Painter and his Pug, 1745, is a self-portrait by William Hogarth. Photograph: Universal Images Group/Getty.

[“Sir John Soane’s Museum [London] will announce this week that it is to stage Hogarth: Place and Progress, an exhibition of 50 or so works in which Hogarth observed the morals of contemporary life, conveying the comedy and tragedy of all human frailty.”]

“[Hogarth] was a social critic but he wasn’t against the establishment or in any way politically radical,” [David Bindman, Hogarth scholar] said. “The paintings are often seen as an attack on pretension and the aristocracy. It’s not actually the case. He had a lot of friends who were aristocrats. He simply picked up on contemporary literary ideas that the aristocracy and the merchant class had a number of people who didn’t live up to their ideals.”

Dalya Alberge, “Gin, syphilis, lunacy: Hogarth’s grotesques united in new show,” The Guardian, 3-2-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.