Shakespeare, Hogarth and Garrick

Plays, Painting and Performance

Robin Simon

$190

Hardback

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English

Paul Holberton Publishing Ltd
01 June 2023

History of art & design styles: c 1600 to c 1800; Shakespeare studies & criticism

In London in 1770 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) remarked, 'What a work could be written on Shakespeare, Hogarth and Garrick! There is something similar in the genius of all three.' Two-and-a-half centuries on, Robin Simon's highly original and illuminating book takes up the challenge.

William Hogarth (1697-1764) and David Garrick (1717-1779) closely associated themselves with Shakespeare, embodying a relationship between plays, painting and performance that had been understood since Antiquity and which shaped the rules for history painting drawn up by the Académie royale in Paris in the seventeenth century.

History painting was considered the highest form of art: a picture illustrating a moment drawn from just a few lines in a revered text. Hogarth's David Garrick as Richard III (1745) transformed those ideas because, although it looked like a history painting, it was also a portrait of an actor in performance. With it, Hogarth established the genre of theatrical portraiture, a new and distinctively British kind of history painting.

This book offers a fresh examination of theatrical portraits through close analysis of the pictures and of the texts used in performance. It also examines the central role of the theatre in British culture, while highlighting the significance of Shakespeare, Hogarth and Garrick in the European Enlightenment and the rise of Romanticism. In this context another trio of genius features prominently: Lichtenberg, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Denis Diderot.

Familiar paintings and performances are seen in an entirely new light, while unfamiliar pictures are also introduced, including major paintings and drawings that have never been published.

The final chapter shows that the inter-relationship between plays, painting and performance survived into the age of cinema, revealing the pictorial sources of Laurence Olivier's legendary film Richard III.

AUTHOR: Robin Simon FSA is Editor of The British Art Journal and author of the acclaimed Hogarth, France and British Art: the rise of the arts in eighteenth-century Britain (2007). He is Visiting Professor in the Department of English, University College London, and Professorial Research Fellow in the History of Art at Buckingham University.

210 illustrations

By: Robin Simon
Imprint: Paul Holberton Publishing Ltd
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 290mm, Width: 245mm,
ISBN: 9781913645441
ISBN 10: 1913645444
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 01 June 2023
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Unspecified

Robin Simon FSA is Editor of The British Art Journal and author of the acclaimed Hogarth, France and British Art: the rise of the arts in eighteenth-century Britain (2007). He is Visiting Professor in the Department of English, University College London, and Professorial Research Fellow in the History of Art at Buckingham University.

Reviews for Shakespeare, Hogarth and Garrick: Plays, Painting and Performance

"""Scholars of the theater, Shakespeare, portraiture, history painting, and the 18th century will find much in this book to advance their study. Deeply researched and astutely written, it is lavishly illustrated with 207 plates, making the work a delight for both eye and mind.""-- ""Choice"" ""As such, it is a valuable and enjoyable contribution to theatrical and art history. . . . Though they are placed firmly within theatrical and artistic history, Simon's three titular subjects nonetheless emerge enriched, providing a wholly convincing justification for Simon's suggestion that theatre, as the 'single greatest shared cultural experience' of 18th-century Britain, is essential to understanding its art.""-- ""Apollo"" ""Fascinating . . . Provides a new understanding of the genre of theatrical painting.""-- ""Country Life"" ""[Robin Simon] furthers our understanding of Garrick's relation to Shakespeare by bringing on stage another member of the cast: the painter William Hogarth. An abundantly illustrated volume sheds light on 'the significance of Shakespeare, Hogarth and Garrick within the European Enlightenment and the rise of Romanticism.'""-- ""The New Criterion"" ""This handsome and well-illustrated book originated as the prestigious Paul Mellon Lectures, given by Simon in London and New Haven in 2013. Consisting of nine chapters, it offers a highly suggestive guide to the ways in which the Georgian stage inflected British art.""-- ""Literary Review"""