HERE ARE SOME EXCERPTS FROM THE FORTHCOMING Hogarth Bibliography by Bernd Krysmanski(The following is a randomised selection of entries.)
The Analysis of Beauty:
- "The analysis of beauty, By Wm Hogarth", The Gentleman's Magazine, XXIII (December 1753), 593. [The author of this short review states that the book "will gratify the imagination of those who read merely for amusement, by the variety of sentiment and examples that it contains; it will certainly instruct the artificer; and in many parts, it will enlighten the moralist, and assist the philosopher".]
- Amal Asfour / Paul Williamson, "Splendid Impositions: Gainsborough, Berkeley, Hume", Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31, no. 4 (1998), 403-32. [Deals with Hogarth's thoughts on ways of keeping the eye moving around a painting.]
- Michael Ayrton (ed.), Hogarth's Drawings, Notes on the Plates by Bernard Denvir, London: Avalon Press, 1948, 10-11, 84, 85, nos. 68-71. [On some studies for plate I of the Analysis of Beauty, among them drawings of hip bones.]
- Michel Baridon, "Hogarth's 'living machines of nature' and the theorization of aesthetics", paper read on 5 April 1997 on the occasion of William Hogarth: A Tercentenary Symposium held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, 4-5 April, 1997. Published in David Bindman / Frédéric Ogée / Peter Wagner (eds.), Hogarth: Representing nature's machines, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001, 85-101. [A discussion of Hogarth as a theorist of the Rococo in The Analysis of Beauty. Shows that a close study of the text contradicts Waterhouse's disparaging comments. Suggests, in addition, that Hogarth's aesthetic criteria, "fitness" in particular, introduce a direct relation between Newtonian science and art.]
- James Beattie, Essays: On the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism; On Poetry and Music as they affect the Mind; On Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition; On the Utility of Classical Learning, Edinburgh, 1772. Further editions: Edinburgh, 1776 and 1778, London and Edinburgh, 1779. [The "Essay on Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition" discusses the modes of combination by which incongruous qualities may be presented to the eye or to the fancy in order to provoke laughter. On page 608 is a passage on Plate 2 of The Analysis of Beauty: "A country dance of men and women, like those exhibited by Hogarth in his Analysis of Beauty, could hardly fail to make a beholder merry, whether he believed their union to be the effect of design or accident. Most of those persons have incongruities of their own in their shape, dress, or attitude, and all of them are incongruous in respect of one another; thus far the assemblage displays contrariety or want of relation: and they are all united in the same dance; and thus far they are mutually related. And if we suppose the two elegant figures removed, which might be done without lessening the ridicule, we should not easily discern any contrast of dignity and meanness in the group that remains."]
- Jochen Bedenk, Verwicklungen: William Hogarth und die deutsche Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts (Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Jean Paul), Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004. [Shows that both The Analysis of Beauty and the print, Tail Piece, or The Bathos, had a wider influence on debates about aesthetics in eighteenth-century German literature than hitherto assumed.]
- Peter Bexte, "Die Schönheit der Analyse", in William Hogarth, Analyse der Schönheit, transl. Jörg Heininger, Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1995, 212-28. [Afterword to the new German translation of Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty.]
- Ilaria Bignamini / Martin Postle, The Artist's Model: Its Role in British Art from Lely to Etty, University Art Gallery, Nottingham, 30 April-31 May 1991, The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood, 19 June-31 August 1991, 15 [on Hogarth's description of the human skin]; 62, no. 37 [on The Analysis of Beauty, Plate 1]; 78, no. 64 [on Paul Sandby's anti-Hogarth caricature, Pugg's Graces etched from his original daubing].
- David Bindman, "Am I not a man and a brother?: British art and slavery in the eighteenth century", Res, no. 26 (Autumn 1994), 71. [On Hogarth's argument "that 'blackness' was literally skin-deep, caused by different colored juices that flow through the cutis, or underskin".]
- Ulrike Bolte, Deformität als Metapher: Ihre Bedeutung und Rezeption im England des 18. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris, Vienna: Peter Lang, 1993 [Europäische Hochschulschriften, Series XXVIII: Kunstgeschichte, Vol. 187], 22 ff., 36-37, 47-48, 149, 171-72, 196. [Discusses the "unfit" or "deformed" as seen by Hogarth in his treatise. Also mentions the differences between Hogarth's and Edmund Burke's aesthetics.]
- E[benezer] Cobham Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: Giving the Derivation, Source, or Origin of Common Phrases, Allusions, and Words that have a Tale to tell, new edition, revised, corrected and enlarged, to which is added a concise Bibliography of English Literature, London, New York: Cassell and Company, 1897. [Includes an entry on the "Line of Beauty". Says that Mengs was of the same opinion as Hogarth, but thought the curve "should be more serpentine. Of course, these fancies are not tenable, for the line which may be beautiful for one object would be hideous in another. What would Hogarth have said to a nose or mouth which followed his line of beauty?"]
- Olivier Brunet (ed.), William Hogarth: L'Analyse de la Beauté, Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1963. [This modern French translation of The Analysis of Beauty includes, pp. 11-135, an extensive introduction and notes by the editor.]
Beer Street and Gin Lane:
- Diana George, "William Hogarth's Moral Message: The Politics of Eighteenth-Century Middle-Class Reality", in Frederick M. Keener / Susan E. Lorsch (eds.), Eighteenth-Century Women and the Arts, Conference, Hofstra University, 10-12 October 1985, New York, London: Greenwood, 1988, 184.
[Sees "both gender prejudices and class prejudices working together" in Gin Lane. Interprets, in addition, the "debauched woman allowing her infant son to fall to his death" as an evil, "wickedly debauched madonna".]
Mark Hallett, The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999, 195, 197-222, 223, 233, 236. [Thorough discussion of the two prints with special reference to the urban prospect. Argues "that Gin Lane demands to be understood not only as a vehicle of reformist polemic but also in terms of the functions and traditions of graphic satire".]
Fiona Haslam, "Hogarth and the Art of Alcohol Abuse", Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 22 (1992), 74-80. [Shows that Hogarth's prints Beer Street and Gin Lane formed part of a general attempt to reimpose legislation on the sale of spirits at this time. Hogarth compares the two scenes; in the former, traditional English beer forms part of the life of a well-ordered society whereas the consumption of gin, as in the latter scene, leads to the total disintegration of society. Hogarth presents alcoholism as a social, economic and ethical problem.]
Berthold Hinz, William Hogarth, 'Beer Street' and 'Gin Lane': Lehrtafeln zur britischen Volkswohlfahrt, Frankfurt am Main, 1984. [Detailed socio-historical analysis of Hogarth's prints in German. Compares the subjects of Hogarth's two prints with the twin motifs of virtue and vice depicted by artists such as Pieter Bruegel and the topic of "Madam Geneva" as reflected in contemporary broadsheets.]
"Hogarth and His Works - No. XI", Penny Magazine of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge [London], 4 (28 February 1835), 81-88. [Includes an important nineteenth-century account of the problems of drunkenness, overlooked by most modern scholars.]
E. Dudley H. Johnson, "The Making of Ford Madox Brown's Work", in Ira Bruce Nadel / F. S. Schwarzbach (eds.), Victorian Artists and the City: A Collection of Critical Essays, Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press, 1980, 142-51. [Hogarth's Beer Street is seen as the underlying design of Ford Madox Brown's Work.]
Robert Katz, "A Dickens Legacy", Dickens Quarterly [Amherst, MA], 6, no. 2 (June 1989), 66-68. [On the prints of Beer Street and Gin Lane which the author acquired in 1982 and "which on later examination appeared to be the only known survivors of the famous collection of William Hogarth engravings owned by Charles Dickens".]
Bernd W. Krysmanski, Hogarth's Hidden Parts: Satiric Allusion, Erotic Wit, Blasphemous Bawdiness and Dark Humour in Eighteenth-Century English Art, Hildesheim, Zurich, New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2010, 20-23, 29n80, 70, 97n295, 124n368, 212. [Compares the living "skeleton" of a ballad seller in Gin Lane with the beggar depicted with two dogs licking his legs in one of the woodcut illustrations to Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff (1494). Further compares the position of the legs of Hogarth's figure with that of the sleeping churchman in the print, Amidab (c.1710).]
Hans Medick, "Plebeian Culture in the Transition to Capitalism", in Ralph Samuel / Gareth Stedman Jones (eds.), Culture, Ideology and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, 84-112. [Overlooked by Hogarthian scholars, under the headline "A New Thirst and its Background: Hogarth, Gin Lane and Beer Street", pp. 96-113, the author analyses Hogarth's two prints from the point of view of an eyewitness. The essay includes an interpretation of the inverted cross in Gin Lane, seen as
replacing, in a "perverse" way, the church cross that is missing from a neighbouring steeple.]
John Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth, and a Catalogue of his Works chronologically arranged, with occasional Remarks, 2nd edn, London: Printed by and for J. Nichols, 1782, 50, 247-50, 451. [States that Horace Walpole is mistaken in his observation that, in Beer Street, "the variation of the butcher lifting the Frenchman in his hand, was an afterthought. ... This butcher is in reality a blacksmith; and the violent hyperbole is found in the original drawing, as well as in the earliest impressions of the plate. ... The painter, who ... is copying a bottle from one hanging by him as a pattern, has been regarded as a stroke of satire on John Stephen Liotard, who (as Mr. Walpole abserves) 'could render nothing but what he saw before his eyes.' It is probable that Hogarth received the first idea for these two prints from a pair of others by Peter Breugel (commonly called Breugel d'enfer, or Hellish Breugel), which exhibit a contrast of a similar kind. The one is entitled La grasse, the other La maigre Cuisine." Adds that the latter "exhibits the figures of an emaciated mother and child, sitting on a straw-mat upon the ground, whom I never saw without thinking on the female, &c. in Gin Lane. In Hogarth, the fat English blacksmith is insulting the gaunt Frenchman; and in Breugel, the plump cook is kicking the lean one out of doors".]
E. Paditz, "Darstellung alkoholgeschädigter Kinder in der Bildenden Kunst bei William Hogarth und Jakob Jordaens - ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Alkoholismus und der Alkoholembryopathie", Kinderärztliche Praxis [Leipzig], 54, no. 1 (January 1986), 39-47, particularly 42-45. [On the depiction of alcohol-damaged children in the art of Hogarth and Jakob Jordaens - a contribution to the history of alcoholism and alcoholic embryopathy. Discovers typical dysmorphic signs on faces associated with alcoholic embryopathy in three Hogarth prints: Gin Lane, Night, and A Country Inn Yard at Election Time.]
Marriage A-la-Mode:
- Joseph Burke, "Ronald Paulson, The Art of Hogarth, London, Phaidon, 1975", RACAR: Revue d'art canadienne, Canadian Art Review, 4, no. 1 (1977), 48-49. [This book review includes a detailed interpretation of Marriage A-la-Mode, Plate 3, proceeding on the assumption that the angry woman is not a procuress but "a practising prostitute. Hogarth invariably follows the contemporary practice of distinguishing between Madams and harlots by dressing the former soberly and with dignity, as if matrons on their way to church, and the latter in their service uniform of lace and a brightly coloured apron." Thus the subject of Plate 3 "is not the health of the young girl, but that of the Earl himself. He has summoned the two to the doctor to find which has infected him. Like Solomon, he discovers the truth by an ingenious trick, worked out in advance with the doctor, who polishes his glasses as if preparing to conduct an examination. In fact the syphilitic Earl and the elderly doctor, even together, are no match for the tall and magnificently developed harlot in a trial of force. She falls, however, into the trap and furiously opens a clasp-knife to prevent examination, while the innocent girl continues to weep. The doctor grins and the Earl, who displays the medicine he has been forced to take and presumably share with his younger mistress, and at the same time raises his cane in a threatening gesture, looks searchingly at the enraged harlot."]
- Werner Busch, "Hogarths Marriage A-la-Mode: Zur Dialektik von Detailgenauigkeit und Vieldeutigkeit", in 'Marriage A-la-Mode' - Hogarth und seine deutschen Bewunderer, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie - Altes Museum, Berlin, 18 December 1998-28 February 1999, Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie Frankfurt am Main, 25 March-20 June 1999, exh. cat., ed. Martina Dillmann and Claude Keisch, Berlin, 1998, 70-83. [Offers different readings ("Lektürevorschläge") of Scenes 1 and 5. Suggests, pp. 80-81, that the main motif in Scene 5 alludes to Rembrandt's Descent from the Cross (Ermitage, St Petersburg, formerly Walpole collection).]
- Werner Busch, "Hogarth's Marriage A-la-Mode: the dialectic between precision and ambiguity", in David Bindman / Frédéric Ogée / Peter Wagner (eds.), Hogarth: Representing Nature's Machines, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001, 195-218. [English version of the German essay above.]
- CANTIANUS, Gentleman's Magazine, LIX, 1 (1789), 391-92. [On Edward Swallow, butler to Archbishop Herring, who may be seen "in the figure of the Old Steward, in plate II, of Marriage à la Mode". See also the reply by "W. & D." (i.e. the Rev. Samuel Denne) in the Gentleman's Magazine, LIX, 2 (1789), 628.]
- Vincent Carretta, "Petticoats in Power: Catherine the Great in British Political Cartoons", 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, 1 (1993), 23-106. [Briefly mentions the depiction of Judith and Holofernes in the first plate as a part of the ambivalent visual traditions of representing strong women that underlay British satirical treatments of Catherine the Great.]
- A Catalogue of the Pictures in the National Gallery, Pall Mall, London, 1824, 3, nos. 1-6. [First National Gallery catalogue mentioning Hogarth's paintings.]
- Thomas Clerk, The Works of William Hogarth (Including the 'Analysis of Beauty';) Elucidated by Descriptions, Critical, Moral and Historical; (Founded on the most approved Authorities.) To which is prefixed Some Account of his Life, 2 vols., London: Printed for R. Scholey ... By T. Davison, 1810, I: 116-32. [Claims, pp. 116-17, that the descriptions of the series used for Clerk's book were found among the papers of the "late Mr. Lane (of Hillingdon)", the first purchaser of the six paintings, and that "his family believe them to be Hogarth's explanations, either copied from the artist's own handwriting, or verbally given to Mr. Lane at the time he purchased the pictures. That the descriptions in question are Hogarth's is highly probable; as, on comparing them with the explanations published in French by Rouquet (to whom the painter is known to have communicated information), there is a very striking coincidence."]
- George Colman / David Garrick, The Clandestine Marriage, London: T. Becket & P. A. De Hondt; Edinburgh: R. Fleming; Dublin: G. Faulkner; Dublin: Printed for A. Leathley, J. Hoey, Sen. P. Wilson, J. Exshaw, E. Watts, H. Saunders, J. Hoey, Jun. W. Sleater, and S. Watson, 1766. [This play is a comic retelling of the first scene of Hogarth's Marriage A-la-Mode. See also Helmut E. Gerber, "The Clandestine Marriage and its Hogarthian Associations", Modern Language Notes, 72 (1957), 267-71.]
- Sidney Colvin, "From Rigaud to Reynolds: Characteristics of French and English Painting in the 18th Century, IX. - William Hogarth (1697-1764)", The Portfolio, 3 (1872-73), 152-53. [Mentions that Heinrich Heine "speaks of the paintings of the 'Marriage à la Mode' as being the most inharmonious display, the worst assemblage of crying colours in the world. When we find Heine in the next page enthusiastic over the colouring of Paul Delaroche in his 'Deathbed of Mazarin' and other works, we feel that he must be speaking partly in carelessness and partly in natural disqualification."]
A FINAL SUGGESTION
For those thousands of further references to the numerous valuable essays on Hogarth, which have appeared in many different languages in journals from all over the world during the past three centuries; and for other indispensible sources and publications, the reader should consult the forthcoming, annotated, two-volume by the author of this Web site.
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