Hogarth is truly a modern artist. No mere middle-class moralizer, the English painter-engraver created a new kind of art in which everyday life had rich significance and in which people’s foibles are exposed through the artist’s direct participation in the scenes he depicts. In an excellent, engrossing, critical biography, Lindsay finds the key to Hogarth’s art in his treatise, “Analysis of Beauty,” which stresses the inseparableness of form and movement. With this esthetic, Hogarth transformed the traditions he assimilated—emblematic popular prints, the theater, works of Defoe, Swift, Bunyan—to sharpen his satire of a society gripped by the cash nexus. His caree inevitably meant a struggle to win over a new audience, from tavern gossips to sonnoisseurs and critics. Lindsay makes us realize anew the originality and relevance of Hogarth’s acheivement.