Who Is Bernd Krysmanski and What Is His Contribution to William Hogarth Research?

Bernd Krysmanski is a German art historian and Hogarth specialist, best known in Hogarth studies as the compiler of A Hogarth Bibliography, an annotated two-volume reference work published by Georg Olms (Hildesheim, Zurich, New York), ISBN 3-487-10971-9. If you are researching William Hogarth, his paintings, prints, or eighteenth-century context, Krysmanski's bibliography is the resource to check first for locating primary and secondary literature; if you need interpretive arguments rather than source-finding, his own essays are the relevant part of his output.

What the bibliography covers

According to the research site william-hogarth.de, the bibliography is:

• Annotated — entries carry commentary, not just citations.
• International — it covers literature across languages, not only English-language scholarship.
• Two volumes — a scale suited to three centuries of writing on Hogarth.
• A corrective project — the site states that although many books, exhibition catalogues, articles, and scholarly essays on Hogarth have appeared over the last three centuries, attempts at a bibliography have been "rare and indeed imperfect," and this work "tries to avoid the drawbacks" of earlier attempts.

That last point is the practical reason to use it: it is designed as a systematic replacement for scattered or incomplete source lists, not as one more partial reading list.

Krysmanski as a Hogarth scholar, not only a bibliographer

The same source records that Krysmanski wrote Hogarth's Hidden Parts (2010), which raises the question of whether Hogarth could have had connections with the paedophilic subculture of eighteenth-century London. This is a contested interpretive claim, not an established fact — treat it as one argument in the scholarly debate and weigh it against other Hogarth scholarship rather than as settled background.

How to use him in your own research

The william-hogarth.de site also illustrates the kind of orientation the bibliography provides, noting for example that Ronald Paulson has written more than sixty publications on Hogarth over six decades, that a dozen papers on Hogarth and the London theatre come from Mary Klinger Lindberg, and that Peter Wagner's Reading Iconotexts (1995) offers a poststructuralist reading of Hogarth. These are the connections a good annotated bibliography makes visible.

Practical notes

• The site describes the bibliography as "forthcoming" at the time of writing, so check current availability and pricing with the publisher or a library catalogue before ordering.
• The ISBN given is 3-487-10971-9; use it to confirm you are getting the correct two-volume set.
• If you only need a starting orientation rather than exhaustive coverage, the website's sections on biographies, books, and online essays may be enough before committing to the full bibliography.