For years I have immersed myself in the incredible detail of Hogarth's art and the influences at work on him. It is thus educationally refreshing to discover how others view his influence on later artists and authors. The essays here also encouraged me to return to Hogarth and look at him in a new light. The collection consists of twenty-eight essays on Hogarth's so-called “afterlives,” in two volumes, the slenderness of which disguises over 600 pages of formidable text by a distinguished team of contributors. The first volume is concerned with the visual aspects of Hogarth's enduring influence. The second is concerned with the ways in which his images and thoughts have been transmuted into verbal forms.
The elegantly designed covers include clever illustrations by Pietro Spica (both 2020) that set the tone of the whole collection. For book 1, Spica's cover is a variation of Hogarth's Scholars at a...
