44

may remain completely unaware.

p 51

Dutch genre-painters ... seem to portray a static, almost timeless universe. As through a curtain of golden haze, the cavalier lifts his flute-shaped glass: his mistress, in oyster-coloured satin, sits poised before the virginals. They are contemporary character, arrayed in the costume of their time; yet they show little of Hogarth's absorption in the drama of the passing moment.

p 63

The artist's eye, in fact, resembles a camera's lens; and, during the early stages of his professional existence, Hogarth anticipated many of the functions of an expert press - photographer.

p 74

... Hogarth's was a mercantile age; and periods of great commercial expression

45

are frequently periods during which Realism prevails in the fields of art and literature. Emphasis falls on what Man is - an active acquisitive, restless, independent animal- rather than on what he ought to be, according to classical standards, or what, in romantic moods, he often dreams he might be.

p 86

Yet this vision of life, so drab and uncoloured, did not preclude an imaginative appreciation of the value of exact detail. It is the fascinating minuteness of the pictures he draws, the sudden flashes of observation with which he illuminates every episode...

p 88

" ... Let the figures in either pictures or prints be considered as players dressed either for the sublime - for genteel comedy, or farce - for high or low life. I have endeavoured to treat my subjects as