Hogarth

At a quiet auction, a connoisseur dismisses Hogarth’s pictures as dowdy “shouts and screams”—then admits that two of them are great. What makes the painter he scorns so hard to put in his place?

C. Lewis Hind opens his study of William Hogarth, born in 1697, amid the portraits and prints of an auction room, where a quarrel over the art of the past turns into a spirited test of Hogarth’s worth. Was he chiefly a satirist, a moralist, a preacher with a brush—or a painter whose portraits and crowded scenes deserve to be seen apart from their engravings? Hind brings the eighteenth-century artist into lively conversation with later admirers and skeptics, while asking what it meant to break from convention and make English art answer to life. Which Hogarth will the pictures reveal?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.