The Age of Highmore

Building on her 2017-18 exhibition at the Foundling Museum, London, Jacqueline Riding makes a forceful case for Joseph Highmore as a key figure in eighteenth-century British art. Her book, which covers Highmore's conversation pieces and portraits, his series pictures and his involvement with the Foundling Hospital, reveals Highmore to have been a painter of internationalist instincts, and as keenly interested in the narrative possibilities of painting, both individually and in sequence, as his coeval, William Hogarth.