Lara Prendergast

Has the rake progressed?

Hogarth’s famous ne’er-do-well is given a modern twist by David Hockney, Grayson Perry and Yinka Shonibare at the Foundling Museum

• From magazine issue: 28 June 2014

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

The show is titled Progress — but don’t come expecting happy endings. Only Yinka Shonibare gives us a relatively light ending, in that the protagonist does not end up mad, bad or lying in a drain. His photographic series, Diary of a Victorian Dandy, refuses to moralise and instead toys theatrically with race, colonialism and aristocracy.

David Hockney’s rake, intoxicated by freedom and money, wastes away in 1960s New York, against a backdrop of Kennedy, bottle-blonde women and transistor radios. Eventually the storyline veers into Bedlam.

While Hockney dusts his prints with contemporary events and objects, Grayson Perry goes full throttle. Into the six magnificent The Vanity of Small Differences tapestries (see ‘The Adoration of the Cage Fighters’, 2012, above ), Perry squeezes all manner of objects as he charts the most taboo of subjects — class. Using biblical references and religious iconography, he exposes our collective foibles: the sentimentality of the working classes; the painful self-loathing of the middle; the mildewed nostalgia of the upper. Penguin mugs, Hermès bags, William Morris wallpaper — the devil is in the detail, and it’s hard not to recognise yourself somewhere within the paraphernalia. Like Hogarth, Perry knows our vanity can’t resist a mirror to peer into.