenthal was inspired by an exhibition, William Hogarth and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture, held at Northwestern University in 1997 (available online as of this writing at www.library.northwestern.edu/spec/hogarth/), and also includes essays first prepared for a Hogarth symposium hosted by Columbia University the following year. Despite its somewhat provocative premise, that Britain's staunchest defender of native prerogative in the visual arts entertained ideas of otherness and difference, the volume sponsors a rich critical reconsideration. Well-known for his rumbustious John Bullishness and as a jealous reactionary concerning representational liberty, Hogarth could nonetheless contribute images to a narrative that reads at times like a period primer on diversity, La Mottraye's Travels through Europe, Asia,and Africa (1730). A spirit of outrage about human poverty and degradation clearly animates the satire from The Harlot's Progress to The Four Stages of Cruelty. The authors gathered here find their common ground in three main areas: in Hogarth's attack on luxury, in the central place of women in his work, and in what might be called his aesthetics of desire. The essays by David Bindman, Sarah Maza and Sean Shesgreen, and David Solkin approach the problem from different angles but agree that luxury in Hogarth is a sign of dissolution and weakness. In "'A Voluptuous Alliance between Africa and Europe': Hogarth's Africans," Bindman takes up the prominence of Anglo-Africans in Hogarth's work. Bindman argues that Hogarth, like Defoe in Robinson Crusoe, likely accepted the institution of slavery as an economic reality, much as we want to believe otherwise, if only because the discourse of abolition found its voice after his death. Hogarth was personally comfortable in slave-trading circles, Bindman writes, and if he viewed slavery as a dangerous wrong it was because the system encouraged primitivism and luxury. Maza and Shesgreen address luxury as a target of critique in Marriage A-la-Mode by juxtaposing the series to a French counterpart created more than a century before, the Mariage àla Ville series of Abraham Bosse. Showing how full of expensive goods Hogarth's English interiors are by contrast with the French, the authors trace the influence of luxury into the sterile union of the young Squanderfields. Solkin argues eloquently that one of the prime objects of Marriage A-la-Mode, the antique portrait bust atop the mantel in The Tête à Tête, with its broken nose suggestive of syphilis, symbolizes the corruptibility common to luxury and venereal disease alike. In "The Fetish over the Fireplace: Disease as genius loci in Marriage A-la-Mode" Solkin traces the cracks and fissures of the fetishized artwork into the broken sword of The Bagnio, symbolic of impotence, and beyond. The key terms of the collection are meanwhile redefined from essay to essay. For Bindman the knowing look of Hogarth's Africans reminds beholders that the other...