Arthur Paul Hoggarth was born at in Kendal, Cumberland on 4 October 1917. His father was a butcher. He was educated at St Agnes School at Rusholme in Manchester. In 1933 he won a scholarship to Manchester College of Art, but received little in the way of encouragement from his parents, who intended him to find a proper job. According to his friend Ronald Searle, Hogarth was ‘the original angry young man’. Fired by radical left-wing politics, he lied about his age and went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War, but was returned to England by the Communists, when they discovered that he was still only 17. He resumed his studies at St Martin’s College of Art in London and remained politically active. During the Second World War, Hoagrth’s Communist Party affiliations prevented him serving in Britain’s armed forces and he worked at the Ministry of Propaganda. In the post-war period, the Russian satellite Communist governments were eager to show off their achievements and sought artists who could record their successes. Through his contacts in the Party, Hogarth travelled to Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria. With Ronald Searle, Laurence Scarfe and Percy Horton, he also recorded the building of a railway in eastern Bosnia (in what was then Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia). In 1954, while working at the Central School of Art, Hogarth was summoned to the office of the Principal, William Johnstone. ‘Either’, said Johnstone, ‘ye arrange for me to be invited to China, or indeed any of these damned countries, or I’ll have to ask ye to resign.’ It was the end of Hogarth’s career at the Central, but he would be the first British artist to set foot in China after the war and he wrote and illustrated Looking at China (1953) as a record of the visit. In the period 1946-48 Hogarth worked as an illustrator and graphic designer for Shell International and then as art editor for various periodicals, before becoming a freelance painter and illustrator. He said he chose to be an illustrator because it was fun: ‘I developed a very strong sense of composition and design and the ability to extract elements of significance. Editing and exaggeration are also important. The problem is how to make an image compelling, even in an aesthetic way – not just to sit down and make a record.’ His illustrated books included Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1954) and Malcolm Muggeridge’s London à la Mode (1966) to Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon (1978); as well as a number of books written by himself. He also produced original work in watercolours and conté crayon and as a printmaker. Hogarth became an intrepid traveller and his partnerships with great writers of the day further extended his wanderings. His collaborations included travels in South Africa with Doris Lessing, in Ireland and New York with Brendan Behan and America with Stephen Spender, and Corfu with Lawrence Durrell. His came to know Majorca through his friendship with the poet Robert Graves and subsequently bought a house there. He also produced a portfolio of lithographs entitled Deyá (1972) with handwritten poems by Graves. He later encountered the author Graham Greene, whose thirst for travel was perhaps, if possible, even greater than his own. Hogarth’s travels in ‘Greeneland’ – what has been described as the hinterland of that author’s imagination, took him to more than 20 countries. His best-known work is probably the series of book covers he produced for Greene’s novels published by Penguin in the 1980s. The illustrations he provided for Betjeman’s In Praise of Churches (1996) demonstrated Hogarth’s sensitivity to architecture and a particularly English love of eccentricity. It is unusual for a commercial artist to become a Royal Academician but Hogarth’s outstanding draughtsmanship led to his election as ARA in 1974 and RA in 1984. He was supportive of the RA and strongly defended the controversial ‘Sensation’ exhibition in 1997. He was also a Member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and was appointed OBE in 1989. Hogarth cited as influences Degas and Ford Madox Brown, Sir John Millais and Arthur Boyd Houghton (on whom he produced a monograph in 1982). In 1997 he published his autobiography Drawing on Life. For some years, Hogarth rented Hidcote Manor near Chipping Campden from the National Trust. Recently Hogarth and his wife Diana had moved to Cirencester, where he died at home from a heart attack on 27 December 2001.