Ronald Paulson, a renowned specialist in artist William Hogarth and in 18th-century English art and culture, died Aug. 7 at his Baltimore home. The William D. and Robin Mayer Professor Emeritus in the Department of English was 94.
“Professor Paulson was a titan among literary scholars,” said Mark Christian Thompson, chair of the English Department. “Part of a generation whose expertise could transcend narrow disciplinary distinctions and false field designations, his contributions to public knowledge were unparalleled. That is, Professor Paulson was an intellectual of the first order who found at Hopkins a place where his genius could be fully, undeniably expressed.”
Image caption: Ronald Paulson
Image credit: Courtesy of the Paulson family
Convinced early in his career that the often overlooked Hogarth was in fact a central figure of English culture in the 18th century, Paulson spent four decades studying the artist and his cultural environment. His first biography explored Hogarth’s work in the context of the literary and cultural movements of the time. Twenty years later, he produced an exhaustive three-volume biography documenting years of archival research on Hogarth, revealing him not only as an oil painter and engraver, but also a satirist, blasphemer, entrepreneur, and aesthetician.
Paulson’s research also placed Hogarth in the midst of a shift away from art as defined by the elite and instead reflective of more down-to-earth tastes, making way for forms including the ballad opera, the bourgeois tragedy, and the novel.
A prolific scholar, Paulson questioned assumptions throughout his career about the role and power of art, and how cultural developments changed how art was perceived. Among other books, he also wrote a biography of author Henry Fielding; an exploration of 18th-century English poets and artists; a work on literary texts and the emergence of English painting; and an analysis of riotous actions in three centuries of pictorial and literary art.
Born in North Dakota, Paulson earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Yale in 1952, 1956, and 1958, respectively. After serving as instructor, assistant professor, and associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1958 to 1963, he was named professor at Rice University. He moved to Johns Hopkins in 1967, where he chaired the English department from 1968 to 1975 and served as Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities from 1973 to 1975. After serving as professor at Yale from 1975 to 1984, he returned to Hopkins and chaired the department again until 1991.
Paulson was a member of the editorial board of ELH: English Literary History, serving as senior editor from 1985 to 2004. He also served on the boards of Studies in English Literature, PMLA, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Johns Hopkins University Press. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Modern Language Association of America, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Academic and Advisory Committees and Governing Board of the Yale Center for British Art, and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art in London. He was a Guggenheim Fellow, an NEH Senior Fellow, and a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1988, he traveled with several humorists from the United States to the Soviet Union as part of a cultural exchange.