{"id":1291,"date":"2018-06-24T13:31:04","date_gmt":"2018-06-24T13:31:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=1291"},"modified":"2025-09-21T18:39:32","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T22:39:32","slug":"cynthia-ellen-roman-ed-hogarths-legacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2018\/06\/24\/cynthia-ellen-roman-ed-hogarths-legacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Cynthia Ellen Roman, ed. Hogarth\u2019s Legacy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Cynthia Ellen Roman, ed. Hogarth\u2019s Legacy<\/h1>\n\n
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Editor<\/a><\/div>\n\n
in <\/span>Book review<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Cynthia Ellen Roman, ed. Hogarth\u2019s Legacy. <\/a><\/em>New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016. xl, 259p., 108 ill. ISBN 9780300215618. US$ 60.00 (hardcover).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Cynthia Ellen Roman\u2019s edition of collected essays on the legacy of the English engraver, printmaker, and painter William Hogarth (1697-1764) is a timely tribute to one of the most iconic figures of the eighteenth-century visual satire, 250 years after the artist\u2019s death. The collection focuses for the first time on Hogarth\u2019s afterlife in Britain and abroad by bringing together eight contributions by a multidisciplinary team of scholars. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a beautifully illustrated volume containing 108 artworks by Hogarth (or copies after the artist\u2019s prints), many of them held in the Lewis Walpole Library\u2019s outstanding collection, the editor successfully illuminates the multifaceted nature of Hogarth\u2019s art and his enduring influence on the development of graphic satire during the eighteenth century and beyond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are many reasons to praise this elegant collection, some of the most important being its illustrious contributors and the range of topics covered. Art historian Douglas Fordham opens the book with an essay on \u201cHogarth\u2019s Act as the Professional Caricaturist\u201d in which he unveils the artist\u2019s role in the passing of the Engravers\u2019 Act of 1735, also known as Hogarth\u2019s Act, which is one of the most enduring legacies of the artist. Proposing that the value of a print lies not in the paper but in the \u201cdesign,\u201d which necessarily goes beyond the simple copy of one\u2019s work, the Engraver\u2019s Act created opportunities for the emergence of the professional caricaturist in England, outstandingly represented by James Gillray and George Cruikshank later on. In \u201cCopying The Sleeping Congregation<\/em>: Hogarthian Innovations and the Rise of Graphic Satire,\u201d Cynthia Ellen Roman explores the \u201cpersistent history\u201d (51) of copying the artist\u2019s work as fostering innovations in graphic satire. The chapter uses as a case study one of Hogarth\u2019s most famous visual satires to discuss the role of copies, translations, borrowings, and appropriations in forging Hogarth\u2019s pictorial legacy, and aptly complements the opening chapter by shedding new light on Hogarth\u2019s role in protecting printmakers\u2019 rights. In an elegantly written chapter, historian Mark Salber Phillips considers a less explored aspect of Hogarth\u2019s legacy: his work as a history painter. Looking at the artist\u2019s paintings for the stage as a road to history painting, Phillips discusses the former\u2019s satiric realism and the latter\u2019s elevation of style as exemplifying Hume\u2019s notion of \u201ccontrariety,\u201d a process whereby Hogarth\u2019s ironic commentary subtly infuses the visual language of his classical and biblical \u201chistories.\u201d In \u201cHogarth Moralized? Hogarth\u2019s Presence in Nineteenth-Century Mass Circulation Print Culture,\u201d historian Brian Maidment addresses Hogarth\u2019s reception during the Victorian era by looking at series of articles on his work published in mass circulation periodicals between 1820 and 1850, as well as by examining The Curse of Mammon<\/em>(1839) by playwright Thomas H. Reynoldson and The Days of Hogarth: or, The Mysteries of Old London <\/em>(1847-1848), by novelist G. W. M. Reynolds. The author argues that these interpretations of Hogarth\u2019s work or reconstructions of Hogarth the artist in the first half of the nineteenth century answered the market\u2019s demands for educational, moral, and cultural values and reimagined the artist for a new audience. In \u201cHogarth \u2018Corrected\u2019: Modern Moral Subjects in France,\u201d art historian Patricia Mainardi explores Hogarth\u2019s reputation in France and his influence on several French satirists. Such artists include Jean-Baptiste Greuze, or \u201cthe French Hogarth,\u201d whose work is insightfully analyzed in this chapter, as well as Louis-L\u00e9opold Boilly, Rodolphe Topffer, Emile Wattier, Victor Adam, Edm\u00e9-Jean Pigal, and Edouard Charon, who \u201ccorrected\u201d or emulated Hogarth the caricaturist (a title with which Hogarth would have strongly disagreed). Michael Printy\u2019s chapter explores Hogarth\u2019s reception in Germany though the lenses of physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg who, in his Hogarth Commentaries <\/em>(1794), provides close readings of Hogarth\u2019s major print series and a few stand-alone pieces. Printy aptly places Lichtenberg\u2019s work in the context of the physiognomy debate started by Lavater\u2019s influential Fragments<\/em>, highlighting his use of \u201cpathognomy\u201d (Lichtenberg\u2019s more capacious term describing \u201cthe entire semiotics of emotions\u201d) in analyzing Hogarth\u2019s prints, and describing the German author\u2019s work as a sort of \u201csocial physics\u201d dealing with the study of human behavior and motivation. Dominic Hardy\u2019s chapter looks at the circulation of Hogarth\u2019s artworks and aesthetic ideas in North America after the Revolutionary War following two lines of enquiry.  First, the author traces down Hogarth\u2019s presence in post-revolutionary America to prove that Americans appropriated the messages of Hogarth\u2019s satires in general, and of the Wilkes image, in particular, as \u201cemblematic of political resistance to British tyranny\u201d (202). According to Hardy, Americans were deeply influenced by Hogarth\u2019s aesthetic ideas, as described by the artist in The <\/em>Analysis of Beauty <\/em>(1753). Second, the author looks at Hogarth\u2019s presence in the public sphere as reflected by references to his work in the newspapers of the time to explain the ways in which art production and consumption operated in America as compared to Europe. Finally, the collection ends aptly with a chapter by distinguished Hogarth biographer Ronald Paulson, who discusses the importance of George Steevens\u2019s compilation of Hogarth\u2019s works, together with his commentaries, in assessing the artist\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The collection stands out not only for the quality of contributions but also for its cohesiveness: various authors address aspects of Hogarth\u2019s heritage from different disciplinary perspectives (e.g. Hogarth\u2019s distinction between character and caricatura<\/em>, his contribution to the Engravers\u2019 copyright act, etc.), which creates the impression of a lively dialogue that illuminates the object of investigation. The volume is also generously illustrated and its large format allows for clear and detailed reproductions. The only drawback that this reader found is the absence of a list of illustrations, which would have helped readers identify them more easily (especially given that more than one author refers to the same image). This is, however, just a minor observation that does not take away from the truly superb contribution that this collection makes to Hogarth studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ileana Baird
Zayed University<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cynthia Ellen Roman, ed. Hogarth\u2019s Legacy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016. xl, 259p., 108 ill. ISBN 9780300215618. US$ 60.00 (hardcover). Cynthia Ellen Roman\u2019s edition of collected essays on the legacy of the English engraver, printmaker, and painter William Hogarth (1697-1764) is a timely tribute to one of the most iconic figures of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1294,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"wp-custom-template-post-template-reviews","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1895,1934],"class_list":["post-1291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","tag-18th-century","tag-illustration"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1291"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5721,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1291\/revisions\/5721"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}