Hogarth's work chronicles the seething,impossible London of Gin Lane and Beer Street,with a piercing almost narrative moral sense exemplified in such prints as A Harlot's Progress,the pictorial tale of a country girl gone to ruin.

William Hogarth (1697-1764) ranks amongst the few artists whose work defines a period of history:for his paintings, drawings, engravings and portraits have become the accepted representation of London in the Eighteenth Century.Hogarth's work chronicles the seething,impossible London of Gin Lane and Beer Street,with a piercing almost narrative moral sense exemplified in such prints as A Harlot's Progress,the pictorial tale of a country girl gone to ruin. A complex, profoundly curious artist, Hogarth would leave an equally rich legacy for British art,his instincts for parody and story-telling becoming essential to our artistic traditions of social commentary.Michael Rosenthal's study reviews the entire corpus of Hogarth's work, reproducing much of his celebrated series, The Rake's Progress and Marriage a la Mode, and addresses Hogarth's timeless status as the quintessential 'artist of his epoch'.