the series bears comparison with william hogarth's contemporary series such as "marriage a-la-mode", "a rake's progress" and "a harlot's progress", also painted for the print market, but it differs from them in that they derive from a concrete literary source rather than the artist's own plot-lines. art historians see the "pamela" series as placing highmore alongside hogarth and hayman as "one of the initiators of a british school of narrative painting". though highmore's paintings were intended as treatments of scenes from the novel rather than strictly as illustrations, highmore and richardson became close friends, with the former painting the latter's portrait as well as from his later novel "clarissa".