2004 Reports

Pictorial frames and textual thresholds : bitextuality in Rebecca West and David Low's The modern rake's progress

Frigerio, Francesca

"Since its first publication in 1735, Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress has been extensively
imitated in a wide range of media, from the prints, copies and ‘interpretations’ of his
moral series in the nineteenth century, when popular culture, as well as Augustus Sala’s
biography, made of Hogarth a cultural icon whose work was considered morally
improving and therefore worth circulating (see for example William Powell Frith’s Road
to Ruin, 1878-82), to David Hockney’s twentieth-century homage, in which the idea of
the rake is used to illustrate the artist’s progress in the urban world of New York in the
1960s."