Hogarth: Life in Progress

Jacqueline Riding

Softcover | 14 x 3.8 x 20.2 cm | 554 pp

Profile Books | 2022 | 9781788163484 

On a late spring night in 1732, a boisterous group of friends set out from their local pub. They are beginning a journey, a 'peregrination' that will take them through the gritty streets of Georgian London and along the River Thames as far as the Isle of Sheppey. And among them is an up-and-coming engraver and painter, just beginning to make a name for himself: William Hogarth.

Hogarth's vision, to a vast degree, still defines the eighteenth century. In this, the first biography for over twenty years, Jacqueline Riding brings him to vivid life, immersing us in the world he inhabited and from which he drew inspiration. At the same time, she introduces us to an artist who was far bolder and more various than we give him credit for: an ambitious self-made man, a devoted husband, a sensitive portraitist, an unmatched storyteller, philanthropist, technical innovator and author of a seminal work of art theory.

Hogarth: Life in Progress illuminates the work and life of a great artist who embraced the highest principles even while charting humanity's lowest vices.

A Sunday Times Best Paperback of 2022

Christie's Best Art Books of the Year

'Deft and richly detailed ... rescues the artist from John Bull caricature'  Michael Prodger, Sunday Times

'The full technicolour panorama of Georgian life laid out in a huge and passionate book' Lucy Worsley