What Is the Hogarth Bibliography and How Can It Help You Find Sources on William Hogarth?

Updated

The Hogarth bibliography most often meant by that phrase is the forthcoming annotated, international two-volume Hogarth Bibliography by German art historian Bernd W. Krysmanski, published by Georg Olms (Hildesheim, Zurich, New York), ISBN 3-487-10971-9. It is the reference work to consult if you are researching William Hogarth's life, paintings, engravings, or literary relationships and need to locate primary and secondary sources rather than rely on scattered citations. The same research site that announces it also offers biographies, books, online essays, image galleries, and special search tools, so the bibliography works best as one part of a wider search strategy.

What the bibliography covers

According to the site, the bibliography is:

  • Annotated — entries carry commentary, not just citations.
  • International — it draws on scholarship across languages and countries.
  • Two volumes — a scale that reflects three centuries of writing on Hogarth.
  • Focused on primary and secondary source literature — books, exhibition catalogues, articles, and scholarly essays on Hogarth's work, life and times, and literary relationships.

The site notes that over the last three centuries many books, catalogues, articles, and essays have been written on Hogarth, but attempts at a bibliography have been "rare and indeed imperfect." Krysmanski's work is presented as an attempt to avoid the drawbacks of those earlier efforts.

Why it matters for finding sources

Without a dedicated bibliography, Hogarth research tends to depend on footnote-chasing and partial lists. The site illustrates the scale of the problem with concrete examples of how dispersed the literature is:

  • Ronald Paulson has written more than sixty publications on Hogarth over six decades.
  • Mary Klinger Lindberg produced a dozen papers on Hogarth and the London theatre.
  • Peter Wagner's Reading Iconotexts: From Swift to the French Revolution (1995) offers a modern intertextual, poststructuralist reading of Hogarth.
  • Dennis Todd and Ronald Paulson interpret Hogarth's Cunicularii as a parody of the Adoration of the Magi.
  • Werner Busch's Das sentimentalische Bild (1993) reads Beer Street and Gin Lane as allusions to the wings of a Last Judgement triptych — Paradise and Hell.
  • Michael J. H. Liversidge published a booklet on Hogarth's Bristol Altar-Piece.
  • Bernd Krysmanski's Hogarth's Hidden Parts (2010) raises the question of Hogarth's possible connections with the paedophilic subculture of eighteenth-century London.
  • Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn wrote an excellent study of Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty as early as 1762.

A bibliography that gathers this range — from eighteenth-century criticism to twenty-first-century reinterpretation — lets you find work by author, subject, or document type instead of discovering it by accident.

How to use it in practice

  1. Start with a name you already have. If you know Paulson, Liversidge, Busch, Wagner, Todd, or Lindberg is relevant, use the bibliography to pull their Hogarth-related output together rather than searching each title separately.
  2. Search by theme. Topics such as Hogarth and the London theatre, Analysis of Beauty, or Beer Street and Gin Lane map onto clusters of entries the bibliography is designed to surface.
  3. Separate primary from secondary material. The bibliography covers both, which matters when you need eighteenth-century sources alongside modern scholarship.
  4. Use the annotations to triage. Because entries are annotated, you can judge relevance before tracking down a title.
  5. Pair it with the site's other tools. The same site provides Hogarth biographies, books, online essays, image galleries, and special search tools, so you can move from a citation to context, images, or a full essay.

Practical caveats

  • The bibliography is described as forthcoming, so check availability and exact publication status before planning around it.
  • The site gives the publisher and ISBN but no price or access conditions; do not assume it is free or open access.
  • For quick orientation, the site's biographies, essays, and galleries may be faster than the bibliography; reserve the bibliography for comprehensive or citation-level work.

If your goal is to find what has been written on Hogarth — by whom, on what theme, and in what form — Krysmanski's annotated two-volume bibliography is the tool the site points to, with the surrounding site resources covering the gaps while you wait for it.