Readers acquainted with Ronald Paulson's many important contributions to scholarship on Hogarth and on eighteenth-century British artistic and literary culture may find much of the material in this new book familiar. Paulson earlier established the large outlines of his understanding of Hogarth and offered many of the details of his interpretations of particular paintings and engravings in a series of works including his heavily annotated and lavishly illustrated catalogue, Hogarth's Graphic Works (New Haven, CT, 1965; 2nd ed., 1970; 3rd rev. ed., 1989), and his critical biographies, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times (2 vols. [New Haven, CT, 1971]) and Hogarth (3 vols. [Cambridge, 1991–93]). Paulson's erudition and intelligence always make his reflections of interest. Here his comparisons of Hogarth with artists in other media, including Alexander Pope, George Frederick Handel, and Christopher Smart, are suggestive. Yet some readers may reasonably consider that they have already learned most of what Paulson has to teach about Hogarth without reading this last book. This is especially true since, as Duncan Bell (“London and Elsewhere: Hogarth's Tercentenary,” Burlington Magazine 140, no. 1139 [1998]: 38) memorably remarked in reviewing a Hogarth exhibition, Paulson's criticism of Hogarth “has now reached its Alexandrian phase.”

Paulson continues to develop his argument that Hogarth alludes to masterpieces of earlier continental painting and print in his English engravings and that these allusions control the meaning of his images. Thus, in A Harlot's Progress, in plate 1, where the young country girl meets the old bawd, Paulson finds Hogarth parodying Albrecht Dürer's woodcut, The Visitation, depicting the Virgin Mary and her cousin Elizabeth. In plate 6, showing the mourners gathered around the Harlot's coffin (which partly serves as a table for refreshments), Paulson finds Hogarth alluding to Leonardo da Vinci's painting of the Last Supper, in Dürer's woodcut version. From claimed similarities like these, Paulson builds a reading of the Harlot series in which the Harlot—far from being a negative exemplum in a moral tale, as some more obvious readings would claim—becomes not quite an allegorical image of Christ or an incarnation of the divine, but rather what Paulson calls a “humantion,” that is, a “human replacement” of a religious icon (142). Many of the supposed allusions seem unpersuasive to me, and many elements of the argument are slippery or speculative, some marked by locutions like “may,” “could be,” “must have,” and “we may assume.”

While some Hogarth critics have presented Hogarth primarily as a great original master of realism, seeing his genius as an ability to represent the visible street life of London and a commitment to new subject matters, others, including Paulson, consider his art as importantly making meaning by referring to other art. The evidence of Hogarth's treatise, The Analysis of Beauty (1753), certainly supports claims that Hogarth possessed artistic self-consciousness and sophistication. By contrast, if the meanings of Hogarth's images were as controlled by allusions to continental painting and prints as Paulson argues they were, it is at least a little surprising that earlier critics remained so oblivious of them. Perhaps in recognition of this, Paulson proffers the theory that Hogarth intended both exoteric and esoteric readings of his images, the exoteric and common readings not dependent upon allusion, but the truer, more sophisticated readings predicated on noticing the allusion.

Nevertheless, despite possible quibbles with interpretive particulars, Paulson may advance our understanding of Hogarth's art and of a kind of eighteenth-century Protestant art more generally. As William Hazlitt said, Hogarth shows “what was tangible and visible,” not what is abstracted or transcendent (Lectures on the English Comic Writers, vol. 6 of The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. [London: J. M. Dent, 1930], 147). For Hazlitt, this meant that, compared with an artist of the ideal like Raphael, Hogarth, for all his genius, remained an artist of a lower order. For Paulson, Hogarth's version of modern Protestantism underlies his decision to create a modern English art by removing “idols, images of the ‘deity,’ not just degrading and destroying them but transforming them into their ordinary English equivalents” (142). Instead of images of the deity, Hogarth offers images like that of the Harlot, who, Paulson writes, “may … from a radical Protestant perspective, demonstrate the belief that Christ is manifest in each of us—indwelling in a sense that was not metonymical but ‘essential’ and ‘personal’” (139).

Paulson may characterize Hogarth's theology more confidently than the evidence will support, yet his explorations lead to insights, especially in his account of The Analysis of Beauty, a work in which he argues that Hogarth replaced religious worship with “the enjoyment of beauty” (170) and religious redemption with artistic recreation. Here, he illuminates Hogarth's rejection of Shaftesbury's aesthetics and effectively connects Hogarth's conception of beauty to his images of the beautiful and natural female face and figure. He notes that during the eighteenth-century beauty was decreasingly defined in terms of the male figure; instead, the male figure became associated with sublimity and the female figure with beauty. In this reading, as Hogarth becomes progressively disillusioned with the ruling establishment, which victimizes poor people like the Harlot, he increasingly turns to images of beautiful young women—like the rake's wife in The Rake's Progress or the pretty milkmaid in The Enraged Musician, “mediators” who “redeem the ugly reality of living here on an unredeemed earth” (229) and who parallel the artist in his different work of redemption by recreation. The particulars of Paulson's argument may be disputed, but he does give an interesting account of Hogarth's early version of the beautiful young woman who may not have the power to save herself yet mysteriously possesses a power to redeem a man—the figure who becomes the Gretchen of Goethe's Faust and of much nineteenth-century art. Although Paulson is deservedly regarded as a leading authority on Hogarth, the best use of this book may be to treat it not as authoritative, but rather as a collection of suggestive propositions worth pondering and further debate.