In 2006, Tate Britain, in collaboration with the Louvre, organized a major exhibition of William Hogarth’s work which travelled to Paris and Barcelona. The exhibition was a hit at the Tate, but its success in drawing both crowds and critical attention to this canonically English artist among continental audiences was unprecedented. Co-curators Mark Hallett and Christine Riding’s accompanying catalogue, Hogarth, reflects the dual purpose of many Tate catalogues, providing a summa of recent research in the fertile field of Hogarth studies for academically inclined readers, while serving as an accessible introduction to the artist for a wider audience, including a French public. The publication of Robin Simon’s more specialized monograph, Hogarth, France and British Art, co-temporaneously with the exhibition, is opportune, as it addresses the question of Hogarth’s relation to the continent—so vividly raised by the positive reception of the exhibition.

Though there have been a number of important exhibitions dealing with specific aspects of Hogarth’s life and work, the Tate’s Hogarth was the first comprehensive monographic show of the artist to be mounted since 1971 and the first retrospective to appear in France. In the intervening years, the study of Hogarth’s oeuvre has been transformed, as has the wider field of British art history. Both the Tate’s catalogue and Simon’s book are, among other things, attempts to negotiate Hogarth’s at once dominant and anomalous position within that field. Often posited as the originator of the British School, but firm in his refusal to be a member of any club that would have him, Hogarth’s works are studied as history or literature as often as art—an attitude that can be traced back at least as far as Horace Walpole. This has made the field of Hogarth studies bracingly responsive to broader academic trends, but it has also marginalized a number of the issues with which art historians are typically concerned: influence, facture, and technique, among others. Hogarth as social commentator, entrepreneur, or even art theorist often eclipses Hogarth as working artist. From the start, the Tate catalogue redresses this imbalance by displaying Hogarth’s impressive breadth. It illustrates the full chronological range of his work, both engraved and painted, highlighting the diversity of Hogarth’s productions, from trade cards to portraits in his own very particular Grand Manner. This diversity is underscored by the catalogue’s structure, which is divided into thematic sections, each prefaced by a short essay.

The book opens with two longer essays. The first, by Hallett, is entitled “Hogarth’s Variety,” and uses the language of Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753) to outline the eighteenth-century context for the valorization of Hogarth’s art. This is followed by an essay by Olivier Meslay of the Louvre and the respected French Hogarth scholar Frédéric Ogée that attempts to construct a place for the artist in the framework of the French Enlightenment. Their essay introduces a leitmotif, present throughout the remainder of the catalogue, whereby Hogarth’s genius is equated with his modernity. This is followed by a section, introduced by Riding, that looks both at representations of Hogarth in his own time and his influence on later artists up to the present day—concentrating particularly on twentieth-century iterations of The Rake’s Progress, including those by David Hockney, Paula Rego, and Yinka Shonibare. Half of the essays in the catalogue are written by Hallett, who draws fluently on the last thirty years of scholarship, and on his own considerable contributions to it, to situate Hogarth in a broadly conceived and richly detailed framework of eighteenth-century culture, utilizing periodical publications, popular prints, and conduct manuals, while giving more traditional sources, drawn from literature, the stage, and “high art,” their due. Hallett and Riding have achieved a synthesis of the advances and methodological acuity of the past decades’ scholarship, with the concision and utility of an affordable and portable exhibition catalogue. These qualities should make Hogarth a lasting addition to the literature, and an important resource for students of early and mid-eighteenth-century British art, to be shelved next to the invaluable Manners & Morals: Hogarth and British Painting, 1700–1760 (London: Tate, 1987) Elizabeth Einberg, and London: 1753 (London: British Museum, 2003) by Sheila O’Connell.

Simon’s Hogarth, France and British Art marshals the author’s considerable erudition to execute a series of forays and excurses into the relatively unmapped territory of Hogarth’s relations with the continental art world of his day, as well as with the old masters, contemporary sculpture, the London stage, Georgian music, and Augustan poetics. The book is divided into two parts: the first is principally concerned with Hogarth’s attitudes toward France, French art, and artists (including numerous Huguenots); the second analyzes his competitive engagement with British art, or rather arts. Despite its title, Simon’s book is not, in fact, exclusively or even principally an investigation of relations between British and French art in the first half of the eighteenth century; that book remains to be written. Though aimed at a specialized audience, and often minutely argued, the scope of Simon’s book is wide-ranging and can best be characterized as an attempt to reassert the importance of Hogarth at the nexus of eighteenth-century British cultural production. It places Hogarth at the center of an intricate web of influences and affinities, many of which are fresh, and many of which have lain dormant in the literature.

For Simon, Hogarth’s greatness is axiomatic: it forms the premise of the book’s enquiry and its conclusion. While registering his objections to approaches grounded in social history and visual culture that have informed much Hogarth scholarship in recent decades, Simon ringingly endorses both Hogarth’s personal centrality to the establishment of the British School and the importance of his mastery to that achievement. Simon puts Hogarth resolutely forward as a technical practitioner of the visual arts who stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries, and as a kind of walking cultural entrepôt through which passed all that was most vital and significant in the culture of his day. In Simon’s own words: “In the case of Hogarth, a failure to note when he is operating at the highest level as a painter vitiates any appreciation of his achievement not only in relation to contemporary French art but also in the context of the desire to create a native culture of Britain” (6). Though Simon casts himself in opposition to prevailing art-historical orthodoxies, the conviction that Hogarth stands as a great national figure is, in fact, one largely shared by the authors of Hogarth, who are the inheritors and exponents of many of the positions Simon opposes. The differences lie in rival conceptions of the nature and constitution of Hogarth’s greatness, rather than in disputes over its magnitude.

While Simon emphasizes Hogarth’s mastery, the contributors to the Tate catalogue consistently present the artist as an exponent of modernity, and make that modernity a central plank of his claim to national, and European, greatness—though the nature of this greatness shifts between contributors. For Riding, it resides in the immediate appeal of Hogarth’s work to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century viewer. For Ogée and Meslay, and to a lesser extent Hallett, Hogarth’s modernity is articulated through the authors’ identification of the artist with eighteenth-century concepts and manifestations of modernity, and in particular with the Enlightenment; even (or especially) when transplanted to the continent, Hogarth’s significance remains that of a figure who produces innovations and establishes traditions.

Although in his lifetime Hogarth constantly agitated to improve the position of British artists, and not least himself, through his satires, his writing, professional associations like the Saint Martin’s Lane Academy, and legal protections like the early copyright law known as the Hogarth Act, the claims made for Hogarth’s greatness in these books have less to do with the artist’s own ambitions than with the desire to canonize the perceived founder of the British School. Hogarth was, without doubt, an artist of rare accomplishment, but he was not always uniformly successful in the eyes of his contemporaries, and especially in the eyes of those artists who emerged in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Hogarth is no longer in danger of being forgotten or underrated in our time, and we can surely afford to consider the reasons his ambitions sometimes overreached, as well as the ambiguous reception of his legacy by the later architects of the British School. Overlooking or denying his “failings” ultimately undervalues the complexity of Hogarth’s project and the fecundity of the cultural sphere in which he laboured.