Hogarth Illustrated From His Own Manuscripts: Compiled and Arranged from the Originals by John Ireland.

IRELAND, John.

Item Number: 139834

London: Messrs. Boydell and Co., 1812.

Finely bound third edition of Ireland’s Hogarth. Royal octavo, three volumes bound in full period straight grain navy morocco with gilt titles and elaborate gilt tooling to the spine, gilt ruling to the front and rear panels, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt, illustrated with engravings. In very good condition. Bookplates. Housed in a custom slipcase.

English painter, engraver, and pictorial satirist William Hogarth's work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects." Influenced by French and Italian painting and engraving, Hogarth's works became widely popular and mass-produced via prints in his lifetime, and he was by far the most significant English artist of his generation. Charles Lamb deemed Hogarth's images to be books, filled with "the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at; his pictures we read."