I, Hogarth
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The great eighteenth century portraitist comes to life in this "gritty, bawdy and funny" rags to riches novel told in the voice of the artist himself (The New York Times).
William Hogarth was London's artist par excellence, and his work—especially his satirical series of "modern moral subjects"—supplies the most enduring vision of the ebullience, enjoyments, and social iniquities of the eighteenth century.
And in I, Hogarth, he tells a ripping good yarn.
From a childhood spent in a debtor's prison to his death in the arms of his wife, Hogarth recounts the incredible story of how he maneuvered his way into the household of prominent artist Sir James Thornhill, and from there to become one of England's best portrait painters.
Through his marriage to Jane Thornhill, his fight for the Copyright Act, his unfortunate dip into politics, and his untimely death, "the voice in which Dean's Hogarth tells his own story is rich and persuasive . . . Like stepping into a Hogarth painting" (The New York Times).
"A brilliant exercise in imagination and storytelling." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
William Hogarth, famous for inventing a "moral" storytelling series of paintings and engravings he called Progresses (including the Rake's Progress and the Harlot's Progress), turns out to have had a progress of his own from poor child to society artist, from engraver's apprentice to painter and lobbyist for copyright law, from frequenter of whorehouses to happily married man and back again, from ignored to lauded to mocked that would require a Hogarth to depict. Lacking such an artist, we have Michael Dean's biographical novel, which draws on Hogarth's own writing and a range of other sources. That may make the novel sound boring, but it's not, largely because Hogarth a likable self-promoter and self-described "pug" of a man makes for highly diverting company. It helps that he knew everyone and went everywhere, and that Dean is good at showing his foibles and his artistic process. Hogarth's eye for human frailty and nose for news, coupled with his way with line, made him the perfect artist for the first half of the 18th century a time when high and low mingled at the theater, the debtor's prison, and the brothel. If the BBC hasn't already optioned this, it should get a move on: Hogarth's life, as Dean portrays it, is an educational but sexily pleasurable costume drama waiting to happen.
