Complementing our main exhibition, Hogarth & The Art of Noise, will be a display, on the first floor of the Museum, of new work by contemporary British artist, Nicola Bealing.

Using both print and painting, Bealing’s work takes as its starting point the subjects and narratives found within 18th-century broadside ballads – descriptive or narrative songs on popular themes, often sung or sold in the form of cheap sheet music in the streets.

Vibrant, bawdy, surreal and humorous in its nature, her work bears many similarities to that of Hogarth’s, an artist she cites as having inspired her.