Hogarth and his Times: Serious Comedy.
Berkeley: University of California Press, (1997),
First American Edition. quarto, wrappers. 208 pp. University of California Press, Very fine. Item #10661
"This exhibition commemorates the three-hundredth anniversary of William Hogarth's birth in 1697, and it is built upon the remarkable collections of prints and drawings by Hogarth, and his contemporaries and successors, in the Prints and Drawings Department of the British Museum...It is a premise of both catalogue and exhibition that Hogarth's moral series are works of fiction, based on a simplified and schematic view of society, divided between three self-contained classes: the wealthy, 'the middling sorts' and the poor. By juxtaposing in this exhibition images from different series with the work of other artists, it becomes possible to highlight and comment on the very artificiality of Hogarth's notions of society, and to present the apparent truth of his social observation as no more (or less) credible than those we might find in a novel or play of the period. A second theme of the exhibition, which is extensively treated in the catalogue, is the way in which Hogarth's work and significance were defined by contemporaries and redefined by posterity."Extensively illustrated in black and white and in color.
Price: $15.00