^, CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY GIFT OF Professor Wm* A* Hgrnmond FINE ARTS ND 497.H6eM7"m5''''-''''"^ William Hogarth; 3 1924 015 712 833 B Cornell University y Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 571 2833 The Makers of British Art Edited by JAMES A. MANSON. William Hogarth. Zbe Rafters ot aBritfsb art. Already Published in tids Series. THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, R.A. By A. E. Fletcher. With Photogravure Portrait and ao Plates. SIR HENRY RAEBURN, R.A. By Edward Pin- NINGTON. With Photogravure Portrait and 20 Plates. JOHN CONSTABLE, R.A. By Lord Windsor. With Photogravure Portrait and Nineteen Plates and a Portrait of David Lucas. SIR DAVID WILKIE, R.A. By William Bavne. With Photogravure Portrait and 20 Plates. GEORGE ROMNEY. By Sir Herbert Maxwell. With Photogravure Portrait and 20 Plates. J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. By Robert Chignell. With Photogravure Portrait after Dance and 20 Plates. SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS, P.R.A. By Elsa D'Estbrre-Keeling. With Photogravure Portrait and 20 Plates. SIR EDWIN LANDSEER, R.A. By The Editor. With Photogravure Portrait and 21 Plates. This Series, in superior leather bindings, may be had on application to the Publishers. [all rights reserved.] -lUXif^J^.Sti. //('//mm ('/lorffi rt/i William Hogarth G. Baldwin gROWN, M.A., Professor of Fine Art in the University of Edinburgh Preface. The career of William Hogarth, though in itself un- eventful, touched the life of his times at many points, and offers an almost inexhaustible field for investigation and comment. Furtt^ermore, his activity as graphic artist is by no means confined to the production of the moral and satirical designs by which he is chiefly known. Any catalogue of his paintings will reveal a surprising productiveness on his part in work which is not naturally connected with him in our minds. He painted life-size portraits, and essayed his hand more than once in figure-pieces of a monumental size and on exalted themes. The relations of these very dif- ferent kinds of work to each other and to his whole eeuvre are not easy to fix, and the judgments of critics on their comparative values have varied from age to age. Hence there is always room for a fresh and independent treatment of Hogarth's life and art, such as is attempted in the following pages. In these chapters Hogarth is not treated solely as the William Hogarth original genius striking out for himself a new artistic line. This is only one of the aspects in which he is to be regarded, though it is of course the most important aspect. He was a Maker of British Art because he was the first outstanding personality of the British school of painting, and the first English painter whose name became a household word on the Continent. In not a little of his work however, he belonged rather to the past than to the future, and in one sense he was as much the last of the ancients as the first of the moderns. In his monumental figure-work and his portraits he was a man of school, conforming to an established manner, and sometimes surpassing, sometimes falling short of work in the same kinds by his contemporaries or pre- decessors. Whatever was the intrinsic value of the style he inherited and maintained, it was a traditional style, and Hogarth was one of the last who worked in this fashion. With the advent of Reynolds genius was substituted for tradition, with a result on technique and on monumental figure-work not wholly for good. So far as its modest limits allow, this volume notices the main facts about Hogarth's life and art, and indica- tions are given which may be of use to any who desire to enter further into the subject. Thus references are made throughout to the Catalogue of Satirical Prints in the British Museum Print Room by F. G. Stephens, Preface in which a detailed account will be found of almost all Hogarth's engraved plates; and a Bibliographical Note has been added in the Appendix giving an account of the chief original authorities for Hogarth's career both as man and as artist. The reader may find it con- venient to peruse this Note at the outset. Thanks are due to the Trustees of the national collections and of the Soane Museum, for permission to reproduce the works which appear as illustrations in the text, and the author gratefully acknowledges the kind aid of some friends in the preparation of the index. G. B. B. April igos- Contents CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. FASE Barry's glimpse of Hogarth — The artist under divers aspects — Patriot, moralist, and painter — Modern estimate of his handling in oils - - • I CHAPTER II. EARLY LIFE AND ARTISTIC EDUCATION. Birth, descent, and early training— Hogarth's literary uncle— The circumstances of his family — His apprenticeship to Ellis Gamble — Essays as a copper-plate engraver — Cultivates a technical memory — His choice of subjects — Different sides to his artistic activity — Stages in his progress — Plates for book- sellers—Original plates— The copyright question— Early paintings — Large Scripture pieces — Hogarths place as a painter — Reynolds's criticism — Hogarth's historical pieces defended — His predecessors in portraiture — Hogarth ii foUowerofasound tradition— The "Grand Style" fallacy - William Hogarth CHAPTER III. THE PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER OF HOGARTH. PAGE Hogarth settled in life— His appearance and personality— Amiable traits in his character — His social tastes — The Kentish tour — Hogarth's simplicity— His first great success— His _ worldly means — Hogarth as a controversialist — His anti-foreign prejudices — His opposition to an Academy — His defence of friends — The eighteenth century and Hogarth's work in it — Didactic pieces — Moral influence of his works 45 CHAPTER IV. THE LONDON OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, AND HOGARTH'S PLACE IN IT. Changes in London since Hogarth's day — Loss of the Thames waterway — And of noblemen's houses — New thoroughfares — Survivals of Hogarth's London — Coffee houses — Shop signs — Sights of the streets — The pleasure gardens — Professional beauties — Hogarth and Vauxhall — Hogarth at Chiswick — His time divided between London and Chiswick — His tomb in Chiswick churchyard - - - - - - 8i CHAPTER V. ORNAMENTAL DESIGNS, BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS, SATIRICAL PRINTS OF SPECIAL ALLUSION, SUBSCRIPTION TICKETS, ETC. Classification of Hogarth's designs — His style in ornament — Illustrations to Hudibras, etc., and questions connected with Contents these — Jacques Callot's influence on Hogarth — Early satirical plates — Rebuke to religious extravagance — Political satires — Charm and merit of Hogarth's lighter studies - - - io8 CHAPTER VI. DIDACTIC PIECES AND SOCIAL STUDIES. Hogarth as professed moralist and reformer — The " 'Prentice " series — Merit of the Execution scene — Power shown in plates like "Gin Lane"— The social studies— The "Harlot's Prt^ress" — Causes of its success — The "Rake's Progress" — "Marriage^ la Mode" — Hogarth's dramatic power, and his good drawing — Other social pieces, " Southwark Fair," etc. —George II. and "The March to Finchley"— The " Election " series — Pictorial qualities in " Canvassing for Votes " 130 CHAPTER VII. PORTRAITS: HOGARTH AS A GRAPHIC ARTIST AND AS A MAKER OF BRITISH ART. Hogarth as artist — Portrait-painting — Characterisation — Not a caricaturist — His execution — Line and composition — Model- ling and chiaroscuro — Hogarth a born painter — Handling unequal— " Captain Coram"— "The Shrimp Girl"— His gmre pictures — Compared with the Dutch — His perspective — Founder of the British school — His insularity — Hogarth a national type - - - 16S Appendix I. — Principal Works - - 187 ,, II. — Bibliographical Note - 191 „ III. — The Limits of Hogarth's London - -201 ,, IV. — Literary Remains of "Aid Hoggart," the Painter's Uncle - - 206 Index ... 211 xi List of Illustrations Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse Hogarth's Shop Card "Masquerades and Operas" " Pool of Bethesda " "Southwark Fair" Hogarth's Servants "Calais Gate" " Idle 'Prentice Executed at Tyburn "Morning" .... "A Rake's Progress— The Arrest" "The Enraged Musician" "Canvassing for Votes" . "Burning the Rumps at Temple Bar" "The Laughing Audience" "A Rake's Progress— The Tavern Scene" "A Rake's Progress— The Prison Scene" " Marriage a la Mode— The Countess's Dressing Room" "The Distressed Poet" . "Simon, Lord Lovat" "The Shrimp Girl" "A Rake's Progress— The Marriage" . Frontispiece Facing page 14 ), 26 ., 40 M SO 52 , 64 74 „ 90 94 ,, 96 ., 102 » 114 „ 128 148 152 158 160 170 176 202 William Hogarth. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. Barry's glimpse of Hogarth — The artist under divers aspects — Patriot, moralist, and painter — Modern estimate of his handling in oils, James Barry the painter, who came to London in the year in which Hogarth died, told a picturesque story which probably embodies a genuine recollec- ^^ , tion. He was walking, he said, through Cranbourn Alley with a companion, who ex- * claimed, "There, there's Hogarth!" "What," cried Barry, "that little man in the sky-blue coat?" and he described how he pursued the figure indicated into Castle Street and found Hogarth there talking with some lads.^ To Barry, who was born in 1741, Hogarth was already a heroic figure, and he placed him at a later ' J. T, Smith, NolUkms and His Times, Lond., 1828, I. 47. I B William Hogarth date in the Elysium of his decorative compositions at the Adelphi. For thirty years "that little man in the . sky-blue coat " stood out as one of the most otn s Of prominent figures in the artistic world of London. He was by no means a universal favourite, but to many he was an object of warm affec- tion, to more of curiosity, and to all of regard. Even to be lampooned by Hogarth was an attention that had its flattering side, and "Athenian" Stuart, whom the artist had satirised, with truly classical suavity kept the polemical etching in a place of honour in his parlour.^ Hogarth's satirical portrait of John Wilkes was a master blow struck in the bitterest personal con- troversy in which the painter was ever involved^ but Wilkes in after life told his friends with somethine: like glee that he was growing more like his portrait every day I^ The ordinary citizen, the man in the street, would recognise in Hogarth a bold, somewhat self-assertive| Hop-arth P^''s°"^''*^y> that, if it were nothing else, was as Patriot ^'^■*'®'^ *° ^^^ backbone. The patriotism of the artist was of the aggressive type, and though during a good part of his life England was at nominal peace with her neighbours, yet the war-clouds were often on the horizon, and Hogarth's pugnacious attitude to the foreigner suited the mood of the populace. ' J. T. Smith, Nollekens and His Times, i. 38. ''■ Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes, Lond., 1785, p. 386. See Bibliographical Note in the Appendix. General Characteristics s To the reflecting section of the community Hogarth appeared primarily as moralist. Social prints, polemi- cal or didactic or edifying in intent, issued in great numbers from his press, and were / sold at cheap rates so as to command a wide "'''* circulation. He became a recognised popular preacher of the more obvious virtues of industry, honesty, clean living, and kindliness, and many who had no special interest in art would run to see "that little man in the sky-blue coat " as one who had power to warn and to exhort. Such work as his was needed at the time, and he was not alone in attempting it. It is not quite fair to the eighteenth century to condemn it, as a great Victorian writer was wont to do, for an age wholly given up to materialism and corruption. As will be shown later, most of the agencies, which ultimately achieved the religious and social reforms of the Victorian era, were already at work in the eighteenth century. The leaven was already in the lump, though this lump was so compact, and composed of material so tough, that it has taken all the time between Hogacth's generation and our own for the leaven to get through it. Hogarth was with and of these agencies of reform, and all those who were at work to ameliorate and purify society recognised in him a potent fellow- labourer. To a third section of the community, d •/ • * those who belonged to the artistic world, . Hogarth's name stood for that of the ■^''^"^ champion of native talent, who had proclaimed his 3 William Hogarth faith in a British school when that school was not yet in being, and had put forth claims which before his death the art of Reynolds and Wilson and Gainsborough had already begun to justify. At the same time the artists of this younger generation knew Hogarth as one who stood apart, and had not thrown himself in with the movement that culminated a few years after his death in the foundation of the Royal Academy. Into the history of this movement, and of Hogarth's participation in it, whether as critic rr j^ or as patron, there is not space to enter, ■f The truth is that Hogarth was not a man n 7j who would readily admit the excellence'' Reynolds ^ .■',.,,. : of new ways in which his younger con- temporaries were presuming to walk. Steevens tells us indeed that Hogarth was jealous of the rising fame of Reynolds. 1 There may be some truth in this, and in any case the two men were by nature inimical. They were of very different tempers, and in the comparison between them the advantage does not necessarily lie with Reynolds. But independently of personal relations, Hogarth's attitude towards the new movement, with which Reynolds was so closely connected, can be best explained by chronology. Hogarth belonged to an earlier generation — he was indeed by thirty years Sir Joshua's senior — and was no more disposed than other middle-aged men of strong personality and dogmatic 1 Biographical Anecdotes, 1785, p. 97- On Steevens, and the caution with which his statements must be taken, see Bibliographical Note in the Appendix. His Rank as Painter views to turn his expectations for the future all at once into new channels. ' On their part the younger artists and critics of the day, perhaps a little nettled at Hogarth's attitude, were accustomed to treat lightly his achievements in the more specific work of the painter. His satiric power, his mastery in grotesque design, they recognised to the full, but denied him a sense of beauty or of refinement, and held it presumption for an artist of his special vein to attempt figure painting on a monumental scale. Hogarth in his own time was praised for merits which he certainly possessed, but which were not his only merits, while little attention was paid to those aspects of his genius which make him specially attractive to painters of our own day. It has indeed been reserved for later times to welcome Hogarth into the ranks of the masters of oil painting. The tendency now will rather be to exalt unduly his technical dexterity. This would be a mis- rr- mt a take as great as the earlier depreciation. . . Hogarth makes no pretension to stand in the very first rank of oil painters, but he has a place, and a distinguished one, among the artists who use the brush and the oil pigments as holding in themselves the secret of artistic expression. With such artists the touch of the pencil on the canvas is not merely instru- mental in helping to convey an intellectual idea to the spectator; over and above this it is in itself an artistic statement with a beauty and a character of its own. There are many painters who employ their pigments 5 William Hogarth merely as a convenient device for bringing before the spectator's mind some scene or figure or object de- lineated in colour and light and shade, while those artists are in the minority with whom artistic expression is inherent in the very fabric of the pigment, in the direction and emphasis of the brush strokes, in the texture and surface of the resultant impasto. No one can examine the Hogarths available for study in the National Gallery or the Soane Museum, without re- cognising that the painter was one of the latter class— an executant and not a mere delineator; and that his canvases are to be regarded as modes of independent artistic expression, not as preliminary stages in the production of the engravings by which their subjects are most widely known. CHAPTER II. EARLY LIFE AND ARTISTIC EDUCATION. Birth, descent, and early training — Hogarth's literary uncle — The circumstances of his family — His apprenticeship to Ellis Gamble — Essays as a copper-plate engraver — Cultivates a technical memory — His choice of subjects^Different sides to his artistic activity — Stage? in his progress — Plates for booksellers — Original plates — The copyright question — Early paintings — Large Scripture pieces — Hogarth's place as a painter — Reynolds's criticism — Hogarth's historical ' pieces defended — His predecessors in portraiture — Hogarth a follower of a sound tradition — The "Grand Style" fallacy. William Hogarth was born in Bartholomew Close, West Smithfield, London, on the loth of November, 1697. He was by descent a north-countryman. His family claimed connection with one Robert Hoggerd whose name appeared among those of the tenants of the Premonstratensian Abbey of Shap in Birth Westmorland, at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. ^ The father of the painter, Richard Hogarth, came from the Vale of ' Nicholson and Burn, History and Antiquities of the County of Westmorland and Cumberland, Lond., 1777, I. 474. 7 William Hogarth Bampton, not many miles from Kendal, and we first hear of him as keeping a school in Westmorland. Early in his life however he removed to Londoii, ^^ , where he again opened a school in Ship Coiirt Father j^ ^j^^ qj^ Bailey, and received some extra employment as corrector for the press. He compiled a Latin and English Dictionary, and published in 1712 a work entitled Disputationes Gratnmaticales, "whereby," as the title-page optimistically asserts, "children in a very little time will learn, not only the knowledge of grammar, but likewise to speak and write Latin." This statement the author clinches by the succeeding words on the title-page "as I have found by good ex- perience." Whether or not the experiment was tried on the author's only son, the future artist, we are not told, but William Hogarth in his later life appears on fairly easy terms with the classical languages. Any one in the eighteenth century who aspired to authorship or mingled with literary society was able to quote the classics, and we find not only Latin but Greek quota- tions and mottoes appended to Hogarth's plates. Such familiarity with the dead languages as the gifted son possessed may be put down to the credit of his sire, and it is possible too to explain on the theory of inheritance some more special traits of his intellectual equip- ment. An elder brother of his father, who settled at Troutbeck near Windermere, as a joiner and agriculturist, and died there in 1709, was noted for his jollity and whimsicality, as well as for a habit of spinning rhymes, and seems to have achieved con- 8 His Literary Uncle siderable local reputation as a rustic playwright and satirist. A certain Adam Walker, a native of Troutbeck, who enjoyed some esteem in the eighteenth century as a natural philosopher, wrote about 1770 an ,, account of this "Aid Hoggart," as he was ° called, which is quoted by John Nichols at the beginning of his Biographical Anecdotes. Walker gives an amusing description of an elaborate per- formance on the banks of Windermere of a metrical play entitled The Destruction of Troy, which opened with '■'■Paris running away with Helen, and Menelaus scampering after them," and the successive incidents of which, "interlarded with apt songs, both serious and comic," were interpreted to the audience by a sort of comic Chorus in the person of a clown in cap and bells, who turned the "most serious parts of the drama into burlesque and ridicule." The whole pro- duction was the work of this uncle of the artist, Thomas or "Aid" (old) Hoggart, who at the time of the performance had been dead for half a century. Walker also tells of him that "he was as critical an observer of nature as his nephew" (the artist), making every "incident or absurdity" in the vicinity an occasion for satiric verse, "so that his songs were said to have a greater effect on the manners of his neighbourhood, than even the sermons of the parson himself." In the middle of the nineteenth century a Westmor- land antiquary. Dr. Craig Gibson, obtained from the 9 William Hogarth descendants of Aid Hoggart's daughter the loan of a large MS. volume containing "an enormous mass of poetry in the handwriting of Thomas Hoggart and chiefly of his own composition," and a number of specimens were printed by George Lee at Kendal about 1850, in a small brochure of 77 pages. Unfortunately the editor was submissive to early- Victorian propriety, and announced that the "want of delicacy" in most of the productions of the rustic bard was such as "to pre- clude all idea of making them public," and adds that "his least decent productions are the wittiest and most amusing." Unless therefore this curious MS. volume can be recovered, we shall not have the means of form- ing a true idea whether Aid Hoggart's local satires and more risque occasional verse had what we may call the true Hogarthian ring. The poems that Dr. Gibson has printed are not " racy of the soil," but are commendable literary exercises of a somewhat conventional kind, re- minding us that their author lived in the days of Queen Anne. It is interesting to see the literary spirit of the time shaping the efforts of a rustic rhymester, and the fact has some significance for the subject of this book. It will be shown in the sequel that William Hogarth was no self-taught genius stumbling into art, but was broi^ght up in a sound artistic tradition of which in his work he took full advantage. It is true that he struck out an independent line for himself, but he also availed himself of the established style in figure design and ornament, just as his uncle at Troutbeck availed himself of the literary forms which had become everywhere Father and Sisters common property. A specimen from Aid Hoggart's repertory is given in the Appendix. ^ Whatever may have been Hogarth's intellectual debt to his forebears, his worldly position was entirely of his own making. He tells us himself of his father's diffi- culties through narrow means, "and the cruel treatment he met with from booksellers and printers," . of which instances are furnished, and states Tr ii, ^ that his pen "like that of many other authors, did not enable him to do more than put me in a way of shifting for myself."' That this did not imply actual poverty we may judge from the circum- stances of Richard Hogarth's two younger children, Mary and Ann Hogarth, whom we find in 1725 at a date when their brother William cannot have been able to do much for them, comfortably established in a mercery business, near St. Bartholomew's, Smithfield, in the neighbourhood of which the family had for many years resided. The shop card of the two sisters, included among the engraved works of Hogarth and dated about 1725, shows above the interior of a mercer's establish- ment with customers and saleswomen, enclosed in a classical frame with the royal arms at the top, while below there is the following quaintly-worded announce- ment : — ' The writer is indebted for a sight of Dr. Gibson's rare volume to his friend Canon Rawnsley of Keswick. 'John Ireland, Hogarth Illustrated, in., Lond., 1798, ch. I.; also in Anecdotes of Hogarth written by Himself, Lond., 1833. See Biblio- graphical Note in the Appendix. II William Hogarth "Mary & Ann Hogarth, from the old Frock shop the corner of the Long Wall facing the Cloysters, Removed to ye Kin^s Arm joyning to ye Little Britain-gate, near Long Walk. Sells ye best and most Fashionable Ready Made Frocks, Sutes of Fustian, Ticken, and Holland, Stript Dimmity, & Flanel Waistcoats, blue and canvas Frocks, & blue- coat Boys' Dra's. Likewise Fustians, Tickens, Hollands, white stript Dimitys, white & stript Flanels in ye piece, by Wholesale or Retale at Reasonable Rates." A desire to earn his own living, and at the same time a lively sense of "the precarious situation of men of classical education," led to the withdrawal ^f -^ from school of the future artist, who em- barked at once on the career where so much fame awaited him. His own account of his early years runs as follows^: — " I was born in the City of London, on the loth day of November 1697, and baptised the 28th of the same month. ^ . . . As I had naturally a good eye and a fondness for drawing, shows of all sorts gave me uncommon pleasure when an infant ; and mimickry, common to all children, was remarkable in me. An early access to a neighbouring painter drew my attention from play; and I was, at every possible opportunity, employed in making draw- * John Ireland, Hogarth Illustrated, ill. ch. I. ' The records both of the birth and baptism exist and are quoted in Notes and Queries, March 6, 1880. They agree with Hogarth's dates. 12 Silversmith's Apprentice ings. . . . My exercises when at school were more remarkable for the ornaments which adorned them than for the exercise itself. ... It was therefore very conformable to my own wishes that I was taken from school, and served a Jong apprenticeship to a silver- plate engraver." The engraver in question was Ellis Gamble, " a silversmith of eminence, who resided in Cranboum- Sireet, Leicester-Fields,"'^ then as now a _ ,,, ., .c r ' • 4. I.. Gambles thoroughfare of some importance. It must be remembered that the silver plate " of the Queen Anne and early Georgian period was in style excellent. It was freer in treatment than the later Georgian work influenced by the neo-classicism of the end of the eighteenth century, and admitted into its ornamentation human and animal forms as well as foliage in flowing scroll work. It is said however that the youthful Hogarth was exclusively employed in one special department of work, on those heraldic designs and cyphers which were engraved on tankards and salvers, and specimens of which any collection of old English plate will show. Hogarth speaks himself of " the monsters of heraldry "^ which it irked him to draw, and it is evident that his silversmith's work was very limited in range and in no way satisfied his artistic ambition.* ' Biographical Anecdotes, 1785, p. 6. * Hogarth Illustrated, in. ch. I. 2 We know from J. T. Smith, Nollekens and His Times, I. 193, that pieces of plate engraved by Hogarth were even in his lifetime prized by collectors. 13 William Hogarth We come now to the most important moment in [ogarth's early career, when his individual taste began to direct, him towards those branches of art ngraver j^ which he was afterwards to excel. His f first ambition, he tells us, was to learn "•^-^ to engrave on copper,^ that is to apply to riginal design and to the representation of nature the cill with the graver already acquired by coats-of-arms id lettering on silver. He was now twenty years of je and just out of his indentures, and found himself )nfronted by the discovery that copper-plate engraving jmanded a great increase of technical skill beyond lat required in the shop of the silversmith, while jure design invited to a far profounder study of iture than the copying "with tolerable exactness in le usual way " which was all he had then achieved. The situation he describes for us with an engaging ankness that is quite in accordance with his character. To attain this '' (the art of engraving on copper), he lys, "it was necessary that I should learn to draw' 5Jects something like nature, instead of the monsters heraldry, and the common methods of study were uch too tedious for one who loved his pleasure, and ime so late to it; for the time necessary to learn in e usual mode, would leave me none to spare for the ■dinary enjoyments of life. ... I found that the sauty and delicacy of the stroke in engraving was not I be learnt without much practice, and demanded a ' Hogarth Illustrated, ill. ch. i. The quotations that follow from jgarth's artistic autobiography are all from this source. 14 Engraving on Copper larger portion of patience than I felt myself disposed to exercise. Added to this, I saw little probability of acquiring the full command of the graver, in a sufficient degree to distinguish myself in that walk; nor was I, at twenty years of age, much disposed to enter on so barren and unprofitable a study, as that of merely making fine lines." Hogarth's expressed determination to have a good time in his life in general is characteristic, while, as we shall see, his avowed love of pleasure did not result in anything that can be termed dissipation. What he says about his native idleness is puzzling, for the im- pression we receive from his life is one of sustained diligence. It is true however that, as he himself indicates, he never succeeded in mastering the refine- ments of the engraver's art. As compared with the best products of the French and even of the English burin in the eighteenth century, Hogarth's engravings are comparatively coarse and summary, though he maintains throughout a fairly high standard. This " idle disposition," whatever the words may be taken to imply, led him, he tells us, " to considering whether a shorter road than that usually travelled was not to be found," and this introduces an interesting passage of auto- ^ h I biography from which much may be learned. The ordinary work of the i;ngraver, he lets ^ us know, consisted in cop;^ing pictures or prints, and though these pictures or prints to be imitated were by the best masters, "it was little more than pouring IS William Hogarth water out of one vessel into another." Even. to draw from the life in an academy was only copying, and Hogarth conceived in his mind a more excellent way towards proficiency in art. His idea was that the powers of observation might be quickened and the memory trained, so that the artist's mind would be stored with the appearances of the world of nature and of man, and possess a complete repertory of the scenes and figures and objects that he would after- wards employ in his pictorial representations. To use his own words, " he who could by any means acquire and retain in his memory, perfect ideas of the subjects he meant to draw, would have as clear a knowledge of the figure, as a man who can write freely hath of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet." In pursuance of this idea, he says, " I endeavoured to habituate myself to the exercise of a sort of technical memory; and by repeating in my own mind, the parts of which objects were composed, I could by degrees com- bine and put them down with my pencil. . . . Sometimes, but too seldom, I took the life, for correct- ing the parts I had not perfectly enough remembered, and then I transferred them to my compositions." On this passage John Ireland introduces a note ^ to the eifect that it was usual with Hogarth ^'^ " "when he saw a singular character, either ^^' in the street or elsewhere, to pencil the leading features, and prominent markings Upon his n&il, and when he came home, to copy the * Hogarth Illustrated, m. p. 12, note. l6 A Technical Memory- sketch on paper, and afterwards introduce it in a print. Several of these sketches," Ireland goes on, "I have seen, and in them may be traced the first thoughts for many of the characters which he afterwards introduced in his works." In ths Biographical Anecdotes Nichols gives us an example of this practice. "It was likewise Mr. Hogarth's custom to sketch out on the spot any remarkable face which particularly struck him, and of which he wished to preserve the remembrance. A gentleman still living informs me, that being once with our painter at the Bedford Coffee-house, he observed him to draw something with a pencil on his nail. En- quiring what had been his employment, he was shown the countenance (a whimsical one) of a person who was then at a small distance." ^ A forcible though inelegant action depicted in the background of the bagnio scene in the "Rake's Progress," plate 3, was also observed from the life.^ This habit of taking rapid pencil notes on the spot he spems to have formed before his apprenticeship was out, for there is a story in Nichols of a Sunday expedition to Highgate, where in a public- house the face of a fellow-guest who was involved in a fracas so struck his fancy that " he drew out his pencil, and produced on the spot one of the most ludicrous figures that ever was seen." ^ To quote again from Hogarth's artistic auto- biography, " In pursuing iny studies, I made all ^ Biographical Anecdotes, 1785, p. 15. '^ Smith, Nolkkens, I. 94. '^ Biographical Anecdotes, p. 7. 17 C William Hogarth possible use of the technical memory which I have before described, by observing and endeavouring to retain in my mind lineally, such objects as best suited my purpose ; so that be where I would, while my eyes were open, I was at my studies, and acquiring some- thing useful to my profession. " A systematic method for the collection of material' being thus established, it remained to determine its application, and here we find the painter still further amplifying his original artistic design. "A choice of composition was the next thing to be considered," and 'this he describes as "painting and engraving modern moral subjects, a field not broken up in any country or any age. "The reasons which induced me," he continues, "to adopt this mode of designing were, that I thought both writers and painters had, in the historical style, totally overlooked that intermediate species of subjects, which may be placed between the sublime and grotesque. I therefore wished," he explains, "to compose pictures on canvas, similar to representations on the stage. . . . _ . I have endeavoured to treat my subjects as a dramatic writer: my picture is my stage, ^ and men and women my players, who ^ by means of certain actions and gestures are to exhibit a dumb show." The reference here is to those specially characteristic pieces on which the fame of the artist is chiefly founded. In produc- tions such as the " Marriage k la Mode" or the two "Progresses" the successive plates present the same i8 The Painted Comedies sort of sequence as the scenes in a play. The same actors reappear and the situations advance towards the catastrophe of the plot. The actors, it is true, do not move or speak, but the grouping, the actions and the expression of the personages are so contrived by the artist that the story is told as well as it would be by speech and movement on the stage. The artist claims indeed that his pictures are to be "tried by the same test, and criticised by the same criticism " as stage performances. The particular kind of scenic repre- sentation he desires to imitate is, he explains. Comedy, by which he understands a portrayal of human life on the intermediate levels between the sublime of tragedy and the ludicrousness of farce, though at the same time elements both of the tragic and the absurd are per- mitted to appear. Lastly, in the style of composition here contemplated the moral element is to be prominent; "those subjects that will both entertain and improve the mind, bid fair to be of the greatest public utility, and must therefore be entitled to rank in the highest class." In this manner, by using Hogarth's own recorded words, we have been able to express the genesis and general character of his most characteristic productions, the moral and satirical plates. _ , , TL ^ 1 -1 -i r t Tableaux Ihey were to exhibit scenes from human life animated by a moral purpose, and •' •' present these scenes so that the spectator would read the situation as clearly as if this were explained by the speech and gesture of living performers. The material 19 William Hogarth of them was drawn from nature, and the artist's observa- tion and memory, aided by rapid sketches made on the spot, would store his mind with incidents and figures that he would afterwards combine upon the canvas oi the copper. Anxious and precise copying, as from the academic figure, was not to be attempted, nor in the technical execution was any effort to be made to rival the beauty and delicacy of the engraved line which only those who had served a long apprenticeship to the burin could hope to compass. If this were all, the story of William Hogarth's artistic education and practice would be a simple one. As a matter of fact, his energies were by no ■J. ... means confined within the range of produc- •^ tion that has just been indicated. Besides being (i) an original designer of these characteristic moral scenes and situations in which the special bent of his genius best displayed itself, Hogarth was (z) a controversialist. A reformer, with a pronounced polemical vein, he delighted to scourge the vices and follies of his kind, and the presentation of human life in the broad and genial spirit of a comedian was often in his work exchanged for the incisive critique of the satirist. Moreover ^), quite independently of his powers of invention, Hbgarth was a professed engraver, with a workshop to which all sorts of commissions within the engraver's line of business would come. Again (4), he was also on the other side a painter, and his efforts in this branch were by no means confined to the representation by the brush of those same scenes A Versatile Artist which were afterwards to be multiplied by means of the copper-plate printing-press. He essayed the higher walks of painting in historical and Scriptural composi- tions in the grand style and on a monumental scale, and carried on no incon aidei abl u bui»iii u< » s-AS_ a painter of portraits both singly and in groups. The question therefore wTTich is now before usjsj Haw came it that Hogarth entered upon theseSwder fields of art^nd how did he pre2are_himself for their cuTtivatton ? " To obtain an answer to this question we must undertake a more systematic survey of Hogarth's early activities in different forms of art, „ . , . . • Hcotciv of and m so doing we must naturally still rely , . „ , to a considerable extent on his own remini- -^ scences. It will be remembered as the primary fact in Hogarth's early life that he had to make his own living, and had served a long apprentice- ship to one special branch of the engraver's art. Hence it was natural that the instant he became ^ , . master of his own time he determined, as we have seen, to qualify himself for ensrrav- „ mg on copper. "In this,' he says, "I readily got employment, although by engraving, until I was near thirty, I could do little more than maintain myself; but even then," he characteristically adds, " I was a punctual paymaster." The first work he received seems to have been from the booksellers, for he tells us that "frontispieces to books, such as prints to Hudibras, in twelves [i2mo] etc., soon brought me into the way." He was employed also on commissions in his old style 21 William Hogarth of work, such as the engraving of the tops of snuff- boxes, the emblazoning of arms for book plates, tickets, and similar purposes, and the production of shop cards. These involved ornamental borders and headings in which the human figure could be employed, and engraved letterpress. His own shop card with " W. Hogarth, Engraver" and the date "April 21st, 1720," has come down to us, and another specimen is the card for his sisters Mary and Ann Hogarth, already referred to. His earliest extant production is reckoned to be a small engraving for the lid of a snuff-box, representing a scene out of Pope's Rape of the Lock. Hogarth's work for the booksellers claims some special attention. Its intrinsic importance is not great, and Mr. Austin Dobson dismisses it in a somewhat summary fashion; but it is of interest in relation to the development of the artist's genius. There is about it far less originality than we should r, , expect, and far less also of what may be „ ' termed the true Hogarthian vein. The work seLLcTS . ... consists of some series of illustrations, mostly but not exclusively on a small scale ("in twelves " as he terms it), to The Travels of Aubrey de la Mottraye (1723), to The New Metamorphosis (a re-casting of The Golden Ass of Apuleius, in a modern setting) (1724), to Beaver's Roman Military Punishments (headpieces only) (1725), to Butler's Hudibras (1726), and also to Don Quixote (of uncertain date [c. 1738?]). Many of these plates are signed "W. Hogarth, delt. et sculpt.," others "W. Hogarth, sculpt.," others not signed at all. It must be 22 Early Book-designs remembered that the artist proclaims himself in his shop card of 1720 as "engraver," and was naturally pre- pared to transfer to the copper other persons' designs, as well as any he might himself devise. Thus in the Travels one plate is signed "Jos. Grisoni, Florent. del. — W. Hogarth, sculp.," and " W. Hogarth, sculp.," appears under a view of the Atmeidan at Constanti- nople that Hogarth certainly never saw. The same signature is found under a plate exhibiting a dance of Greek damsels in the island of Scio, in some of whose figures there is no little grace and elasticity. This design was claimed by John Ireland for Hogarth, ^ though there is nothing of his style to be observed in it. On the other hand, when the signature uses the word "invt.," the engraver indisputably claims the design as well as the work of the plate as his own. Now in the case of some of these early book-designs so claimed, as In those of The New Metamorphosis of 1724, and the Hudibras of 1726, there is an undoubted similarity to certain earlier illustrations to the same works, and this fact has raised the question of the artist's originality. In some of the designs we see Hogarth basing his own work without any attempt at concealment upon that of his predecessors, while at the same time in various improvements which he introduces we have evidence of the working of his own artistic gift. They are thus documents of considerable value for the earliest stages of the great artist's career, and some further ' Anecdotes of Hogarth, by John Bowyer Nichols, Lond., 1833, p. 161. 23 William Hogarth reference will afterwards be made to them in connection with the more purely artistic aspects of the work of Hogarth. It is clear at any rate that Hogarth's heart was not in work of this kind, and he complains of his treatment by the " tribe of booksellers " who had used His own j^jg father so badly, and a few years pre- PuMtsher ^jp^giy Yia.6. done much to vex him to his death. 1 This usage, he says, " put me upon publishing on my own account." It is noteworthy that after, executing the (partly plagiarised) duodecimo plates to Hudibras for the booksellers, he almost imrnediately, ! in the same year (1726), issued on his own account a larger series of plates of the same subjects, which show as great an improvement on the duodecimo ones as these do on their own, non-Hogarthian, predecessors. The earliest plate, however, issued by Hogarth on his own account, appeared, if Ireland be right, in 1724, and though called by Hogarth " The Taste of the Town " is identified by the former with the plate now known as " Masquerades and Operas; Burlington Gate."^ In this plate Hogarth tells us "the reigning follies were lashed," and we meet here with the first example of a class of productions numerously represented 1 Hogarth's father died in 17 18. He must have established his two daughters in their "old frock shop" {ante, p. 11), for William, who ^ tells us that till he was thirty he barely made enough for his own needs, cannot have given his sisters their start. ^ Hogarth Illustrated, ill. p. 16. Stephens, No. 1,742 (see note on next page). 24 Polemical Satires throughout his career. The vein is not that of comedy, but of polemical satire. Comedy presents a bit of human life and exhibits its personages actuated by universal, or at any rate well-understood, desires and sentiments. Reproof or exhortation may lurk a little under the surface, but what strikes the spectator at the first glance is the truthful presentment of human nature. Every intelligent person, that is to say, can read more or less clearly the meaning of such plates as the "Progresses," the "Marriage," the "Four Times of the Day," the "Election Scenes," the "Midnight Modern Conversation," etc., just as every intelligent person can follow the story of a play fittingly presented on the stage. With the polemical and satiric plates the case is different. They are directed against certain special abuses, or against personages in whom . such abuses seem to be embodied. The ^"^^^^^^'^ Plates meanmg is esoteric, and escapes those who are not familiar with the circumstances of the time. Hence they require interpretation. Correctly to furnish this demands considerable research and study, such as has been devoted by F. G. Stephens to the vast collec- tion of satiric prints in the British Museum, ^ but the interpretation when retailed to the modern reader, who ^ Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, Division I., Political and Personal Satires, Lond,, 1870, etc. See the Bibliographical Note in the Appendix. The Catalogue is referred to in the sequel as " Stephens," and the plates by their numbers, which run continuously through the volumes of the Catalogue. 25 William Hogarth has little interest in the special theme, is often ex- tremely tedious. For this reason in what follows less attention will be paid to Hogarth's polemical work than to those productions in which the interest is, broader and more human. The particular plate under notice has for its object to reprove the pleasure-loving public of the day for desert- „ ,. ing what we should call the legitimate "Burling- , • c r J J °^ drama, in favour of masquerades and variety entertainments of a frivolous and licentious order. It emphasises Hogarth's interest in the theatre, which was constant and keen. He may be said to belong rather to the theatrical than the literary set of his time, and his name is as indissolubly associated with Garrick as the name of Johnson with Sir Joshua Reynolds. It is also characteristic in that it exhibits the artist as the avowed foe of foreign virtuosi, who in his day as in ours were credited with a monopoly of the arts of pleasing. At the risk of wearying the general reader, an "interpretation" of this plate may be given here, and it will serve as an example of this particular phase of Hogarth's work. The scene is Piccadilly, and in the middle distance appears the gate of old Burlington House, over which is written Accademy OF Arts. The inscription is curiously prophetic, for at this exact spot is now the actual entrance to the Royal Academy of Arts. In Hogarth's time however, the gate gave admission to a courtyard partly surrounded by a circular colonnade, a much admired architectural work, beyond which was the town mansion of the Earl 26 " Masquerades and Operas " of Burlington. The Earl, a Maecenas of the day, was patron of the artist William Kent, against whom, for reasons mentioned on a subsequent page, Hogarth's ire was kindled. He has therefore represented Kent posturing in glory above the gateway, and has in irony given to him as supporters Michelangelo and Raphael. In the foreground of the plate are seen two crowds pressing towards the entrances into two buildings facing each other across Piccadilly, to the spectator's right and left. The entrances are supposed to give access to entertainments of a frivolous or sensational kind in which foreign virtuosi hold the stage. On the spectator's left a satyr and a figure of Folly are roping- in a crowd to a door marked Masquerade, while Faux, a well-known conjurer of the day, is advertised on the first floor, and a painted show-cloth hung out over the street displays the forms of three popular foreign singers, Berenstat, Senesino, and Cuzzoni, against whom and all their kind Hogarth nourished the liveliest animosity. On the other side of the street the perform- ance of Dr. Fausius attracts a similar crowd of fashion- able idlers. In the middle of the foreground we are shown the figure of a woman wheeling a barrow. Out of her mouth proceeds a scroll with the words "Waste Paper for Shops," and her barrow is full of books labelled " Congrav," " Dry den," " Otway," " Shakspere," " Ben John{son)."'^ Other details con- tribute to enforce the idea of the piece. ' So in the second state of the plate, a copy of which is reproduced in this book. See Stephens, No. 1,742. 27 William Hogarth The experiment of publishing for himself, which as we have seen Hogarth tried with this plate, was not p . , altogether successful. The print-sellers paid p. , , the work the compliment of pirating it, and selling spurious copies at a reduced price. It had no sooner, Hogarth tells us, " begun to take a run, than I found copies of it in the print shops, vending at half-price, while the original prints were returned to me again; and I was thus obliged to sell the plate for whatever these pirates pleased to give me, as there was no place of sale but at their shops. "^ The circum- stance, however annoying to a young artist anxious to pay his way, is at any rate a proof that his work was beginning to excite attention, and it had an ulterior consequence of lasting importance. A few years later we find Hogarth joining in a counter-move against the pirates which led to the effectual protection of artistic property. In 1735, in concert with the engraver and author George Vertue and others, he was instrumental CnSvr 'p-ht *" bringing forward a parliamentary measure . , intended " to vest in designers and engravers an exclusive right to their own works, and to restrain the multiplying of copies without their consent." 2 This resulted in the well-known Copy- right Act 8 George II. cap. 13, and to Hogarth a good deal of the credit of the reform seems to have been due. He commemorated its passing by an inscription on one of his plates, and the familiar words "published as the ' Hogarth Illustrated, in. ch. i. ^ Austin Dobson, William Hogarth, new ed., Lond. 1898, p. 42. 28 Studies for a Painter Act directs" appear from this time forward under all the prints he issues. It must be remembered that the purpose immediately in our view is to explain Hogarth's advance from his more or less mechanical work as engraver . to original design and to painting. Up to p ■ f this point, no mention has occurred of his ^ work as a painter. His own reminiscences were evidently written down late in his life, more in the form of jottings than as parts of a consistent chrono- logical account. The sequence of events is by no means clear, and a certain amount of conjecture is necessary before a satisfactory grouping of the facts can be attained. How did Hogarth become a painter ? He gives us a useful hint when he lets us know that, even during the early days of his apprenticeship to Ellis Gamble the silversmith, "the paintings of St. Paul's Cathedral and Greenwich Hospital, which were at that time going on, ran in my head." Painting, and painting on a monumental scale and in the so-called " grand style," was evidently from the first a far-off ideal, even while copper-plate engraving engaged the active powers. Walpole boldly tells us that "his apprenticeship was no sooner expired, than he entered into the academy in St. Martin's Lane, and studied drawing from the life.''^ To this it has been answered that the St. Martin's Academy was not then in existence, but though Walpole may have merely made a blundering guess, ' Anecdotes of Painting, Lond. 1786, iv. 160. 29 William Hogarth it is pretty certain that some more or less systematic study from the figure occupied part of Hogarth's time from an early date in his career. The fascination exer- cised upon his youthful mind by Sir James Thornhill's decorative paintings in St. Paul's and at Greenwich was followed by personal intercourse with this distin- guished painter,! then at the head of such native talent as the England of the time could boast. As Thornhill had opened an academy at the back of his own house in Covent Garden, Hogarth may have studied here, or he may have attended, the earlier academy which he himself tells us was opened at the beginning of the cen- tury at Queen Street. ^ Through some means or other he qualified himself at a pretty early date to under- take the painting of portraits, singly or in groups, as well as Scriptural compositions on a considerable scale.. When he was a little over thirty years of age, as he tells us, he " commenced painter of small Conversation Pieces, from twelve to fifteen inches high. "^ One of these pieces is in the National Gallery, and another engraved, though not by Hogarth himself, from one of his paintings, is in the Print Room at the British Museum. A good example signed " W. Hogarth pinxt. 1730" ' In 1728 Sir James is a witness on the side of Hogarth in a law case where he had to give an opinion favourable to the artistic capacity of the emancipated silversmith's apprentice. See Biographical Anecdotes, 1785, p. 24. The next year Hogarth repaid the favour by running away with Sir James's handsome daughter. ■ Anecdotes of Hogarth, 1833, p. 24. '^ Hogarth Illustrated, m. ch. 2. 30 y Early Pictures was in the collection of the late Mr. Louis Huth. The figures in these pieces are on a small scale ; as a rule they wear rich dresses and are posed with some attempt at elegance. The engraved example in the Print Room, published in 1799, is entitled "Conversation in the manner of Van Dyck," and a certain Van Dyck-like grace of aristocratic demeanour is evidently aimed at by the artist. Hogarth does not himself, however, use the name Van Dyck in connection with these pieces. An early picture of a more ambitious kind is now in the National Portrait Gallery. It represents a session of a Committee of the House of Commons charged with examining one Bambridge, a . -^ POiVyiit'Th ^s deputy jailer of the Fleet prison, who was * accused of extortion and cruelty. The date of this is 1729. At about the same period many single portraits as well as conversation pieces are mentioned among his works. Nichols has preserved a list of paintings enumerated in a memorandum in Hogarth's writing as remaining unfinished in his studio in 1731.^ They are almost all groups or single portraits. A few years later, in 1736, Hogarth produced the most ambitious of all his efforts in the higher walks of painting. To quote his own words, "I entertained some hopes of succeeding in . ■^ what the puffers in books call ^he great style '^^'"f/^"''^ of History painting; so that without having Pictures had a stroke of this grand business before, I quitted ^ The Genuine Works of William Hogarth, Lond., 1S08, etc., I. p. 45. See Bibliographical Note in the Appendix. 31 William Hogarth small portraits and familiar conversations, and, with a smile at my own temerity, commenced history painter, and on a great staircase at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, painted two Scripture stories, the Pool of Bethesda and the Good Samaritan, with figures seven feet high. These I presented to the Charity. "^ The paintings are still in good condition on the two walls of the staircase leading to the great hall in St. Bartholomew's Hospital. The "Pool" measures about 20 feet by 14 and the "Good Samaritan" about 17 feet by 14. They are framed in painted ornament of the Louis XV. style, with some subject pieces in monochrome below, and on the third wall at the landing on the top of the stairs is some more ornamental painting. Here also is the following inscription: "The historical paintings of this staircase were painted and given by Mr. William Hogarth, and the ornamental paintings at his expense, A.D. 1736." Hogarth's interest in the hospital, of which he was forthwith made a governor, is easily explained from the fact that he was born and brought up almost under the shadow of the institution. The question of the artistic value of these paintings (to which justice has hardly been done) introduces us to the larger subject of the general position of „ . , Hogarth as a painter. Both the extent and £IS PcLZJIlBT^ the quality of the artist's pictorial achieve- ment have been commonly under-estimated. There are many tolerably familiar with Hogarth's engraved works, at least as far as the principal pieces are concerned, who ^ Hogarth lUustraled, in. ch, 2. 32 Activity as a Painter yet do not realise that in almost every case, save in that of some of the satirical prints, the engraving w^as pre- ceded by a picture. These pictures, most of which survive, are not merely studies for the engravings, as were Turner's sepia drawings for the plates of the Liber Studioncm, but finished works carried out into every detail, and possessing as much claim to consideration as pictures as any piece by Jan Steen or Van Ostade. Furthermore, independently of the characteristic scenes from human life and the satires, there are the conversa- tion pieces representing a considerable body of work — Mr. Austin Dobson catalogues thirty or forty of them — and portraits of various sizes from the monumental "Captain Coram" downwards, to the number of some eighty separate items. Lastly, the pictures in the historical style, embrace, besides the two large ones at' St. Bartholomew's, the monumental "Paul before Felix" in the vestibule to the Hall at Lincoln's Inn, the "Moses before Pharaoh's Daughter" of the Foundling, and an altar-piece for St. Mary RedclifFe, Bristol, consisting in a centre-piece of the " Ascension " and two wings, "The Sealing of the Sepulchre" and "The Three Marys," the whole containing some 1300 square feet of canvas. There are also the famous "Sigismunda" and that brilliant sketch "The Shrimp Girl " in the National Gallery, with other pieces of a miscellaneous kind so numerous that the total number of entries in Mr. Austin Dobson's " Catalogue of Paint- ings by, or attributed to, Hogarth" runs to nearly three hundred. 33 D William Hogarth There are two questions that may be asked about these painthigs by Hogarth. First, What is their natural history, how did they come into being and what went to their accomplishment? and second. How do they rank as regards their intrinsic quality as works of art ? The second question will be touched on in the conclud- ing chapter, but on the first a few words may here be fittingly introduced. It has been noticed already that Hogarth's reputation as a painter has for a long time past been steadily _ . growing, so that he is more likely now to be over-esteemed than depreciated. In his own p . .. day he was as a practitioner in oils but * lightly regarded. Horace Walpole asserted that " as a painter Hogarth had but slender merit," and it is known that, with rare exceptions, his pictures, now treasured by collectors, were sold for very,^ paltry prices.^ Hogarth was indeed in his own time ■ most widely known by his engravings, and the pictures from which these were taken attracted comparatively little attention. The engravings were naturally regarded from the point of view of their subjects, and it was too often assumed that the exceptional gifts of humour and satire displayed by the artist could not in the nature of things co-exist with a feeling for beauty, an elevation of style, a grace of colouring, or any of the other qualities that ' The "Shrimp Girl" changed hands in 1799 for ;^4 10s., and as late as 1832 it fetched only £4^ 2s. Austin Dobson, Memoir, P- 313- 34 Reynolds on Hogarth were supposed to make up the painter. The popular estimate began to change when Hogarth's original paintings and sketches were exhibited in the British Gallery in 1814. In the preface to the catalogue it was then remarked ' ' his merits are known to the Publick, more from his Prints than from his Paintings: both deserve our attention. His Pictures often display beautiful colouring, as well as accurate drawing," and the general opinion current about that time is summed up in these words of Northcote: — " Hogarth has never been admitted to rank high as a painter, but certainly so as a moralist; yet it has, of late, been discovered, that his small Pictures possess considerable dexterity of execution. As to his large pieces," he continues, " they appear to be the efforts of imbecility; he was totally without the practice required for such works. "^ Northcote, it will be noticed, makes a distinction between two kinds of paintings by Hogarth, the " small pictures," in which merit had recently been discovered, and the large pieces which were altogether beneath criticism. This last opinion is an echo of Reynolds, who in his fourteenth Discourse delivered him- self of certain judgments upon Hogarth, , which are worth recording. "Our late ^ . excellent Hogarth," he says, "was not blessed with. . . knowledge of his own deficiency. . . . After this admirable artist had spent the greater part of his life in an active, busy, and, we may add, ' Supplement to the Memoirs . . . of Sir Joshua Reynolds, etc., Lond., 1815, p. xxxix. f. 35 William Hogarth successful attention to the ridicule of life; after he had invented a new species of dramatic painting, in which probably he will never be equalled ... he very im- prudently, or rather presumptuously, attempted th,e great historical style, for which his previous habits had by no means prepared him: he was indeed so entirely unacquainted with the principles of this style, that he was not even aware that any artificial preparation was at all necessary." The President is here referring no doubt to a late production of Hogarth's brush, about which a needless and tiresome fuss was made — the "Sigis- munda " of the national collection. Every one can now see that this workmanlike production takes a modest but by no means insignificant place among the fifteen excellent Hogarths in the Old British room at the National Gallery. Designed in a conventional style and firmly painted, the picture is in no way displeasing, though it possesses little of the active attraction of his more inspired handiwork. A prodigious number of worse pictures have received flattering meeds of praise, but Hogarth was abused for the work as if he had com- mitted a crime. The piece can hardly be left entirely unnoticed, but we may turn back from " Sigismunda" and her critics to the remarks of Reynolds, which have a wider application. The President is of course wrong in his chronology, because, as we have just seen, Hogarth's ambitious efforts at St. Bartholomew's date from an early epoch (1736) in his career, but the point to note in the passage just quoted from the Discourses is the censure 36 Historical Painting on Hogarth because "he was not even aware that" (for the grand style) "any artificial preparation was at all necessary." The remark possesses a curious significance for the history of the ^ English School in the eighteenth century. Hogarth, it seems, had no idea of the -^ need for any special preparation for "historical" painting other than the study of the figure; but to Reynolds, and through Reynolds to his successors, this "grand" or "historical" style became a mystery that was to be approached in the spirit of a candidate for initiation. There is really no mystery about the style. It is simply figure painting on a monumental scale applied to subjects of a religious, or classical, or allegorical order. At the time when it was growing to artistic perfection in the Italy of the fifteenth century, a certain vividness was imparted to the style by the portrayal of real persons of the day as actors in religious or ideal scenes. When the style culminated In the days of Michelangelo and Raphael, this device was discarded, and these great creative artists knew how to inspire their figures with a vitality and a force that gave them convincing reality as actors in the momentous scenes of the Christian drama. Their successors of the later Italian period preserved the outward forms of this phase of art, but had no power to make their figures live before us or to transport the spectator in imagina- tion amid the scenes of history or of fable. Their work was cold and unconvincing, but such as it was they executed it with masterly ease, the outcome of a long 37 William Hogarth technical tradition. The style spread from Italy to other lands ; first to the Roman Catholic Netherlands, and then in the latter half of the seventeenth century to Holland, where some even who had been Rembrandt's pupils, such as Bol and Maes and Victor, cover large canvases with accomplished but empty "historical" designs. In France the style, so admirably suited to the age of Louis XIV., flourished both in the form of the academically constructed subject picture, religious or classical, and the decorative composition, commonly located on the ceiling, and in most cases of allegorical import. Nor was work of the kind unknown in English studios. For in the vestibule of All Souls' College Chapel, Oxford, hangs a large picture in the Cethng << historical" style by the English artist Pamtmgs j^^^^ Fuller, who died in 1672. The subject is the appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection. The poses are conventional and the figures somewhat stiff, but the nude of the Christ is well drawn and broadly painted, and the whole would be pronounced a fairly good school-piece of the Italo- Flemish type, neither better nor worse than a hundred other such pieces that might be collected from European galleries. Ceiling decoration, moreover, was practised in England before Hogarth's time, and by native artists as well as by foreigners. This is of course a highly conventional form of art, and one that may reasonably be condemned as false in principle. Responsibility for 38 English Decoration it should not however be laid on the shoulders of those who practised it in Britain, such as Verrio and Sir James Thornhill, for they were only carrying on an established tradition which originated with the Correggios and Veroneses of the palmy days of Italian painting. Much of Verrio's ceiling painting in Hamp- ton Court Palace, though to the plain man from the street it may seem absurd in general design, has yet the true lightness of treatment and the aerial colouring which this kind of work demands. The ceiling paint- ing by Robert Streater (1624-80) in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford keeps the traditional style, but is heavier than Verrio's work, and this same fault of an over-strong chiaroscuro, and a solidity, not to say woodenness, in forms that should seem to float bathed in air in the empyrean, is observable in most of the work of Verrio's successor. Sir James Thornhill. Hogarth, as he himself has told us, was inspired by the work of Thornhill at St. Paul's and at Greenwich^ to attempt painting on a monumental scale. This merely means that Hogarth was prepared to continue the tradition which English painters before him, like Fuller and Streater and Thornhill, had maintained. Further- more, the unprejudiced observer will admit that con- sidering his limitations, he carried out his purpose with a very fair measure of success. He had no ' The ceiling of the great hall at Greenwich, 100 feet long by 50 feet wide, was painted with an allegorical composition by Sir James Thornhill early in the eighteenth century, that is now very dark and not easy to make out. Hogarth knew it in its first freshness. 39 William Hogarth early training as a figure painter, and later it did not fall in with his scheme of work to overtake TT .,, the time lost, by severe application to this j^^ particular branch of artistic study. Hence , , we can easily detect faults of drawing in P the large St. Bartholomew pictures, which would not be found in the work of a con- temporary French or Flemish painter, but making allow- ance for these technical shortcomings we can regard the pictures with satisfaction, as very fair examples of a recognised style of artistic production which belonged to the age. The "Pool of Bethesda" indeed is distinctly good in composition, and the sweeping line of the curved colonnade embraces a collection of more than a dozen figures over life size, effectively grouped, and conveying by appropriate expression and gesture the meaning of the scene. The female nude is commend- able, and the homely Christ, if not convincing like the homely Christs of Rembrandt, is unpretentious and in good taste. There are one or two heads in which the artist's own special power of characterisation is ap- parent, but it is not this for which we are looking. The point, which it is here sought to establish, is that these attempts on the part of Hogarth in the historical vein are average productions, turned out, it may be, on an established recipe, but free on the other hand from any look of experiment or of bungling. The other pieces which fall under this same category are not so good as the " Pool," but contain nothing 40 Hogarth's Portraits which obliges us to modify the judgment first pro- nounced. In the "Good Samaritan" at St. Bartholo- mew's the pose of the principal figure is rather forced, and in the "Paul before Felix" of Lincoln's Inn, which contains some excellent passages, the principal figure is not a success, and the colouring is not so pleasing as is the case in most of Hogarth's pictures. The "Moses brought before Pharaoh's Daughter" at the Foundling Hospital is a pleasant piece of work in the conven- tional style, well painted, and, like Hogarth's pictures generally, in an excellent state of preservation. About the artistic character of the St. Mary RedclifFe altar- piece nothing can at the moment be said. In 1857 the Vestry of the church presented the pictures to the Bristol Academy for the Promotion of the Fine Arts, and in the possession of the Academy they still re- main. Unfortunately their great size — the "Ascension" measures over 30 feet — and the condition of disrepair into which their frames had fallen made their public exhibition difficult, and for the last fifteen years they have been covered in with boarding on which are hung the pictures of the periodical exhibitions of the Academy. It is satisfactory however to know that there is every prospect that these works, the most ambitious efforts of Hogarth's brush, will before long be properly seen and housed. What has been said here about Hogarth's more ambitious figure paintings applies also to his portraits. Reynolds does not mention these. Regarding Hogarth as an unsurpassable master of humorous genre, who 41 William Hogarth had once stumbled presumptuously into the "historical" domain, he ignores the considerable body of work Hogarth produced at all periods of his career in por- ^^ . traiture. The small conversation pieces Reynolds might consider hardly worthy of remark, though they are at any rate a proof that Hogarth could move as freely in the world of gaily- dressed gallants and ladies as in the crowd of the London alleys. But the life-size painted portraits exist in some numbers, and represent a side of Hogarth's activity that cannot be ignored. In these again the artist is only carrying on a tradition of the school. It is often assumed that portrait-painting in England in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was ^ . ■ almost entirely dominated by Van Dyck and D y ^ his influence, while any independent efforts p J. -f which were made were almost ludicrously inefficient. The truth is, however, that English portrait-painting in this period had a sub- stantial existence quite apart from Van Dyck, and any one who walks through the National Portrait Gallery or Hampton Court Palace will find many ex- amples by English and Scottish artists, such as Walker and Riley and Wright and Jervas, executed in a direct and manly style that is thoroughly national. Indeed, the old English school of miniature painters enjoys such a high reputation, that it would be surprising if no efforts in portraiture had been made on a larger scale. Such portraits in oil exist, and if they have not the technical merits of the beautiful miniatures, they represent a bodj 42 His sound Technique of work of which the school has no cause to be ashamed. Now Hogarth in his portraits was a successor of the men who have been named, and carried on tlie same tradition of unpretentious workmanlike execution which they had established. It is worthy of note that one of these earlier British painters, the Scotsman John Michael Wright (c. 1655- 1700), shows himself a prede- cessor of Hogarth in some of our artist's characteristic qualities. The portrait of Thomas Hobbes by Wright in the National Portrait Gallery exhibits an almost Hogarthian grasp of character, but this comes out still more strongly in an interesting picture at Hampton Court representing an actor of the time in three different parts. The three figures, whole-lengths, stand firmly on their feet, in easy poses, and are well grouped for the composition, but the merit of the piece resides in the humorous countenances, which showing the same face made up for three different personages, give oppor- tunity for whimsical characterisation that is quite in Hogarth's vein. We have now obtained some answer to the question asked a few pages back, What is the natural history of Hogarth's painting in the more ambitious forms of it? It has been necessary to show that Hogarth was no amateur or experimentalist _ ,.^. • •^- ^ s. ^-j ^--.i- Tradition m pamtmg, but practised certam styles m por- . , traiture and figfure-work because they were j;, , Elu6TS the styles of his own time and school. The traditions he followed may not have been inspiring ones, but they enabled him to paint in a sound technique, and 43 William Hogarth with some ease and assurance. The blunderers in the matter of historical painting were not Hogarth or his predecessors, but the later men of the period after Reynolds, who took themselves seriously as professed votaries of the "grand style." Much of the work of this kind, for which they made the "artificial prepara- tion " the President prescribes, is no longer visible, for Reynolds inaugurated an epoch of experiment with materials and media, which had disastrous effect on the permanence of many of his own and of others' master- pieces; but what the "grand style" could become in the generation after Reynolds can be judged by any who ascend to the Diploma Gallery at Burlington House. Sir Thomas Lawrence's picture entitled " Satan calling up his Legions," which hangs on the staircase, is perhaps the worst picture ever perpetrated by an artist of name. In proportion of subject to canvas, in idea, in drawing, in colour, in technique, it is actively and obtrusively bad. Reynolds's own efforts in the grand style are theatrical and unreal, while Haydon and other men of genius who broke their hearts over unsuccessful efforts, were stumbling in the dark with no guidance but a noble ambition. Reynolds and his contemporaries and successors transformed British portraiture and created our landscape, but in the historical department they had little or nothing of value to offer in exchange for the traditional style of the century before. If Hogarth's work in this style is cold and uninspired, at any rate it is better than the blundering efforts of some of his successors in the school. 44 CHAPTER III. THE PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER OF HOGARTH. Hogarth settled in life — His appearance and personality — Amiable traits in his character — His social tastes — The Kentish tour — Hogarth's simplicity — His first great success — His worldly means — Hogarth as a controversialist — His anti-foreign prejudices — His opposition to an Academy — His defence of friends — The eighteenth century and Hogarth's work in it — Didactic pieces — Moral influ- ence of his works. Hogarth's artistic development has now been followed till he was about thirty years of age. At this epoch he felt himself sufficiently established not only to marry, but to marry by annexing-, through Marriage the summary process of elopement, a hand- some wife of a social station above his own. On the 23rd of March in the year 1729 Hogarth carried off the only daughter of Sir James Thornhill and wedded her at the then rural church of Paddington. This performance was a very significant one, for Hogarth was not by temperament adventurous or romantic. It betokens on his part a quiet assurance of his own worth that is most characteristic. It betokens, too, that this self-assurance was justified, 45 William Hogarth for a young lady of the beauty and pretensions of Miss Thornhill^ would hardly have cast herself away upon one she could not look up to as well as love. The escapade appears less arrogant when we consider thai the painter had already won his way to a share of Sir James Thornhill's respect and regard. ^ The match was said indeed to have been favoured by Lady Thornhill,^ but the manner of it naturally excited the ire of the father. We are told that Lady Thornhill paved the way to a reconciliation by bringing under the eyes of her husband some of Hogarth's scenes for the "Harlot's Progress," executed soon after the marriage. Sir James grumpily expressed his satisfaction that the author of such works seemed likely to be able to support a wife without a dower, but the reconciliation soon followed, and Hogarth remained to the end of his life intimately connected with the family of his spouse. Sir James's eldest son, also a painter, was his close friend, and Lady Thornhill, who survived Sir James for many years, found her last resting-place under the Hogarth monument in Chiswick Churchyard. Mrs. Hogarth was devoted to her husband while in life, and after his death she cherished his memory and did battle in his ' Sir James was Sergeant-Painter to the King, and lived in a good house in Covent Garden. Hogarth's portrait of his wife, exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1888, shows her to have been a very handsome woman. ^ See ante, p. 30. ^ The statement to the contrary in the first edition ( 1 781) of Nichols's Biographical Anecdotes is corrected in the subsequent editions. See Genuine Works, 1808, I, 43. 46 His Personality interest, with the most unswerving fidelity. Her dust is mingled with his in the Chiswick tomb. This will be a favourable moment to attempt a sketch of the artist's personality and character, which will be followed in the next chapter by a notice of the London scenes in the midst of which his life was passed. Barry, we have seen, called Hogarth a "little man," while Ireland says that, "with respect to his person, though hardly to be classed as a little man, Hogarth was rather below the middle size,""^ and it may be noted that the pugnacity so -^-^ characteristic of him is more commonly evinced by men (and also by dogs) of small physique than by those of larger build. His personal aspect and habitual mode of dress are well known to us ; first, from two fine and finished portraits of himself from his own hand, one of which forms the frontispiece to this volume, and next from certain other autographic representations of himself in his works, two of the most interesting of which may be seen in pictures readily accessible in London. One occurs in the background of the picture in the National Gallery known as " Calais Gate." The artist is there seen, sketch-book in hand, making a drawing of the gate, where he had, as he tells us, " remarked some appearance of the arms of England on the front. "2 The picture will be noticed a few pages later, but here it is enough to call attention to the keenness and alertness of the artist's aspect, as with ' Hogarth Illustrated, i. 120. ^ Anecdotes, 1833, p. 63. 47 William Hogarth head thrust forward and three-cornered hat tilted to one side, he is gazing with all his eyes at the object of his patriotic delight. Another incidental representation may be discovered in the lower left-hand corner of the picture in the „, Diploma Gallery of the Royal Academy at ■jy' ,. , Burlington House, wherein Hogarth has . , portrayed the interior of the Life School at the Academy in St. Martin's Lane.^ Hogarth had been mainly instrumental in founding this, and had lent to it the furniture of the older school maintained by Sir James Thornhill, which had passed into his hands at his father-in-law's death. The picture measures a little over four feet by three, and shows us about twenty-five students drawing at night from a model who is posed on a table at the left-hand of the picture. They all seem to be using chalk, some on blue paper, others on white. In the corner below the model a figure is seated at an easel, with his back to the spec- tator, engaged on a study in oils, and two visitors are standing beside him in converse. Under the model's table is coiled a dog suspiciously like the "Trump " of Hogarth's self-portrait in the National Gallery, and there can be little doubt that the personage painting is Hdgarth himself, who might come in and set up his > " In this institution, most of the artists in the reign of George II., and the early part of the reign of George III., were trained; and its usefulness only ceased with the establishment of the Royal Academy, to which its 'anatomical figures, busts, statues, etc.,' were transferred in 1768." — Austin Dobson, Memoir, p. 51. 48 Self- Portraits easel beside the students, as Etty and others were wont to do in later days. The well-known portrait in the National Gallery, just referred to, gives us his bust, a little less than full face, in an oval frame which appears to rest on a table that supports some books, a palette, and the seated figure of a dog, the artist's favourite pug named "Trump." That in the National Portrait Gallery, reproduced in the frontispiece, is a small full-length, i5|- inches high by 14J broad, and exhibits the artist seated, with brush, palette, and mahl-stick in hand, before a panel on which is chalked out the outline of a female figure supposed to represent the Comic Muse. The bust portrait shows us a self-reliant personage with a look that would readily turn to one of defiance. The sculptor Roubiliac, in his bust of Hogarth, now in the National Portrait Gallery, has emphasised this expression by an outward thrust of the under lip, which we need not assume to have been a normal trait of his countenance. On the other hand, we can readily believe what Ireland tells us, that Hogarth had " an eye peculiarly bright and pleasing, and an air of spirit and vivacity. "'^ A scar on his fore- head, the result of an accident in his youth, is con- spicuous in the National Gallery portrait, and Ireland says that "he frequently wore his hat so as to display it. "2 The full-length figure enables us to discern a certain dapper smartness in costume. The buckles of the shoes sparkle crisply, the coat is green, and the small clothes are a brick red. As is the case also in the ' Anecdotes, p. 79. •' IbiJ., p. 80. 49 E William Hogarth bust portrait, he does not wear a wig, but a cap crown; the closely shaven head. We are told by John Bowyer Nichols, in his editoria notes to J. T. Smith's Cries of London,'^ that a certaii „. barber informed him that he often used t( ,, shave William Hogarth, whom he knew well f W Ih ^"'^ *'^^*' ^^ painter wore a scarlet roque laure or cloak, and was one of the las persons to appear in that particular article of attire In this cloak he was to be seen walking in the evening in the enclosure of Leicester Fields "with his ha cocked and stuck on one side, much in the manner o the great Frederick of Prussia,"^ and no doubt witl a general demeanour that Benjamin West had in hi mind when he told Smith that Hogarth was "a struttinj consequential little man."^ The firm, well-knit, well-groomed little person tha we know so familiarly, enshrined a dauntless, seli sufficing, uncompromising spirit, which wa His Spirit just as individual and characteristic as th outward man. It is delightful to learn tha he did actual battle on an occasion on behalf of distressed fair one. One of the best known of all hi figures is that of a very comely actress, in hat an feathers, who in the centre of the crowd at Southwar Fair is beating a drum to attract spectators to the shoi in which she bears a part. It is said that the origin; of this attractive study caught the painter's eye on th ^ London, 1839, p. 98. ^ Austin Dobson, p. 33, note. * Nollekens and His Times, 11. 343. 50 Hogarth's Beauties occasion of an altercation between her and the impre- sario of her troupe, on the subject of a shilling that had mysteriously disappeared while in her keeping. The man was going to beat the damsel when Hogarth intervened and thrashed her persecutor. The incident has an artistic as well as a personal interest, for the type of maidenly beauty favoured by the artist is said to have been taken from the fair drummer girl in question. There is, or was, a popular notion that Hogarth was incapable of depicting beauty. /This is as „. j, , gfroundless as the idea that he could not , „ . . . of Beauty pamt. His pencil was apt enough at de- lineating beauty, but it must be beauty according to his own canon. He created his own type of feminine comeliness, and this was of a robust and full-blooded kind, so that a single one of his milkmaids or actresses could rout at hockey a whole team of the aneemic elegantes of the Burne-Jones or Rossetti school. Hogarth, alike as artist and as Englishman, would have loved to set her to the task, for the life that courses through the strong limbs of Hogarth's beauties is an emanation from the vigorous whole-hearted personality of their creator, who while Britain endures will remain one of the typical representatives of some qualities that have helped to make his country great. Hogarth's natural attraction towards the fair sex, which we can divine from his work, was never a source of trouble in his private life, which was irreproachable. The fair lady, who displays her beauty unadorned in Venetian fashion in his large painting of the ' ' Pool 51 William Hogarth of Bethesda," at St. Bartholomew's, is said to have been an early flame of his, but no scandal marred the domestic happiness of the painter and his comely spouse. The union was a childless one, and some oi the natural affection which children would His Pets have evoked went out towards animals, for besides " Trump," who has become a classic, he cherished other pets at his country house, and buried them under tombstones carved by his own hand. It is pleasant, too, to know that when the Foundling Hospital had been established, and the system was started of putting children out to nurse in the country, the painter and his wife looked personally after those sent down to their place of country resid- ence at Chiswick. At Chiswick, again, where in the garden stood, as it still stands, a fine mulberry tree, the children of the village were brought in every year to feast upon the ripe fruit. Hogarth indeed possessed to the full the warm- heartedness which so often accompanies a somewhat pugnacious disposition. The members of his family and household were devoted to PP " him, and we are especially told by George Steevens, who was Hogarth's advocatus diaboli, that some of his domestics had lived many years in his service, a circumstance that always reflects credit on a master. " Of most of these," Steevens goes on to say, "he painted strong likenesses on a canvas still in Mrs. Hogarth's possession. "^ The ' Genuine Works, 1808, i. 396. 52 His Liberality "strong likenesses" can happily be admired to-day by all in the National Gallery, whither they have lately come as a fresh proof of the artist's g-enius with the brush. A glimpse at the management of Hogarth's house- hold is given in the following well-known anecdote, which is too characteristic to be passed over. It is quoted by Smith in his Nollekens ^ from a narrative by Dr. W. Cole in his MSS. in the British Museum. "One thing I omitted in relation to Mr. Hogarth, which deserves notice, and characterises his liberal and ingenuous turn of mind. When I sat to him, near fifty years ago " (Dr. Cole died in 1782), "the custom was not introduced of not giving vails to servants. On my taking leave of him at the door, and his servant's opening it, or the coach-door, I cannot tell which (for I had no servant of my own), I offered him a small gratuity: the man very politely refused it, telling me, that it would be the loss of his place, if his master knew it. This was uncommon, and so liberal in a man of Mr. Hogarth's profession, at that time of the day, that it struck me the more, as nothing of the sort had before happened to me." In social life Hogarth was geniality itself to the inner circle of his intimates, but he was not, like the facile Reynolds, all things to all men, nor did he gather round him such a company of 0-7 distinguished personages as met about the hospitable board of the President. Hogarth -^ was certainly not a man of courtly address, but equally ^ I. p. 48, note. 53 William Hogarth certainly he was not a boor. The point is of som- importance, in view ot what is reported by Georgi Steevens, in one of those ill-natured paragraphs abou which the reader is warned in the Bibliographical Noti in the Appendix. Steevens maintained that Hogartl had low social tastes and aspired only to the society o mechanics. "He remained to the end a gross un cultivated man." Others whose word is of men weight, as J. T. Smith in his Nollekens, have noted ii the artist a taste for low company. To this it mai fairly be replied that it was the artist's business t( study the ways of people in the lowest station, foi it was only by so doing that he secured that repertor] of quaint characters and incidents which give life to hii scenes. On the other hand, that Hogarth was no a boor is conclusively proved by the attitude toward! him of the Thornhill family. Jane Thornhill, we hav( already noticed, was not the girl to throw herself awaj on the sort of man whom Steevens tries to present tc us. Hogarth's circle of intimates included persons o distinction in the Church as well as in the world, and h( was certainly a man capable of bearing his part as i gentleman in the best literary and artistic society of th( time. On the other hand, partly no doubt because hi was somewhat difficult and at times cantankerous, h{ was not a popular favourite, and the small amount o public attention paid to the announcement of his deatl in 1764 seems to show that, though every one ha( heard of him and knew some of his works, he did no live exactly in the public eye. 54 Hogarth in Society We are fortunate in possessing a true picture of the sort of social intercourse in which Hogarth found his element, in the account of a certain famous , _, A Infill f five days' tour, in 1732, in the Medway . district of Kent, in which the painter indulged in company with young Thornhill, his brother-in-law, and three other friends. An account of the outing was written by one of the party, and was afterwards turned by another friend into Hudibrastic verse, while Hogarth and Samuel Scott, the marine painter, supplied illustrations. They were a merry crew, hugely delighted with very small beer in the shape of jokes and incidents of travel, all duly chronicled by the Froissart of the expedition. Characteristic is a humorous invitation card sent by Hogarth to his friend Dr. Arnold King, and given by Nichols as the frontispiece of the later editions of the Biographical Anecdotes. It consisted in a sketch of a plate, flanked by a knife and fork, on which is scrawled: "Mr. Hogarth's compts. to Mr. King and desires the honnor of his company at dinner on Thursday next to Eta Beta PY." A drawing of a mitre in" the middle, supported on a pie, indicates that the Mitre Tavern, Fleet Street, is the place of meeting. The punning use of the Greek letters may be taken as illustrating what was said about Hogarth's acquaint- ance with the classics. Merry and loquacious with cronies such as these, Hogarth out of his element could be dull enough, and we are told the following of a certain dinner to 55 William Hogarth which Horace Walpole invited the poet Gray and Hogarth: " What with the reserve of the one and a want of colloquial talent in the other, In Mixed ^^Ipole never passed a duller time than Company between these representatives of Tragedy and Comedy, being obliged to rely entirely on his own efforts to support conversation. "^ Ireland tells us of Hogarth that "his conversation was lively and cheerful, mixed with a quickness of retort that did not gain him friends;" and adds as a tribute to his goodness of heart: " Severe in his satire on those who were present, of the absent he was usually the advocate, and he sometimes boasted that he never uttered a sentence concerning any man living that he would not repeat to his face."^ In no case, however, can Hogarth be regarded as a professed conversationist like Johnson. He could not, like the Doctor, command the attention of a room for a monologue, while on the other hand his pugnacity and occasional fussiness unfitted him for easy give-and- take in argument. Indeed an opponent quick to play on another's weakness could readily have taken unkind advantage of a certain transparent vanity and openness to flattery in the little artist, which must have amused his associates, though to us they make him none the less lovable. The following is a very characteristic story: — "Hogarth being at dinner with the great Cheselden, and some other company, was told that ' Steevens, in Genuine Works, 1808, i. 393. * John Bowyer Nichols, Anecdotes, 1833, p. 80, 56 His Simplicity Mr. John Freke, surgeon of ^^. Bartholomew's Hospital, a few evenings before at Dick's Coffee-Honse, had asserted that Greene was as eminent in composition as Handel. ' That fellow Freke,' replied Hogarth, ' is always shoot- ing his bolt absurdly one way or another! Handel is a giant in music; Greene only a light Florimel kind of a composer.' 'Ay,' says our artist's informant, 'but at the same time Mr. Freke declared you were as good a portrait-painter as Vandyck.' ' T/iere he was in the right,' adds Hogarth. "^ The simplicity of Hogarth's nature which makes him so attractive comes out in a curious personal anecdote. At a late period of his life, probably in 1757, when he received the appointment of Simplicity Sergeant-Painter to the King, Hogarth set up his coach, and soon afterwards was driven in it to pay a visit to the Lord Mayor. "When he went the weather was fine; but business detained him till a violent shower of rain came on. He was let out of the Mansion House by a different door from that at which he entered; and, seeing the rain, began immediately to call for a hackney-coach. Not one was to be met with . . . and our artist sallied forth to brave the storm, and actually reached Leicester Fields without bestow- ing a thought on his own carriage, till Mrs. Hogarth (surprised to see him so wet and splashed) asked where he had left it!" 2 This anecdote brings Hogarth before us as a man of worldly substance, but we have seen that till he was ' Biographical Anecdotes, 1785, p. 57. ^ Iliid., p. 58. 57 William Hogarth about thirty he hardly earned more than would suppon himself, and his first advance towards worldly success was the publication in 1732, when he was thirty-five, o: the series known as the " Harlot's Progress." Nichols has preserved the following interesting notice: — "In 1733 his genius became conspicuousl) ^-.. _. known. The third scene of his 'Harlot's Progress' introduced him to the notice o: the great. At a board of Treasury which was held a day or two after the appearance of thai print, a copy of it was shown by one of the lords, as containing, among other excellencies, a striking lik& ness of Sir John Gonson (a well-known magistrate especially severe on the filles-de-joie of the time). Ii gave universal satisfaction; from the Treasury eacJ lord repaired to the print-shop for a copy of it, anc i7tjfrt;-zfA rose completely into fame. . . . The familiaritj of the subject, and the propriety of its execution made the 'Harlot's Progress' tasted by all ranks o people. Above twelve hundred names were entered ir his subscription-book. "1 After this favourable start, the prints seem generally to have had a good sale, but the prices were low. Ii the priced catalogue issued by Mrs. Hogartl His Prices in 1784, after her husband's death, th( whole series of 91 plates there enumerate! were offered for thirteen guineas. The six plates of th( " Marriage k la Mode" cost ^i us. 6d., the eight o the "Rake's Progress" JQ2 as., while the " Marcl ■ Biographical Anecdotes, 1785, p. 29. 58 Prices of his Works to Finchley" could be had for los. 6d., and " South- wark Fair ". for 55. The prices he received for his paintings were as a rule small. In 1750 Hogarth arranged an auction sale of the original pictures of the "Marriage k la Mode," but owing to a misplaced originality in the method of sale, and a perverse obstinacy in adhering to an initial mistake, both of which were quite in his style, the whole of the six pictures, now one of the treasures of the National Gallery, were sold for the paltry sum of ;^i20. On the< other hand, for one or two of his pictures, not neces- sarily the best, he received substantial payments. For the " Paul before Felix," at Lincoln's Inn, a large picture, he was paid jQ20o, for the altar-piece for St. Mary RedclifFe, Bristol, ;^Soo, and for his portrait of Garrick as Richard III., ;£^2oo. Hogarth's office of Sergeant-Painter to the King, to which he was appointed in 1757 in succession to the son of Sir James Thornhill, brought him in about ;£^200 a year. He tells us, however, that "he had found by thirty years' experience, that his pictures" (except in the instances just given) "had not produced him one quarter of the profit that arose from his engravings." These became "a voluminous work and circulated not only through England, but over Europe." "■ The most popular of them all seems to have been his portrait of Simon Lord Lovat, of which the original painting is in the National Portrait Gallery. Of the print "the rolling press could not supply impressions enough ; and 1 Hogarth Illustrated, in. 196. 59 William Hogarth though they were sold at a shilling each, for several weeks Hogarth received payment at the rate of twelve pounds a day."^ On the whole, Hogarth may be described as well-to- do, and, though he was never a wealthy man, he was able to give himself and those about him the good time he had looked forward to from early life. It must be noted that he was shrewd in discerning, and quick in taking advantage of, a chance. The success of the "Harlot's Progress" was, as we have just seen, insured by a clever stroke, and in the case of both the Lovat portrait, and that of Wilkes which was equally famous, Hogarth seized on the moment the opportunity of making the needful study from the life. In a worldly sense he thoroughly deserved all the success he obtained, as he worked hard and never let slip the opportune moment for a popular move. In summing up his character, John Ireland says well of him: " In the relations of husband, brother, friend, and TT- master, he was kind, generous, sincere, and ^, , indulgent. In diet abstemious; but in his hospitalities, though devoid of ostentation, liberal and free-hearted. Not parsimonious, yet frugal ; — but such were the rewards then paid to artists, that, after the labour of a long life, he left a very inconsiderable sum to his widow." ^ Attention must now be turned to that part of Hogarth's character and personality which brought ' Austin Dobson, Memoir, p. loi. ''■ Hogarth Illustrated, l. cxxi. 60 The Artist Militant him into the light of publicity. This was his pugnacity. He was by nature a combative little man, and entered into numerous controversies, in which he . bore himself always with straightforward- ness and courage, though it does not * -^ follow that he was always right in the line he adopted. We have indeed to distinguish among Hogarth's various quarrels with institutions or persons. Some were entered into for no very substantial reason, it might be as a consequence of prejudice, or from a desire to support a friend or party ; while others on the contrary were the outcome of all that was best in Hogarth and in his age. When his militant energy took the form of a vigorous attack on abuses, or of resistance to oppression, it was the direct and honour- able expression of one of the best spirits of the eighteenth century. Hogarth's natural pugnacity was specially excited by foreigners, and in this he showed himself at times delightfully narrow-minded, and " British " in the most Philistine sense of the word. One of his polemics, again and again renewed, was directed against the patronage of foreign virtuosi and foreign artists in general, which was the , . , rage m the eighteenth century.^ His views ° as to foreign fashions in art generally will be more suitably noticed on a later page. With respect to the singers and dancers, he makes a direct attack in ' Anecdotes, 1833, pp. 16 f., 39 f., etc. 61 William Hogarth satirical prints on some of the Italian Castrati anc other outland favourites, while in some of the mon serious plates, as in the "Progresses" and similai works, there are bye-allusions to the same grievance. But Hogarth's objection to the foreigner went farthei than this. He seems to have possessed the belief, remarkable in a man of culture and common-sense, that the countries beyond the English Channel wen peopled by an altogether inferior race. Not only was the foreigner not to be welcomed when he came ovei to England, 1 but he could hardly be permitted to exisi even in his own country. The picture known as " Calais .Gate," No. 1464, British School, in the National Gallery, together with „ . . his own remarks in explanation of the " Calais ■ ■ • • „ scene^ will illustrate this curious idiosyn- crasy. The scene of the picture, which is also engraved,^ is the old gate of Calais . called "Porte de la Mer" to the north of the old town, recently removed with the wall of enceinte connected with it.* From the principal incident portrayed, the sub-title, " O the Roast Beef of Old England," is often given to the piece, and under this it appears to have been first advertised.^ The spectator is supposed to be standing under the arch in the outer line of fortifica- ^ See the notice of the plate called " Beer Street," in Chapter VI. ° Anudotes, p. 62. ^ Stephens, No. 3,050. The date is 1749. * Guides Joanne, France, Le Nord, 1878, p. 80, and 1890, p. 70, with maps. ° Genuine Works, I. 142. 62 > "Calais Gate" tion, and to be looking across the intermediate space to the gate in the inner of the two lines of enceinte, over which are to be seen carved the three leopards of England. In this space, and under the arch where we are standing, are various personages intended to illustrate pictorially the impressions of France which the artist has recorded in his own words. "The first time," he says, "an Englishman goes from Dover to Calais he must be struck with the different face of things at so little a distance, a farcical pomp of war, pompous parade of religion, and much bustle with very little business. To sum up all, poverty, slavery, and innate insolence [this from Hogarth!] covered with an affectation of politeness, give you even here a true picture of the manners of the whole nation; nor are the priests less opposite to those of Dover, than the two shores. The friars are dirty, sleek, and solemn; the soldiery are lean, ragged, and tawdry; and as to the fishwomen — their faces are absolute leather." ^ In the centre of the composition a lean French man- cook is bearing in his arms a gigantic sirloin of English beef which we must suppose to have just arrived by the packet. A label attached to it reads "For Madm. Grandsire at Calais," and the lady in question " is said to have been the keeper of the hotel at Calais which was, in Hogarth's time, most frequented by English visitors,"^ for whose dinner the beef was destined. A fat Franciscan friar is unctuously pressing the joint ' Anecdotes, p. 62. - Stephens, No. 3,050. 63 William Hogarth with his fingers, while a couple of emaciated Fren soldiers in ragged uniforms gaze with astonishm« and envy at the prospective feast. Two other tatti demalions, equally lean of aspect, are carrying t tween them a cauldron of " soupe maigre" whi contrasts with the solid British viands. An Iri mercenary in the French service and an exiled Hig lander also cast despairing glances at the luscio roast which is not for them. A group of fishwom with other figures fills up the scene, in the backgroui of which appears Hogarth himself sketching the inn gate. On his shoulder a hand is seen laid, while ti shadow of a pike on the wall above his head signifi that he had attracted the hostile attention of the guar As a fact the artist was actually arrested for sketchii the fortifications, and he was confined to his ov lodgings till he could be sent back to Englan Steevens gives us to understand ^ that Hogarth's d meanour while he was abroad was intentionally i suiting to the French. This we need not whol believe, but the animus shown in the picture ai description must have been betrayed in his bearini and we cannot be surprised that he found himself trouble. A few years later, in 1756, when there was an alar of a projected invasion of England by the Frenci Hogarth issued two plates entitled "The Invasion,' of which No. I. exhibits in facetious fashion the su; ' Biographical Anecdotes, 1785, p." 49. - Stephens, Nos. 3,446 and 3,454. 64 Opposes Academy posed French preparations on the Gallic side of the Channel, while No. II. presents an English scene, flooded with patriotism. On the left a British grenadier is drawing on a wall a satirical effigy of the King, Louis XV. of France, while an admiring maid measures the breadth of his stalwart shoulders with her apron. A would-be warrior on the right is striving to reach the height of the recruiting sergeant's measuring rod. This hostility of the islander to Continental ways and products appears incidentally in connection with a con- troversy in which Hogarth was engaged with his professional brethren at home. It has been mentioned already that he was opposed to the project, much discussed in his time, of forming an English Academy of Arts. As a fact, though he does not seem to have noticed '^ this, the movement for an Academy was in ^ , one respect the following out of an inno- -^ vation of his own. One reason why artists were calling out for an academy was the desire to secure oppor- tunities for the public exhibition of their works. This very idea of public exhibition had been started by Hogarth and his friends in connection with the newly established Foundling Hospital, in the early 'forties. He and others presented pictures to the institution, and the public display of these excited so much interest that the idea of such exhibitions fastened on the artistic mind. Hogarth however opposed the project for an acaderhy, and we possess his own memoranda on the 65 F William Hogarth subject with the arguments he was prepared to emp against it. Some of these are the stock argume against academies and all official institutions of kind, and might be used with the same measure justice to-day, while others are more personal and n be explained in great part by considerations aires adduced (ante, p. 4). It was not only however, that the proposal for academy was an innovation of the rising general! it was something still worse in Hogarth's eyes — it v an idea borrowed from France. He takes it on hi self to demonstrate the ill effects on art of academ from the example of France. It may be arguable tl the arts in their highest branches in France as el where are rather hindered than helped by acadei organisation, but Hogarth tries to maintain this regard also to the decorative and industrial ai These he claims were flourishing quite as much non-academic England as across the Channel, hi Dilke has however sufficiently shown how mi French art in these minor branches of it owes to 1 sagacious arrangements planned by Colbert and carr out ever since, ^ and the fact that Hogarth engra> Ellis Gamble's shop card in French as well as English, while his own ornamental style was "mi in France," might have taught him that in these for of art academic France in the eighteenth century v the leader of Europe. The fact remains that Hogarth in principle oppoi 1 Art in the Modern Stale, Lond. 1888. 66 / " Analysis of Beauty " the formation of an English Royal Academy of Arts, which did not actually come into existence till four years after his death. On the other hand, as we have seen, he helped on the cause of organised artistic study by endowing the academic life-class in St. Martin's Lane with the casts and plant he had inherited from Sir James Thornhill. He also designed the head and tail pieces to a catalogue of one of the exhibitions of the work of the day which preceded the establishment of the Academy, and in these plates he preaches in quite an orthodox spirit on the value of royal support for art.i Hogarth's tirade against the academic idea is of value in another way, as giving us a much better idea of his literary style than will be derived from a perusal of his published volume The Analysis of Beauty.'^ The idea underlying this in- Literary volved and verbose essay is a sound one, -^ that beauty of form is not a mere affair of each one's personal taste, but is susceptible of a reasoned explana- tion. It depends on composition of lines. Hogarth did not however content himself with a clear statement of the formal conditions of beauty, but wrapped his mean- ing up in convolutions of words that the ordinary reader will never have the patience to unravel. Hence the opinion gained currency that the artist was not capable of writing his own language with clearness and sense. As a fact, he was not equal to dealing with the difficult subject of Esthetic, in which it is not easy for any one either to form precise ideas or to express them with ' Stephens, Nos. 3,808, 3,809. ^ Published in 1753. 67 William Hogarth lucidity, but when dealing with a theme within his in- tellectual grasp Hogarth can express himself with plainness as well as vigour, and the whole of the third chapter of the Anecdotes, on the subject of the Academy and other matters of the kind, can be read with both satisfaction and profit. One of the most genial traits in Hogarth's character was his staunch support of his friends. This led him into more than one quarrel into which he otherwise need not have entered. One of these was fought A Staurich j^ j^j^ ^^^-^^ ^^^^ ^^ h^a^M of Sir James Friend Thornhill. Sir James had an artistic rival in William Kent, architect, landscape gardener, decora- tive artist, painter of pictures. Londoners know Kent as architect through the dull and ponderous Devonshire House in Piccadilly. His decorative painting on the walls and ceiling of the Queen's Great Staircase at Hampton Court is oppressively tame and heavy, while two small historical figure-pieces in the same palace from his hand are beneath criticism. Kent was how- ever officially well supported, and Thornhill, an infinitely more accomplished painter, feared him as a competitor. Hogarth, who must already have been favourably noticed by Sir James, and was anxious to show his gratitude, in some of his early plates severely satirised his patron's rival, ^ and moreover produced an absurd parody of an altar-piece Kent had executed for the church of St. Clement's Danes in the Strand.^ ' See the plate "Masquerades and Operas" of 1724, noticed on p. 26. ° Stephens, No. 1,764. 68 Hogarth and Pope In another early plate he takes up the cudgels on behalf of the Duke of Chandos, and in opposition to Kent's patron the Earl of Burlington. ... Chandos had previously been satirised by c /• •/ no less a personage than Alexander Pope. Hogarth in the print entitled " Taste," or " The Man of Taste,"! retaliates on behalf of the Duke by holding Pope up to ridicule, and the material for a very pretty artistic and literary quarrel seemed ready to hand.^ It is a matter to be thankful for that for one reason or another Pope did not reply to Hogarth's attack, and we, are saved the spectacle of two such men fighting a gladiatorial battle on behalf of patrons whom posterity would but for them have well-nigh forgotten. Pope was a more complex personality than Hogarth, and there were elements in his character offensive to the directness and honesty of the painter, but at heart they were at one, and the writer of the lines : " Worth makes the man and want of it the fellow. The rest is all but leather and prunella," was in innermost sympathy with the limner whom Swift called upon to aid him in gibbeting the fools and pretenders of the time. It is noteworthy that as early in Hogarth's career as 1736, Swift, who saw Hogarth ' Stephens, No. 1,873. ^ Stephens, ad loc, says, "It is probable that this attack upon him was severely felt by the poet; and there are good grounds for believing that he even contemplated a prosecution of the artist as a libeller." 69 William Hogarth from a suitable distance, addresses him as a powerful fellow-labourer in the field of honest satire : " How I want thee, humorous Hogarth ! Thou, I hear, a pleasant rogue art. Were but you and I acquainted, Every monster should be painted: You should try your graving tools On this odious group of Fools; Draw the beasts as I describe them; Form their features while I gibe them; Draw them like; for I assure ye, You will need no car'catura; Draw them so that we may trace All the soul in every face." The lines occur in Swift's bitter outpouring called The Legion Club, one of the latest of his writings. A far more serious quarrel, in which for no particular reason the painter found himself involved, was that where he had for opponents the celebrated Quarrel ^^^^ Wilkes and his henchman Charles "^^^^ Churchill. This was a political affair and ^ ^^ was fought out with very bitter feelings on both sides. It occurred at the close of Hogarth's life, but when his opponents pretended that he was sinking into his dotage, he responded by the production of one of his most masterly studies, the satirical portrait of John Wilkes, holding the cap of Liberty aloft on a pole, and looking round at the spectator with a broad leer on his countenance. Hogarth says himself of the portrait that it was " drawn, like as I could as to features, and 70 The Eighteenth Century marked with some indications of his mind,"^ and he evidently intended to add insincerity to the other vices with which he seems to credit his model. In most of the foregoing conflicts no real principle was involved, and they may be regarded as accidental controversies into which the artist was drawn by force of circumstances. Save in so far as the works of art to which they gave rise may come before us in a later chapter, we need have no further concern with these non-essential parts of Hogarth's osuvre. His real work as a practical moralist and corrector of abuses had far deeper roots, and this work, the true expression of his character and personality, must claim here a word. Regarded from the moral and sociological standpoint the world of Hogarth's time, and his own work in that world, seem to present the following aspects. In the early Victorian days of Carlyle and Ruskin it was the fashion to condemn the eighteenth century as a materialistic age unillumined by ideas. Carlyle exhausted his somewhat copious ^ . vocabulary of vituperation on the era that was after all the era of Johnson and of Hogarth, 2 and Carlyle's way of thinking has become ' Anecdotes, p. 59. ^ " A decrepit, death-sick Era, when Cant had first decisively opened her poison-breathing lips to proclaim that God-worship and Mammon- worship were one and the same, that Life was a Lie, and the Earth Beelzebub's, which the Supreme Quack should inherit ; and so all things were fallen into the yellow leaf, and fast hastening to noisome corr uption." — Carlyle, on Boswell's Lije of Johnson. 71 William Hogarth traditional. It is true that the earlier part of the eighteenth century was in the main a coarse and brutal period when most men's thoughts were of the earth, earthy, and neither in the Church nor in secular society did life seem to stir amid the clods. Yet there were germinating in the thought of the time almost all the religious and social ideas that in our own age have come to fruition. The social reform Acts, which have been the glory of the later Victorian epoch, were all the result of the action of public opinion on the Legislature, and this same public opinion, crystallising after English fashion in Associations and Boards, has itself effected more than Parliament could compass. Throughout the eighteenth century this public opinion was in process of formation. The abuses of the time were noted by philanthropists and reformers; associa- tions were incorporated; the Legislature was set in motion, but the means available for the work in view were always too weak to effect more than a little, and were often ill-devised and clumsy. On the subject of these various social abuses. Committees of the House of Commons report, and Grand Juries' of the County of Middlesex present, in terms similar to those used by ' the modern social reformer. Societies still active in beneficent social work in London and elsewhere owed their origin to the despised eighteenth century, and ^ Maitland, History of London, i. 543, prints a presentment of the Grand Jury of the County of Middlesex dealing with the evils attendant on fashionable masquerades, on gin-drinking and other abuses of the date, 1729. All these abuses Hogarth at one time or another attacks. 72 Social Reforms individuals like John Howard, or Captain Coram, or Thomas Guy, set on foot investigations, and founded or endowed agencies for beneficent work, the full effect of which future generations were to see. The appeal of the oppressed and helpless was beginning to come home to the public heart and con- science, and it is one of Hogarth's best titles to fame that he seconded that appeal with all his powers. Not alone, but in "-^ company with other active reformers and philanthropists of his time, he was always at work on the side of social purity, of honesty, of good taste, of gentleness, of all things of good report. Neither he nor the others could boast of as much definite result as they may have expected or hoped for, but theirs was at any rate work along the lines of actual progress, and has been amply justified by the gradual transformation of society into a cleaner, gentler, honester thing than it was in the days when Hogarth issued his satirical plates. And first a word on religion and morality in the eighteenth century and Hogarth's attitude thereto. It is idle to call the eighteenth century a specially irreligious or specially licentious age. All ages seem irreligious and licentious „■ ,, if we look at certain aspects of them. It is "y, , true that, as Sir Walter Besant notices, it is -^ a commonplace that the Church of England in the reign of George II. was at its worst, ^ but he points out that ' London in the Eighteenth Century, Lond. 1902^ p. 148. 73 William Hogarth one-fifth of the populatic^n of London at the time was Nonconformist, and Nonconformity was still com- paratively youthful and inspiriting-. Moreover, the preaching of Wesley and Whitefield had before the middle of the century become a power in the land, and this religious revival, beginning of all places in the world at Oxford, was the motive power which was ultimately to transform the ecclesiastical life of all the Churches. Hogarth, in his print entitled ' ' The Sleeping Congregation, "1 issued in 1736, showed that he was fully alive to the dulness of orthodox Anglicanism. It must be admitted, on the other hand, that he failed to recognise in the early Methodists the vital force that was to arouse and vivify a somnolent Church. Hogarth's plates "Enthusiasm Delineated" and "Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism, "^ that were partly aimed at the Methodists, are a distinct rebuke to a religious fervour which his sturdy common-sense repudiated as extravagant. The power of the new preaching to reach the heart was, however, recognised by Hogarth when he drew the Wesleyan revivalist in the cart with the condemned felon, in the fine scene of the execution at the end of his " 'Prentice " series.^ The morals of the first half of the eighteenth century were doubtless better than those of the last half of the century before, but clearly left much to be desired, and Hogarth appears in this matter not only as satirist but reformer. ' Stephens, No. 2,285. SeepPsUa, p. 124. " S&epostea, p. 122. ^ ^^^ posiea, p. 133. 74 Hogarth Moralised It is stated in the Bibliographical Note in the Appen- dix that many of Hogarth's plates were in his own time, and still more after his death, exploited in the cause of moral edification. The manner * '''' ^^ m which these works were handled by com- mentators of the type of the Reverend John Trusler is naturally offensive to the artistic consciousness of our own time, but it must be confessed that Hogarth himself, artist though he was, took very much the same view of this part of his work. The series of twelve plates contrasting the lives of the Idle and the Industrious Apprentice was intended by him to be a distinct pictorial sermon, and, as was the case also with the equally didactic "Four Stages of Cruelty," the plates were engraved in cheap and summary fashion to allow of their wide circulation at an inexpensive rate. There is a delightful record to the eifect that when the " Harlot's Progress " was engraved on a small scale on fans, he presented a fan thus adorned to every maid- servant who entered his employ. The fact shows the light in which he regarded the series, and the com- panion set of the "Rake's Progress" had a similar practical aim. It may be doubted whether moral appeals of the kind are ever directly effective. The primary result of the warning is to bring temptation and vice vividly before the mind, and to those who are youthful and impressionable this does a direct harm, that is not counteracted by the subsequent exhortation. The same result must often follow on the doubtless well- 75 William Hogarth intentioned efforts of some evangelists of an American type, who are so eager with their " straight talks" to the young of both sexes. They probably do far more harm than good by besmirching pure souls with ideas of evil that otherwise might never have entered them. The maid-servants who received the moralised fans were probably struck at the outset with the sudden rise of Hogarth's misguided heroine from the status of a prospective "slavey" to a dazzling opulence and splendour. Her after misfortunes so numerous and tragic probably affected them less, for they would shrewdly suspect Miss Mary Hackabout of having played her cards badly. The ethics of the servants' hall at Leicester Fields were doubtless as good' as those of the drawing-room and studio, but the whole- some traditions of the household had more to do with this than any lessons or warnings of the two didactic " Progresses." On the other hand, when viewed as pictures of human life of the same type as those drawn by Shake- speare, almost alL Hogarth's pieces are in their moral influence helpful and stimulating. In this indirect manner they undoubtedly checked the career of the eighteenth century towards that " noisome corruption" to which Carlyle saw it hastening, and furthered that progressive purification of society, which is still so far from the desired accomplishment. In this assertion of the good moral influence of Hogarth's work as a whole due account is taken of the facts, first, that there are one or two plates, but 76 Small Indelicacies only one or two, that are not suitable for public ex- hibition; and, second, that in many of his most brilliant and most wholesome productions there are . small indelicacies offensive to modern British " iyiorai, eyes. Of the first it is enough to say ^'J/^^^^^^ that they bear about the same small proportion to Hogarth's work as a whole, that similar plates by Rembrandt bear to the ceuvre of that sublime artist. In regard to the second, Steevens, as advocatus diaboli, has strung together all the indelicacies he can find in Hogarth's works, with the intent of impugning his* morality. The trivial result is Hogarth's vindication ; and the utmost that can be allowed is that in some things which, as Sterne remarked long ago, are re- garded differently in France and in England, Hogarth takes the French view rather than that current in the Britain of to-day. It is worthy of note that the artist showed himself in this matter sensitive to public opinion. In one of his minor productions called " Boys Peeping at Nature" (about 1731) a motive was intro- duced that savoured of indelicacy. In the later states of the plate the motive is altered, though the action of the piece was thereby rendered meaningless. Hogarth spoiled his design because he felt, or was given to understand, that offence might reasonably be taken at what he had first devised. In the last generation it would have been maintained that Hogarth's works were not mrginibus puerisqiie. In respect of the former however, the well-educated, practical young woman of the day is prepared to enjoy 77 William Hogarth her Hogarth with the rest of her family, ignoring any unpleasant detail as she ignores the disagreeable sight or suggestion or word in the streets or in Shake- speare. The present writer once noted with sincere pleasure the frank delight and crystal laughter of a British girl who was making the acquaintance of the Hogarths in the Soane Museum on an occasion when he was working there. Twenty years ago she would have been less at her ease, and the pictures would not have done her nearly so much good. Let it be repeated as we pass from this subject, that the popular notion that Hogarth's works are improper is a thoroughly false and pernicious one. They are as much and as little improper as the unbowdlerised copies of Shake- speare that we put into the hands of our boys and girls. Apart from any broader question of the religious and moral condition of the eighteenth century, it was no doubt an age callous and brutal to an -^ extent we can hardly realise. It was in- different to human suffering and still more to the suffering of the lower animals. There is nothing in which Hogarth shows himself so distinctly in advance of his epoch as in his vigorous onslaught on those guilty of cruelty to animals. In his own notes on the four plates entitled "The Four Stages of Cruelty" he uses the following expressions:— "The prints were engraved with the hope of, in some degree, correcting that barbarous treatment of animals, the very sight of which renders the streets of our 78 As Philanthropist metropolis so distressing to every feeling mind. If they have had this effect, and checked the progress of cruelty, I am more proud of having been the author, than I should be of having painted Raphael's Car- toons." ^ The "feeling mind" was not so common in the eighteenth century as it has now become in an age of greater sensibility, and Hogarth's protest was of all the greater value. Here again, it is true, the direct effect of the plates on heedless youth might be to suggest new experiments in torture, but on the public generally the appeal would certainly not be lost, and heedless youth, when caught in a cruel act and chastised by indignant maturity, would feel the lash of Hogarth administered indirectly by the public opinion the painter had educated. Indifference to human suffering showed itself in the treatment of the helpless, the suffering, the insane, the unfortunate, the criminal. In regard to all these the philanthropist was in Hogarth's day already at work, and the artist aided ^ ^?" him not only with his brush and his graver I'opis but with the gift of time and personal trouble, such as he gave to the incipient Foundling Hospital charity. The work of Malcolm entitled Anecdotes of tlie Mamiers and Customs of London during the Eighteenth Century, including the Charities, Depravities, Dresses, and Amusements, of the Citizens of London, during that Period^ brings together a mass of material concerning the social life of the times, and we cannot peruse it ' Anecdotes, etc., 1833, p. 65. ^ London, 1808, 79 William Hogarth without being constantly reminded of Hogarth and his polemics and charities. The awful mortality among pauper children reported on by a Committee of the House of Commons about the time of Hogarth's death i reminds us of his personal care for the little ones (anie, p. 52). Inquiries and reforms concerning Houses of Detention and Asylums were undoubtedly aided by the fact that Hogarth had revealed the secrets of the prison houses, and displayed to view so many of the dark places of the great city. The infatuation of the fashionable world for entertainments, always frivolous and often licentious ; of the lower classes for the fatal intoxicant "Madam Geneva" (or gin); of all classes alike for senseless gambling in the public lotteries or schemes like the South Sea Bubble, — of all these Hogarth took account on his pictured page, and in regard to all his influence counted for good. Some examples of the way he dealt with these public themes will be given in the sequel. ' Malcolm, p. 6 f. 80 CHAPTER IV. the london of the eighteenth century, and Hogarth's place in it. Changes in London since Hogarth's day — Loss of the Thames water- way — And of noblemen's houses — New thoroughfares — Survivals of Hogarth's London — Coffee houses— Shop signs — Sights of the streets— The pleasure gardens — Professional beauties — Hogarth and Vauxhall — Hogarth at Chiswick — His time divided between London and Chiswick — His tomb in Chiswick churchyard. It has been noticed of Hogarth that, like Dr. Johnson, he was heart and soul a Londoner, and he had the advantage, too, of the lexicographer that he was a Londoner by birth. One cannot think of Hogarth apart from London, nor of Born and London in the eighteenth century apart from '' one who was perhaps its most characteristic citizen. What is said here about London has for its object to help the reader, first, to realise Hogarth's figure more clearly by gaining some definite picture of his sur- roundings; and, next, to understand the viise en scene and incidental details of his works, the setting of which is in nearly every case some part of the metropolis, or of its near neighbourhood. How different is the metropolis we know from the 8i G William Hogarth London of Hogarth, may well be the first thought of a reader. The difference is great, but it is to a very large extent the creation of our own time. A Londoner who has only reached middle life has probably seen more changes in the monumental aspect of London than occurred between Hogarth's apprenticeship and the middle of the nineteenth century, and if we think these changes away, and dwell upon that large amount of modern London which is substantially as Hogarth saw it, we shall realise without any great difficulty his surroundings. The very localities of his scenes are sometimes to be recognised, though in the majority of cases we have to take account of those alterations and clearances, the chief of which we will now proceed to notice. The changes partly concern the monumental aspect of the city, and partly its safety and convenience as a J- f place of residence. In both there has been, Thnntpt ^^ ^^ shall see, a loss as well as a gain. Ti^ , The most conspicuous loss, as great on the utilitarian side as on that of beauty, is the surrender of the great waterway of the Thames as a route of communication as well as a promenade. Londoners have gradually allowed their inheritance in this noblest of thoroughfares to pass from their hands, till in the year of writing, 1904, there is not a single boat between bridges plying for public hire upon the Thames! But even when we get our boats again, the infinite picturesqueness of the river banks cannot ever be restored. The Embankment, which has never yet 82 Riverside London become, like the quays of Paris or of Lyons, a really busy thoroughfare, is a dull substitute from the aesthetic point of view for the mansions and gardens and terraces and flights of stairs, that in eighteenth-century pic- tures are seen bordering a bright stream, alive with dancing boats and swept by many-oared barges. Any one who desires to realise how London on the river looked in the middle of the eighteenth century, should study the series of paintings of that . date by the artist William James, that, formerly at Hampton Court, now hang on the walls of Kensington Palace. The artist has drawn his inspiration from Canaletto, and has perhaps a little exaggerated the palatial grandeur of some riverside structures, but Mr. Law calls the pictures "almost photographic in their accuracy. "^ Look, for example, at the "View on the Thames, with Whitehall and West- minster" which shows on the right Inigo Jones's Water Gate, next, the octagonal tower of the waterworks, then Whitehall, and, beyond, Westminster Abbey and the old bridge. 2 How picturesque the grouping, how varied the outlines and the colour, how abundant the foliage that contrasts with the many-tinted build- ings! In the "View on the Thames" showing the Savoy, the Temple, etc.,^ we note on the left hand the old Savoy Palace, with its curious chequered brick- work. Old Somerset House, and the Temple with its ' Ernest Law, Historical Catalogue of the Pictures in Hampton Court Palace, London, 1881, p. 281. -' Ibid., No. 923. ' Ibid., p. 286, No. 925. 83 William Hogarth gardens, while a glimpse is gained on the right of the opposite bank of the river. The waterway in several of these pictures, notably that showing Old London Bridge,^ is dotted with innumerable boats amidst which the more stately barges, aglow with colour and gild- ing, take their course up or down the stream. Some excellent pictures of the same subject by Samuel Scott, the marine-painter of Hogarth's time, hang in the Hogarth room in the National Gallery, while John Constable's noble "Opening of Waterloo Bridge "^is a true epic that sums up in imperishable art the heroic age of the Thames waterway in Older London. The loss to London of its waterway has been in some measure made up on land by the formation of broad ri,n a continuous thoroughfares through what were f., before networks of narrow streets. These on Snore , , ^ , . , thoroughfares, together with one great open space, represent the chief alteration in the configuration of London between Hogarth's days and our own. This change, which is still in progress under our eyes, as in the case of Rosebery Avenue and the "Kingsway," is now being accompanied by the process of pulling down the plain little brick Georgian houses of four storeys, and substituting either gigantic blocks let out under the tenement system, or else fancy structures in new and independent architectural styles. The new streets may ' Ernest Law, Historical Catalogue of the Pictures in Hamfton Court Palace, No. 884. ^ Shown at Burlington House in the Old Masters' Exhibitions of 1892 and 1903. It was painted in 1817. 84 London Squares be an improvement, but London will have lost much when its characteristic brick houses are pulled down, or beautified after the manner of Russell Square. Another change involving far more loss than gain has been the gradual disappearance of the lordly noblemen's houses, with their ample gardens, which „ f were once so numerous within the bounds tu p of London proper, and of which the present Devonshire House in Piccadilly is the most conspicuous survivor. These meant always open garden ground and greenery, and often imposing architecture with sumptuous fittings in the style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sir Walter Besant says that it was the value of this garden ground for building pur- poses that led to the destruction of the houses. The still higher value to the extending city of the open spaces when not built upon should on the contrary have secured their preservation. Almost all the squares had one side occupied by a mansion of this kind, in the same relative position that Hertford House now occupies in Manchester Square. Bedford House stood on the south side of Covent Garden, where now Southampton Street runs down to the Strand. North of Bloomsbury Square was Southampton House, a "long low white edifice" of "venerable grandeur,''^ built from designs by Inigo Jones or one of his pupils, and close beside it was Montague House on the present site of the British ' Quotations in Wheatley, London Past and Present, Lond. 1891, I. 144. 8=; William Hogarth Museum. Leicester House, which gave Leicester Fields their name, took the whole of the side where the Empire now stands, and its gardens stretched back to the line of Gerrard Street. Returning now to the new thoroughfares that have so altered Hogarth's London, we note that the first in time as well as the most important are „ * Waterloo Place and Regent Street. These were constructed in the first quarter of the nineteenth century for the sake of affording direct communication between Carlton House, on the site of the present Carlton House Terrace, the residence of the Prince Regent, and the new park named in his honour north of Marylebone. Waterloo Place cut through what was St. James's Market, the remains of which can still be seen behind the former Gallery of Illustration, but Regent Street only followed the line of an earlier narrow thoroughfare, called Swallow Street, part of which still survives. Langham and Portland Places are new lines, but that of Great Portland Street is an old one. The " New Road," now called the Maryle- bone and Euston Roads, had been previously laid out as an improvement on narrow and crooked lanes leading eastwards from Paddington, but it was a country road and made no alteration in the actual town. Soon after it had skirted the country hamlet of Marylebone it passed what was known as Tottenhall, Tottnam, or Tottenham ^ Court, an old manor-house ^ There was no connection between this place and the town of Tottenham. 86 Clearances quite in the fields, beside a turnpike on the road From St. Giles's to Hampstead, just where the " New Road" was crossed by it. Near this point _,, ^ , The AdciTtt were one or two places of entertainment, ^, so that the whole formed a little hamlet. ^ Gict fustis The spot is at the present junction of Tottenham Court and Euston Roads. In Hogarth's time there were gardens here called the "Adam and Eve," and opposite them a tavern with the sign of the "King's Head." Herfe he fixed the scene of perhaps the most famous of all his pictures and plates — the " March of the Guards to Finchley," and it is a fact of much interest that at this very day an "Adam and Eve" faces a "King's Head" public-house at the corners of Hampstead and Euston Roads, and they are the lineal successors of the houses shown in Hogarth's print. The first side-street up Hampstead Road is now called " Eden Street," and this is a relic of the " Paradise " attached as a garden to "Adam and Eve." Soon after Regent Street was made there came the important innovation in the vicinity of Charing Cross, when a congeries of structures known as the Royal Mews was cleared away, and aj^ing there was formed on its site the fine piazza ^"^^ of Trafalgar Square. Till that time the open space at Charing Cross was confined to the part immediately around the statue of Charles I., that occupies the former site of Queen Eleanor's Cross. Hogarth has chosen the spot for the scene of that one of his " Four 87 William Hogarth Times of the Day" illustrating "Night." We see there the equestrian statue at the end of a somewhat narrow street leading up from Whitehall, but beyond the effigy, instead of Nelson's column and the foun- tains, we find the view closed in by the crowded buildings of the King's Mews. St. Martin's Lane, a very old thoroughfare, has only recently lost the aspect under which Hogarth knew it. Gay, in his Trivia, describes the Seven Dials. The scene of Hogarth's " Enraged Musician " is in the Lane or in its vicinity, for the spire of St. Martin's in the Fields is conspicuous in the background of this well- devised tableau. Until 1847, Oxford Street, which had ended at what was known as St. Giles's Pound, at the top of Tot- tenham Court Road, was prolonged east- Jv"'' wards towards Holborn by a bend to the ^^'^^^^ south through High Street St. Giles's, and Broad Street or Broad St. Giles. In that year New Oxford Street was opened, cutting through the former "rookery" of St, Giles's; Bainbridge Street, along- side Meux's brewery, being a relic of the older order of things. Victoria Street has greatly altered the district between Westminster Abbey and Tothill Fields, while there are new thoroughfares on the south side of the river, especially the one leading to Waterloo Bridge. The convenient but oppressively dull Northumberland Avenue occupies the site of one of the great mansions already spoken of, Northumberland House, which fell a prey to the spoiler in the year 1874. 88 Hogarth's " Noon " Quite in our own time, Shaftesbury Avenue and Cliaring Cross Road have sadly dislocated the topo- graphy of the region which Hogarth chiefly haunted. The latter in its upper portion coincides with what we used to know as Crown Street, but which was also in the eighteenth century termed Hog Lane. Here was situated the French Chapel, on a site now occupied by St. Mary's Church and clergy-house. It had previously been a church of the Greeks and had a Greek inscription over the door. The name Greek Street is connected with the fact. Hogarth has chosen the front of this French Chapel for the scene of his "Noon." We see there the Hog Lane of the middle of the eighteenth century with the steeple of St. Giles's looking over "Noon" the lower houses. One detail of the plate is worth notice for its topographical significance. Hang- ing to the upper part of the chapel Hogarth has drawn a child's kite, and this seems to signify the presence hard by of open fields. Now if at the present day we cross Oxford Street and pass along Tottenham Court Road, we soon come on the left hand to Windmill Street. In Hogarth's time the houses were only ex- tending gradually along Tottenham Court Road, and even at his death Whitefield's Tabernacle, now recently rebuilt, was the last building towards the country. J. T. Smith, in his gossipy Nollekens and his Times, gives us the following note on the locality, which will show how near the dwellers in Hogarth's London were to the country: — "Another time . . . Mr. Nollekens 89 William Hogarth stopped at the corner of Rathbone Place, and observed that, when he was a little boy" (this would be about the middle of the eighteenth century) "his mother often took him to the top of that street to walk by the side of a long pond, near a windmill, which then stood on the site of the chapel in Charlotte Street ; and that a halfpenny was paid by every person at a hatch belong- ing to the miller, for the privilege of walking in his grounds. . . . When we got to the brewhouse between Rathbone Place and the end of Tottenham Court Road, he said, he recollected thirteen large and fine walnut trees standing on the north side of the highway, be- tween what was then vulgarly called Hanover Yard, afterwards Hanway Yard, and now Hanway Street, and the Castle Inn beyond the Star Brewery." i If the new thoroughfares already referred to have given a handsome aspect to parts of the town formerly laid out in quiet narrow streets and alleys, Soho Soho and the Covent Garden district, with other old residential quarters, have suffered loss through the deterioration of the house property along them. At 75 Dean Street, Soho, is a house once the residence of Sir James Thornhill, before he moved to Covent Garden. Handsome on the exterior, in the plain unpretentious style of the time, it pos- sesses in the interior noble reception-rooms divided by columns, with carved and pilastered over-mantels. The entrance-hall is paved with marble, and the staircase, of oak with carved balusters, shows on its walls figure ' NolUkem and his Times, i. p. 37. 90 Covent Garden compositions in the decorative style affected both by Sir James and his more gifted son-in-law. The house, used now for business purposes, is happily in careful hands. ' A fine house in Covent Garden, well known till recent years as Evans's Supper Rooms, figures in Hogarth's plate called "Morninsf." The background of _, , . , . , , • J Covent this scene, though the topography is reversed in the engraving, has hardly changed. The portico of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, rebuilt, after a fire in 1795, on the old design attributed to Inigo Jones, and the house in question, built or rebuilt early in the eighteenth century for Admiral Russell, Earl of Orford, are easily to be recognised. King's Coffee House how- ever, conspicuous in the print, has disappeared. In Hogarth's day, Covent Garden, so called as belonging to the Convent of St. Peter at Westminster, was a clear open space laid with gravel, and dry and well kept.* In the centre was a column surmounted by a dial. The plate by, or ascribed to, Hogarth, called "Rich's Triumphant Entry," gives a view of the piazza, showing the covered colonnades which on the north side still survive. At that time the southern side of the open space was, as we have seen, bounded by Bedford House, and under the garden wall of Bedford House there had gone on a sale of fruit and herbs, that was the beginning of the great market that now dominates not only the square but its surroundings. ' Wheatley, London Past and Present, Lond. 1891, i. 461. 91 William Hogarth Of a class below these good private mansions, so many of which still survive under altered conditions, are the ordinary dwellings of middle-class Middle- personages, of plain brick with perhaps red class quoins and window lintels, that may possess Mansions ^^^ outward adornment a carved wooden porch and some good cast-iron work, with a well- designed door-knocker. Such houses of the late seven- teenth or eighteenth century remain in great numbers. Bartholomew Close, where the painter was born, has them. Queen Square offers some excellent specimens, and the streets between this and Theobald's Road con- tain some good porches, though for the best of these we must probably go to Queen Anne's Gate, Westminster, Wardour Street, Soho, carries its date 1686, and a charming survival of Hogarth's London is to be found in Meard Street between Wardour and Dean Streets, the whole of one side of which with part of the other is evi- dently of the date, 1732, that is still to be read on the houses at both ends of the passage. Bedford Row, near Gray's Inn, described by Ralph in 1734 as " one of the most noble streets that London has to boast of,"' is still most refreshing to the eye in its quiet dignity. The above are merely a few specimens of this class of houses, which are really abundant in the central districts of the modern metropolis. The houses of the same order of the advancing nineteenth century, which are of course still more numerous, have lost the air of style of the 1 Rulph, A Critical Review of the Publick Buildings, etc., Lond, 1734. P- 97. 92 Coffee Houses older ones, and seldom exhibit any good detail. How far the larger and more showy structures, which are gradually taking the place of both, represent an aesthetic advance is not very certain. A house of the kind just noticed at the south-east corner of Leicester Fields,^ was the town residence of Hogarth from 1733 till his death in 1764. . Over it was a sign of the "Golden Head," V' /// and this consisted in a bust of Van Dyck, cut by his own hands from pieces of cork glued together and handsomely gilded. Leicester Fields in Hogarth's day was by no means like the desolate enclosure with its mutilated statue which thirty years ago was one of the eye-sores and disgraces of London. The Fields, like Lincoln's Inn Fields (after 1735) and the central parts of the other squares, were in the middle of the eighteenth century fenced in and pleasantly laid out in walks bordered by trees and shrubs. The house, to judge by its rated value, was a good pne,^ and it looked across to the mansion, which from 1761 was the home of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Here Hogarth would be in the neighbourhood of many of the famous coffee houses and taverns so inti- mately connected with the social and intel- lectual life of the eighteenth century. The CV#ec streets about St. Martin's Lane and Covent Houses Garden were well supplied with them, and the Bedford ' Now, with the adjacent houses, replaced by Archbishop Tenison's Schools. - Austin Dobson, Memoir, p. 33. 93 William Hogarth Arms Tavern in the piazza, Old Slaughter's • Coffee House, St. Martin's Lane, and Button's Coffee House, Russell Street, Covent Garden, are given as favourite haunts of the painter. Samuel Ireland ascribes to Hogarth some sketches representing frequenters of Button's, which he publishes in his Graphic Illustra- tions. The Coffee House of the eighteenth century was a place of resort, in the day-time as well as at night, for light refreshment and for social intercourse and conversation. The Tavern, on the other hand, pro- vided solid viands and port wine, and was chiefly frequented at the dinner-hour. Dr. Johnson generally dined at a cost of sevenpence, and "after dinner he would repair to a coffee house with the air of a man who had'dined pleasantly and copiously."'^ His habitual haunts for his favourite occupation of talking were the coffee houses, and he held the same sort of position in some of these' that Dryden had occupied at an earlier time at Wills's Coffee House, at the corner of Bow Street and Russell Street, Covent Garden. In Hogarth's London the shops, for some of which he engraved the trade cards included in his oeuvre, rejoiced in certain artistic embellishments which ^ modern London had almost wholly lost— ^^ these are the signs which, painted, and sup- ported on upright poles or else hung from the house fronts on ornamental wrought-iron brackets, were prac- ' Besant, London in the Eighteenth Century, p. 392, 94 State of the Streets tically universal along all the business streets. Hogarth designed a heraldic shield placed over the door of the Foundling Hospital where it was first erected, and he comes into the history of eighteenth-century signs through the part he took in a whimsical exhibition of sign-boards in 1762, an account of which is given in Lar- wood and Hotten's The History of Signboards?- These shop signs, the creaking of which was a familiar street- sound, grew so large and unwieldy that they darkened the streets and were a source of inconvenience and even danger, so that in 1766 a movement was set on foot for their abolition. They still however survive in the case of hostelries and ■rnonts de pieid, and spasmodic efforts are sometimes made towards their more general revival. There is no question that the streets over which swung these signs are safer and pleasanter places to walk in to-day than they were in the more picturesque eighteenth century. Most of the roadways were in the earlier epoch paved with cobble stones, and had in the midst a gutter, often running with a foul stream or choked with dead cats and offal. The footway was marked off and protected by posts. At night oil-lamps hanging from the houses shed a dim light on the scene. One of these lamps is being trimmed in the back- ground of the plate of "The Arrest," No. IV. in " The Rake's Progress." The plate of " Noon" shows the signs, the posts, the gutter, and other details. Householders, as in Hogarth's "Night," might still ' London, 1867, p. 28 and Appendix. 95 William Hogarth empty nameless receptacles on the heads of unoffend- ing passers-by. In day-time the streets were full of bustle and noise and colour, for at early dawn "Now industry awakes her busy sons, Full charged with news the breathless hawker runs; Shops open, coaches roll, carts shake the ground. And all the streets with passing cries resound."' The "cries of London" were in the eighteenth century a feature of the town, and Gay notes in Trivia how they altered according to the times of year : — " Successive cries the seasons' change declare. And mark the monthly progress of the year." Itinerant vendors of articles of food and other com- modities were well-known figures, and Hogarth has introduced them effectively into his admirable crowds in street scenes, such as the "March of the Street Guards to Finchley," and the " Idle Appren- T°r,. tice Executed at Tyburn." The babel of ^^ . ''' noise thus created by voites or performances he has forcibly represented in his plate of the "Enraged Musician," where an unfortunate pro- fessional, practising at his dining-room window in or near St. Martin's Lane, is driven almost distracted, by a concert of every conceivable cry or sound of man, woman, child, beast, and instrument. ' Gay's Trivia. 96 Gaiety of Dress There could not be wanting colour in streets through which Hogarth walked in a sky-blue coat or a scarlet roquelaure. Sir Walter Besant says "never at any time, except perhaps that of Richard Costutnes II., was the dress of men more splendid than in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. "^ The pattern of the dress is familiar to us from Hogarth's pictures, especially the " Marriage k la Mode." Wigs were commonly worn, though they were much smaller , than in the century before, and when the wig was put off a cap was drawn over the shaven head, as Hogarth's two portraits of himself will show us. Shoes with buckles, hosen, and coloured small clothes, equipped the nether limbs, and above came the long and ample waistcoat, the descendant of the doublet, with big side pockets and flaps. Over all, answering more to the cloak than a coat in the ordinary sense, came the long frock-like coat, of any gay colour desired, and trimmed to fancy. There was lace on the shirt front and at the wrists. The hat was commonly of the three- cornered form. Not only the upper classes but well- to-do tradesmen also affected considerable nicety as well as richness in their habiliments. There were of course variations of fashion even in the dress of men, while the costume of the ladies followed the changes, and at times the extravagances of the mode. Hogarth's picture and plate entitled "Taste in High Life," 1742, ridicule the preposterous costumes affected by some of ' London in the Eighteenth Century, p. 252. See also p. 255 for an inventory of the wardrobe of a youthful beau of the period. 97 H William Hogarth the fashionable folk of the town. On the other hand, the artist makes the girls of the lower orders very trim and dainty-looking in their caps, their short linsey skirts, and thdir jimp bodices with the fair linen folded across bosoms the exuberance of which the gallants of the time were not slow to note. People with fine clothes on had to be careful in the streets, and Gay gives quite a catalogue of perils that might involve stain or even ruin to the braided coat or laced hat or white silk stockings. The Londoner however was not compelled to brave the dangers of the streets on foot. If he had no „, carriage of his own he was offered the choice _, , of the hackney coach that plied for hire, or the, sedan chair; or, again, the private or omnibus boat upon the river. Any one of these, or as an alternative some short-stage public coach, would transport him in half-an-hour beyond the limits of the town to one of the suburban pleasure resorts, with which the London of the eighteenth century was so well supplied. "All round the city," writes Sir Walter Besant, ' ' north and south and east and west, there were pleasure grounds and gardens where the people resorted on summer evenings and on Sundays to drink punch or chocolate, to order a syllabub, or to take a peaceful pipe of tobacco. "1 Mr. Warwick Wroth, in his London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century,^ divides ' London in the Eighteenth Century, p. 79. ^ London, 1896. 98 Pleasure Gardens these into three classes : first, evening pleasure resorts of the type of Marylebone or Vauxhall Gardens, where there were music and entertainments, illuminations and fireworks at night, and a liberal provision for refresh- ment ; secondly, gardens connected with mineral springs, usually resorted to by day, and also providing entertainments as well as food and drink; and, thirdly, tea gardens, often unpretending in their equipment but pleasant from their country surroundings. These last were much frequented on Sundays. " The amuse- ments were of a simple kind — a game of bowls or skittles, a ramble in the maze, and a more or less hilarious tea-drinking in the bowers or alcoves which every garden provided. "^ These pleasure grounds were on the whole agreeable and healthful adjuncts to London life. A few like Ranelagh and Vauxhall were imposing, but at all, even the simplest, there were always open spaces laid out with varying degrees of primness, and providing shady walks and bosquets and arbours, as well as kiosks and pavilions and dancing-halls impervious to the frequent London showers. They were pretty, homely places, the disappearance of which is to be regretted. Every one remembers, when a few years ago a succession of fine summers made the "Fisheries" and other exhibitions of the same series at South Kensington such a success, how people congratulated each other on being able to spend the evenings in the open air, with music and illuminations and opportunities for ' London Pleasure Gardens, p. 7, 99 William Hogarth mild refreshment. It was a happy restoration for the moment of the old life of the pleasure gardens that for half a century or more had passed away, but the revival, depending so greatly on the weather, was at best an accidental success. The institution had died because social customs change — wherefore, we cannot always tell. A curious instance in our own time is the abandonment of the Palais Royal in Paris as a place of evening resort. So the pleasure gardens of the London suburbs were gradually abandoned, and their sites are now built over, though a public-house or a music-hall often keeps alive their name if not their history. The institution of the pleasure gardens of old London covered in duration about a couple of centuries, from the Restoration epoch, when Pepys tells us how on a very hot day in 1665 he "took water to the Spring Garden at Fox Hall and there stayed, pleasantly walk- ing, and spending but sixpence, till nine at Vauxhall night,"! till Vauxhall Gardens were finally ana tne closed in 1859, and prosaic streets, such Others ^^ q^^ Street and Auckland Street, built upon the twelve acres of their site. Cremorne from about 1843 to 1877, and Rosherville, established in 1837 and still "a place to spend a happy day," were revivals of which the first represented the "fast," and the latter the homely, side of the old pleasure-garden life. The older gardens had all passed through various vicissitudes, and fashion called her votaries now to one ' Quoted in Pleasure Gardens, p. I. 100 The Young Person resort and now to another. They catered for different classes, for the beau-monde, the demi-monde, the bourgeoisie ; and attracted alike the rake and the city apprentice, the law student and the ruffler, the duchess, the milliner, the actress, the maid of honour, and the nurse-girl. The company was generally mixed, and if one looked for bullies or profligates or courtesans they were to be found, but these did not necessarily force themselves on the attention, and on the whole good behaviour was the rule. There were, it is true, "Little Wildernesses" and "Dark Walks" at Vauxhall, near which a careful young lady of the present day would have hesitated to take her parent, for was it not said that the "turnings and windings" were "so intricate" that "the most experienced mothers often lost themselves in looking for their daughters? "1 Contemporary novels, such as Fielding's Amelia and Smollett's Humphrey Clinker, describe adventures at Vauxhall, but the heroes and heroines of romances are always in the way of adventures, and ordinary persons not in novels do not meet with nearly so many. This may be a suitable place to notice that characteristic denizen of Hogarth's London, the un- attached young person. The law as in duty ^, ^, u^ A I, +1, ; The Young bound was very severe on her, so that, ^ Sir Walter Besant says, "in theory she could not exist. "2 As a matter of fact however, to ' Tom Brown, quoted in Pleasure Gardens, p. 288. '^ London in the Eighteenth Century, p. 284. lOI William Hogarth quote the words of Peacham,^ "these over-hot and crafty daughters of the sun, your silken and gold- laced harlots everywhere, especially in the suburbs, to be found " laughed at the constable, the magistrate, and the gaoler, and were conspicuous in all places of public resort both by day and night. They managed this. Sir Walter Besant believes, by a tactful and well- adjusted system of bribery, the complete success of which shows how well the female mind can adapt means to ends. The ladies in question are as frequent in Hogarth's plates as in the London life which those plates reflect so truly, and the most hardened moralist must confess that he has made of them some very pretty pieces of femininity. There is a whole galaxy of them, daintily attired and playing their kittenish tricks, at the windows of the King's Head Tavern in the picture of " The March of the Guards to Finchley." The higher class of professional beauty of the type of Reynolds's " Nelly O'Brien" or " Kitty Fisher" is also ^ reflected in Hogarth's mirror, and we may . •' ' single out the two graceful girls who appear . on the balcony on the left hand of the picture of " Canvassing for Votes," No. H. in the series of Election Pictures in the Soane Museum. Down below, the agent for the candidate for Parlia- ment (or perhaps the candidate himself), a good- looking gallant, is selecting from the store of an itinerant Jew pedlar some trinkets with which to secure the favour of the smiling damsels above, who ' Art of Living in London, Harleian Miscellany, IX. 85. 102 The Bagnios are interesting themselves greatly in the choice. If they have no votes themselves it is pretty clear that they can influence those that have, and the candidate's guineas will not be thrown away. In some cases a very thin line, constantly overpassed, separated the tavern from the bagnio. The "Turk's Head," the scene of the tragic fifth act of the "Marriage k la Mode," was one. Taverns King's Coffee House, Covent Garden, shown in the background of Hogarth's "Morning," was another, but an unenviable pre-eminence seems to have been held by the Rose Tavern in Drury Lane, where Hogarth has placed his Rake with a chosen company in the third scene of his " Progress." The porter at the "Rose" was in touch with the women of the town, and would invite them in to feast with any youthful spendthrift who might desire their company. (See posiea, p. 148.) Space will only allow of a reference to some of the associations with Hogarth of the London pleasure- grounds. Soon after his marriage Hogarth . ^ ,j stayed for a season in "summer lodgings" at South Lambeth, a region still pleasantly countrified. At this time Jonathan Tyers, lessee of the Spring Gardens, Vauxhall, as they were called, was preparing to re-open the place on an improved footing, and Hogarth is said to have lent him advice and aid, especially in the matter of the decoration of the supper- boxes with pictures. The grateful impresario presented the artist with a gold ticket of perpetual admission for 103 William Hogarth himself and a coachful of friends, inscribed: " In per- petuam beneficii memoriam." This ticket and several other similar medallions serving as free passes were designed by Hogarth, and engravings of them are in the Print Room of the British Museum. They are in unexceptionable taste, exhibiting allegorical figures in a framing of Louis XV. design, and are sufficient in themselves to show that in style and execution Hogarth's work in his original mitier was of the most sane and most admirable kind. With one of the more bourgeois places of entertain- ment Hogarth is connected through his plate termed " Evening," wherein we see a citizen with his wife and two children returning home, very heated and weary and cross, after an afternoon spent in the country. The spot, shown as rural by the incident of cow-milking which is going on in the background, is no farther away from town than Sadler's Wells, on the London „ ,, , side of Islington. The spot was close to SddlBrS the head of the New River, which is shown m the plate flowmg, at that time an open stream, past the house at Sadler's Wells and the Hugh Middleton Tavern. Sadler's Wells originated in one of very many medicinal springs that rose within the London basin on both sides of the river. Islington had its spa, for a time rendered fashionable when in 1733 two princesses, daughters of George II., came up regularly to drink the waters. Bagnigge Wells, on the site of Cubitt's building-yard in the present King's Cross Road, was greatly frequented, and "Ye X04 At Chiswick Olde Bagnigge Wells" public-house, established 1680, claims to continue its tradition. There were several others in this neighbourhood, of which Mr. Wroth has collected notices in his book. They all had gardens and entertainments of various kinds, after the pattern of Vauxhall. Sadler's Wells has survived as a place of entertainment in the theatre of that name, while a house in Lloyd's Row, near the head of the broad Rosebery Avenue, still bears in large letters the inscription: "Islington Spa, or New Tunbridge Wells." All the medicinal wells however in this region have ceased to flow. Hampstead, another of these spas, has still at least its Well Walk, though its spring is only now a curiosity. On the other hand, there is a real survival on the south side of the Thames in the medicinal well at Streatham, mentioned by Aubrey about the middle of the seventeenth century, and still in working order and inviting customers, in its rural hollow below Leigham Court Road. The companionship of Hogarth takes us a little farther from town than the circle of these suburban places of entertainment. We must follow him to Chiswick, where from 1749 onwards Chiswick he possessed a small country house, with a pleasant garden, at the end of which was a stable. Over this he had his painting-room, and in the garden before the house was a mulberry-tree, under which he enter- tained some of the little foundlings put out to nurse at Chiswick. It is pleasant to have to add that the house and the mulberry-tree, with part of the garden, though 105 William Hogarth not the painting-room, still survive, and largely through the efforts of Colonel Shipway, of Grove Park House, have been preserved in perpetuity as a Hogarth memorial and museum. During the later years of his life the artist divided his time between his London house and Chiswick, where he generally spent the summer months. He appears to have enjoyed good health throughout the greater part of his long but uneventful life, the chief landmarks in which are his works; but he reports about 1760 "an illness which continued twelve months."^ The cause of this was in part mental irritation, due to attacks on his picture " Sigismunda." Hogarth, as we have seen, was by no means a universal favourite, and his foes had wounded him sorely some years before, when he came forward as author with The Afialysts of Beauty. Now again, the production of the "Sigismunda" (ante, p. 36), with the controversy that followed, "was the time for every little dog in the profession to bark, and revive the old spleen which appeared at the time of the Analysis. This trouble, which was, he says, "added to my long sedentary life," laid him aside for a year. On his recovery, with the intention of bringing his name again prominently before the public, he plunged into political controversy with his plate of 1762, called "The Times" (postea, p. 125). John Wilkes, who fought for the political party which this plate was intended to satirise, replied with an onslaught on Hogarth in No. 17 of the North Briton, and Wilkes's ' Anecdotes of Hogarth, 1833, p. 58. 106 Death and Burial henchman Churchill followed with a further literary assault. In both of these diatribes Hogarth is repre- sented as a man failing in health and mental powers. The artist retaliated effectively with the satirical por- trait of Wilkes {anie, p. 70), and professed himself restored "to as much health as can be expected at my time of life." It is clear however that his physical strength was seriously undermined, and in October 1764, after coming up one day in a very weak state from his country-house to Leicester Fields, he was taken suddenly ill in the night, Nichols says with an aneurysm, and in a couple of hours breathed his last. He was sixty-seven when he died. The funeral was at Chiswick, and in the churchyard to the south of the church stands the tomb in which the "honoured dust" of the great artist lies enshrined. On the north side of the tomb are inscribed the lines by David Garrick, that are very well known, and yet cannot be omitted in any book on Hogarth : — Farewel great Painter of Mankind ! Who reach'd the nobleft point of Art; VJhost pictured morals charm the Mind, And through the Eye, correct the Heart. If Genius fire thee, Reader, stay; \i Nature touch thee, drop a Tear; If neither move thee, turn away. For HOGARTH'S honour'd duft lies here. 107 CHAPTER V. ORNAMENTAL DESIGNS, BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS, SATIRICAL PRINTS OF SPECIAL ALLUSION, SUBSCRIPTION TICKETS, ETC. ClassiHcation of Hogarth's designs — His style in ornament — Illustra- tions to Hudibras, etc., and questions connected with these— Jacques Callot's influence on Hogarth — Early satirical plates- Rebuke to religious extravagance — Political satires — Charm and merit of Hogarth's lighter studies. Hogarth's personal characteristics, with the outward surroundings and the social atmosphere in which he lived, have now been briefly noticed. It must next be our task to pass in review his work, noting in it, on the one hand, those qualities in design and delineation which are distinctively Hogarth's and which are its most prominent and most popular qualities, and on the other the more purely artistic qualities of the art, in which we come into contact with Hogarth rather as the painter than as the satiric designer. Hogarth's engraved plates are not many more in number than his paintings, but they give a fuller idea of the varied contents of his White Tj- 1 ^ , osuvre. His plates are also more access- ible and more readily studied than the pictures, and 1 08 Hogarth's CEuvre though we must never forget that Hogarth expressed himself just as freely and copiously with the brush as with the graver, in the two chapters which follow it is to the examples in black and white that reference will chiefly be made. Any extensive collection of Hogarth's engraved work, like that in the Print Room of the British Museum, or any full catalogue such as that furnished by Mr. Austin Dobson at the end of his Memoir, must necessarily contain or enumerate many unimportant and not a few doubtful pieces, which add nothing of value to our knowledge of the artist. Of such pieces we need take no account, and in what follows only really char- acteristic works in the different kinds will be re- ferred to. These different kinds may be conveniently separated according to the following scheme: — I. Engraved designs, such as shop cards, etc. II. Book illustrations. III. Satirical prints of special allusion. IV. Subscription tickets, and such smaller pieces as are most characteristic of the master. V. Didactic pieces. VI. Social studies, including the " Progresses," the " Marriage i la Mode," and other important works. VII. The portraits, many of which were engraved. These will be more suitably treated in connec- tion with Hogarth's achievement as a painter, which will occupy the final chapter. 109 William Hogarth The importance of the engraved plates of the type of the shop cards lies, as we have seen, in the fact that they exhibit Hogarth at work on a sound. -^ professional tradition, which he shared witl| '"'' * all the ornamentalists of his time. Those who imagine Hogarth for ever viewing nature through a distorting glass will hardly be prepared for the quietj conventional, but eminently suitable design which he , made for his own shop card in 1720 (see Plate facing p. 14). A classical frame of the late Renaissance stylej wreathed above with festoons against which hover two cupids, is supported below by two figures in antique garb, a female to the left and a man engaged with his tablets to the right. They stand on a parquet floor which sustains the base of the frame and holds in the centre a well-designed escutcheon bearing the date. In the centre of the frame is the artist's name and trade. One cannot help thinking how much better in style is this unpretentious piece of work, in the recognised manner of its time, than the majority of the book plates of the present day, wherein the fancy of individual artists has free play, and the only principle that is often discernible is the principle of doing something unlike what has ever been done before. The style that Hogarth exhibits in pieces of this kind is the comparatively severe "Louis XIV.," before the straight lines and the recognisable ornament became merged in the meaningless though graceful curves of the rocaille. When we come to deal with Hogarth's no < Book Illustrations large decorative pictures of religious themes, we shall see that in his figure work also he adheres to the tradi- tion of the same school. The principal of Hogarth's book illustrations have already been enumerated. They are by no means the most characteristic works of the artist, but they have their own special interest. It is possible indeed to trace some of the steffs in the development of Hogarth's artistic powers by means of certain illustrations to Butler's Hudibras. This satirical poem, the publication of which bearan in 1662, after being several times re- . tions printed, was issued in the year 17 10 m two distinct editions adorned with cuts. The illustrations are practically the same in these two independent editions, yet they are not printed from the same set of plates. The two undertakings were rival ones, and the appearance of the two sets of similar but not identical cuts is not very easy to explain. It has even been suggested that there may have been an earlier- illustrated edition, not now to be identified, from which the two sets of cuts may have been borrowed. ^ In any case however, whether the cuts of 1710 were derived from an earlier source or were only then produced, Hogarth, who was only thirteen at the time, cannot have had anything to do with them. Sixteen years later, in 1726, appeared another edition, according to the title-page, "adorned with a new Set of Cuts design'd and engrav'd by Mr. Hogarth," ' Mr. Wood Smith, in Notes and Queries, Sept. 19, 1896. William Hogarth and the plates themselves bear the signature "Wm. Hogarth Invf. et sculpt." They are thus claimed distinctly as Hogarth's own, and it is " * ^''^^ natural to compare them with the pre- vious set of cuts of 1710. The comparison shows a decided resemblance in many important respects. The size is similar, Hogarth's being a little larger than the others.' The sixteen plates of 1726 are all of the same subjects as sixteen out of the eighteen plates of the earlier editions, and the composition is at any rate in nearly half the cases pretty closely akin,^ though Hogarth introduces more figures and incidental details. The types of the principal figures are the same, but this in view of the detailed descriptions in the poem (I., i., 241 f.), is inevitable. In some plates also, in which the general resemblance is but slight, certain figures of the 1 7 10 series reappear with modifications in Hogarth's plates. On the other hand, the landscape background of almost all the scenes is different, and many of the renderings, though the subjects are the same, are quite distinct in composition. An exterior is sub- stituted by Hogarth for the interior of the earlier series in the scenes of Sidrophel star-gazing, and 1 The editions of 1710 were iSmo; that of 1726 somewhat larger, or i2mo. 2 This applies to Nos. I, 2, 4, 7, 8, 11, 16, while the remainder, Nos. 3, S. 6. 9. lOi 12, 13, 14, 15 cannot be regarded as in the same sense founded on the earlier plates, though the subjects are the same. 112 " Hudibras " Plates Hudibras visiting the widow. The superiority of Hogarth's plates is very marked in the improvement in the compositions, the addition of subsidiary figures, and those side incidents for which in his later works he was so famous. There is more action and move- ment in Hogarth's scenes, and in two of them, that are folding plates of larger size, the " Procession of the Skimmington" and the " Burning of the Rumps at Temple Bar," the scenes, crowded with life and move- ment, are thoroughly Hogarthian. In the former plate the figure of the old woman, seated in the fore- ground and blowing up a fire on which boils a pot, is characteristic. On the whole, it must be admitted that in the plates of 1726 Hogarth is only to a limited degree original. It is not the case, as John Ireland pretends, 1 that they are "almost direct copies" from the earlier series, but his work is distinctly founded on that of his predecessors. The effort made by Mr. F. G. Stephens^ to free Hogarth from any charge of plagiarism is hardly successful, and no one who compares, say, the "Setting forth," the "Visit to Sidrophel," or the "Visit to the Lawyer" in the two series, can doubt that Hogarth was not freely creative. What reason there was for this want of independence we cannot tell, but John Ireland, with whom Mr. Austin Dobson agrees, thought that the booksellers enjoined on him a general adherence to the already established types and renderings. If we accept the fact that Hogarth started in depend- ^ Hogarth Illustrated, i. xxix. '^ Notes and Queries, Oct. 3, 1896. 113 I William Hogarth ence on his forerunners, this makes his own additions and improvements all the more significant, and to get the full instruction from this part of his early work we must bring into the comparison his set of large-scale prints of the same subjects from Hudibras, which he published independently without the text in this same year, 1726. There are twelve of these, and we see in them carried farther the same qualities of copiousness in incident and vigour of action, which already serve to distinguish the i2mo plates of 1726 from the earlier i8mo series of unknown origin of 1710. Some of the small plates however, notably that of TruUa bestriding the prostrate knight and the " Skimmington," seem better in the smaller than in the larger size. As an example of this department of Hogarth's work may be taken the large plate of 1726 representing the subject of " Burning the Rumps at Temple Bar." The event commemorated is the final downfall of the so-called Rump Parliament in 1660, when the obnoxious _. . members were burned in effigy by the ^ populace. Pepys, who was passing through „ the streets on the occasion, counted no ^ fewer than fourteen bonfires between St. Dunstan's Church and Temple Bar. Hogarth's plate shows some bonfires merrily at work in the street, and effigies of the unpopular Parliamentarians being carried forward to feed the flames. One effigy is seen hung out beside the signboard of an inn. On Temple Bar are to be seen stakes with heads and limbs of decapitated traitors aloft upon them. 114 " New Metamorphosis " Another series of small illustrations, to which the same sort of interest attaches, appeared in 1724 in connection with the facetious tale called ,, _,, The New Metamorphosis. Here again there had been an earlier illustrated . ," edition published in London in 1709, and ^ also an illustrated French translation of its proto- t)rpe, The Golden Ass of Apuleius, published in 1707. There are seven plates in the edition of 1724, claimed by Hogarth with his name and the words "fee," "invt.," "sculpt.," and of these three are of the same subjects as plates in the earlier edition of 1709, and, when compared with the latter, exhibit the same sort of general similarity as Hogarth's Hudibras plates show with respect to the earlier Hudibras illustrations. The remaining four plates are of different subjects. Some of these agree in subject with plates in the French translation of 1707, but are totally different in treatment. It is just as clear that Hogarth did not use these French prototypes, as it is clear that he did in part found his work on the London edition of 1709. A third series, consisting in head-pieces to a work called Roman Military Punishments, published by John Beaver, London, 1725, is only worthy of ^ notice because it introduces the question of the relation of Hogarth to one of his -^"^^f^ famous predecessors in the arts of design „ and engraving. The plates in question are "^^'^ ^ mostly signed like the Hudibras plates "Wm. Hogarth, invt. et sculpt.," and are presumably from William Hogarth his own designs. They are however quite unlike his later work, and consist in scenes filled with small figures of an attenuated type, vigorous in expression and action, which remind us forcibly of the little personages that crowd some of the best- known compositions of Jacques Callot, such ru^^ as those illustrating ' ' The Miseries of War." "^ ° Figures of the Callot type occur in several of Hogarth's earlier plates, as in that entitled " Mas- querades and Operas," and shown facing p. 26. They may be recognised by their small heads, their lean an4 sinewy limbs, and their forcible gestures. It is evident that Hogarth knew and admired the work of his great French p^redecessor, who shows at times in his design some of the grimmer qualities of the grotesque of Hogarth. John Ireland says that the works of Callot " were probably his first models." ^ As a specimen of Hogarth's work in this particular style we may notice certain figures which occur upon an early satirical plate of the type of that already described under the name " Masquerades and Operas." It is directed against the infatuation of the South Sea Bubble, and exhibits a large number of figures whose equipment and proceedings are emblematic of the folly and vice rampant at the time. On one side is the pedestal of a column (the monument on Fish Street Hill) inscribed /*'this monument was erected in memory of the ' Hogarth Illustrated, I. xxi. Callot's life falls between the years 1592 and 1635. 116 Influence of Callot DESTRUCTION OF THIS CITY BY THE SOUTH SEA IN 172O." In the centre of the picture is a merry-go-round worked by directors of the South Sea Company and sur- mounted by an effigy of a goat with the legend "IVho'l ride?" Various personages are mounted and ready for a spin — Stephens describes them as "a Scotch nobleman with his ribbon, an old woman, a shoe- black, a divine, and a wanton woman, who chucks the last under the chin as he grins at her."^ The medley of classes and the wantonness betoken the universal folly and demoralisation of the year of ill omen. Another plate of the same kind, also issued in 172 1, is called "The Lottery,"^ and is aimed at the institu- tion briefly noticed on a former page. The state char- acter of the institution is emphasised, and the demor- alisation to which winners and losers alike fall victims is illustrated in a series of groups. Here again some of the figures, notably the semi-nudes, are in the style of Callot. The interpretation of the plate is given by Stephens, but the plan of this book does not allow of any further description of it here. Very little space moreover will be devoted to the other prints of a similar character appearing from time to time in the course of Hogarth's career, and always aimed at special abuses. It -^ may be asked. Why single out a particular o /• set of polemical prints, seeing that almost all Hogarth's work is inspired with a satirical purpose ? ' Stephens, No. 1,722. ^ /did., No. 1,730. 117 William Hogarth The answer is that there is a real distinction, and one artistically very important, between the broadly treated studies from human life in which the meaning of the piece is revealed to any intelligent eye in the piece itself, and those more specialised satires, or as they have been already called, "satirical prints of special allusion," which require exoteric interpretation, and cannot be understood without a somewhat intimate knowledge of the social and political condition of the England of the artist's day. Plates in which the separate personages have to be lettered and explained by reference to the notes at the foot, like trains in Bradshaw, fall under a different category from that embracing, say, the prints of the "Election" series, which the general knowledge and common-sense of the spectator enable him to comprehend. From the artistic point of view the difference is immense, and it is doubtful if the plates which are quite unintelligible without foot-notes can be called works of art at all. The student of social history must take account of them, but their aesthetic interest is of the slightest. The fact is that their origin was really literary. They represent a traditional style of work to which the public had become accustomed, and which was the only kind of satirical plate recognised by the booksellers. The two early plates by Hogarth, just referred to, the "South Sea Scheme" and the "Lottery," both of 1721, were not published by Hogarth on his own account, but were ordered from him by the booksellers, and must not be regarded as 118 Literary Plates the genuine expression of his art. On this subject there are some excellent remarks by F. G. Stephens in the introduction to the second volume of his Catalogue. He points out that, as a general rule, the earlier satiric prints, current in England from the Elizabethan age to the middle of the seventeenth century, were of a simple kind, but that from the latter date onwards they in- creased in complexity and elaboration, and were quite unintelligible without a literary commentary. "With this increased elaborateness of design, artistic satire did not, so to say, contrive to free itself from literary accompaniments ; but on the contrary . . . both literary and artistic satire . . . grew more and more elaborate and diffuse." This was the style represented in the " South Sea" and the " Lottery" plates, but the noteworthy fact about them is that they represent the close of the period of the cumbrous satire that needed literary interpretation. Only once or twice after about 1730 does Hogarth rely on the device of elaborate inscriptions or letters of reference in his plates. The vast majority of the later ones carry their meaning on their face. There are however a certain number of plates, not all early ones, which belong to the "cumbrous" and "literary" kind, and these can be dismissed here with a very few words on each. The "South Sea" and "Lottery" pieces, and the "Masquerades and Operas" (see page 26) of 1724, have been already noticed. The circumstances in which Hogarth in 1725 attacked the contemporary artist 119 William Hogarth William Kent, by issuing a burlesque on one of Kent's religious pictures, ^ have also been incidentally referre|i ,,r- jj^°- Another "elaborate and diffuse" plate t eraty ^^ 1725, with the same intent as " Masque^- ■^ ades and Operas," refers to the condition, of the stage at the time, and satirises the taste which neglects the legitimate drama for pantomimes and variety shows.* The plate of 1728 called " The Beggar's Opera"* is a not very intelligible medley referring to Gay's work produced at the Theatre in ^ Lincoln's Inn Fields on January 29, 1728, , This same performance forms the subject of ** ^^ a serious piece from the brush of Hogarth, " that was engraved later and published by Boydell in 1790. The picture is a very fair example of Hogarth's painting, and shows us the principal characters of the opera on the stage, which represents' the interior of Newgate. Macheath in a scarlet coat is in the centre, and on the right Polly Peachum kneels to her father, while on the left Lucy implores the pity of the turnkey. A special point of interest connected with the picture is the fact that it shows the arrange- ment of the theatres of the time. On each side of the scene, but on the stage itself, is a box in which persons of the highest quality, both ladies and cavaliers, sit to watch the performance. Hogarth's well-known portrait of the actress, Miss Fenton, afterwards Duchess of * Stephens, No. 1,764. * Stephens, No. 1,761. It is called "A Just View of the British Stage." » Stephens, No. 1,807. Theatrical Satires Bolton, in the character of Polly Peachum, in the National Gallery, also connects the artist's work with the Beggar's Opera. Another theatrical plate, of about the same period, is intended to ridicule the foreign singers over whom the town periodically ran wild. It appears uncertain whether this plate, generally called " Berenstat, Cuzzoni, Senesino, etc.,"^ is really by Hogarth, and this doubt must be taken into account, for the work shows characteristics rare in Hogarth's genuine designs. There is avowed caricature, as distinct from the character drawing to which the artist generally con- fines himself, in the figure of Berenstat or Farinelli, whose head is out of all proportion small, while Cuzzoni appears a dwarf. The plate generally known as the ' ' Large Masquerade Ticket,"' of 1727, exhibits a company in fancy dress in a hall, the fittings of which are all meant to ^^ indicate that the company is assembled with ? ' licentious intent. A large clock above is in- scribed on the pendulum "nonsense," on the minute hand " impertinence," and on the hour hand "wit" — the idea being that in such a scene there would be non- sense every second, impertinence every minute, but wit only once in an hour. Above the clock are seen the supporters of the royal arms, the lion and the unicorn, ' Stephens, No. 1,768. The third figure beside those of the two Italians Senesino and Cuzzoni, may be meant for another famous Italian, Farinelli. ' Stephens, No. 1,799. William Hogarth but with a touch of his proper humour the artist has represented the beasts as lolling on their backs with their legs in the air and playing with their tails. "Taste," "The Man of Taste," or "The Gate of Burlington House, "^ contains the attack on Pope and side blow at Kent referred to on page 69. "The Mystery of Masonry, "^ of 1742, is a tedious satire on street processions. The Freemasons held such processions, and mock cavalcades were got up in opposition to them. Hogarth shows a burlesque pro- cession of the latter kind. The prints known as "Enthusiasm Delineated," and "Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism" satirise ex- travagant forms of religion, in the somewhat . " cumbrous allusive style of the plates just jf J- -^ noticed. One copper-plate served for both, *^ the subject called ' ' Enthusiasm Delineated" having been engraved at a date not exactly to be fixed, but not published. Only two impressions from the plate in this, its first, state are known to exist, one being in the Print Room at the British Museum. Later, for some unexplained reason, Hogarth made alterations on the plate which went so far that in the end almost all the figures were altered, though the general mise en scene remained the same. The en- graving was then published, in 1762, with the changed title "Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism. A Medley." ' Stephens, No. 1,873. ' ^Hd-, No. 2,549. Religious Satires As the titles indicate, the plates are intended to satirise extravagances in religion. In the first, " En- thusiasm Delineated," the main object of attack was the gross materialism and sensational appeals of Roman Catholic teachers of the baser type, and in the words intended to be engraved at the foot of the plate he explained that its intention was "to give a Lineal repre- sentation of the strange effects of litteral and low conceptions of Sacred Beings as also of the Idolotrous Tendency of Pictures in churches and prints in Religious books, &c." Even here however, a satire on the re- vivalist Protestant preachers of the time, with Whitefield at their head, is mingled with the anti-Roman artillery. In the later states of the plate, when it was changed to " Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism," all the attack is directed against the revivalists, only a few slight allusions to Rome being suffered to remain. The significance of Hogarth's polemic has been already pointed out, and it will be sufficient here to indicate one or two of the devices by which the ingenious artist tries to effect the purpose of the pieces. ^ The interior of a meeting-house is shown in both, with a pulpit in which a preacher wears, over a head marked with the Roman tonsure, a wig of the type favoured by Pro- testant divines, such as Wesley or Whitefield. He dangles the puppets of Roman materialism in his hands ' The full description of the plates, in Stephens, see Nos. 1,785 and 2,425-6, occupies ten pages. The two plates are given in reduced copies, with Ireland's comments, in John Bowyer Nichols's Anecdotes, p. 258 f. 123 William Hogarth and vociferates like a revivalist; a thermometer beside the pulpit indicates the gradations of his voice from " Natural Tone" to " Bull Roar," which last extremity he seems to have already reached. Another thermometer gives the gradations of excitement in the brains of the hearers, and these run up and down from "Convulsion fits" and "Extasy" to "Despair" and "Madness." In "Enthusiasm Delineated" some of the congregation are gnawing sacred images — a direct satire on Transub- stantiation. In "Credulity" they are thrown into fits of terror and remorse at the descriptions of Hell fire, or the cries of " Blood, Blood, Blood," thundered from the pulpit. The inscriptions "Methodist," "Wesley," <'W— d," "Romaine," and " Whitfield'si Journal," on different parts of the plate in its second form leave no doubt of the artist's intention. It is fair to notice however, that Hogarth was fully as alive to the dulness of the orthodox preaching in the episcopal churches of his day as to any extravagances of priest or revivalist. The plate called " The Sleeping Congregation,"^ of 1736, is proof of this. Here, in a church where all the congregation are sunk in slumber, a preacher is droning out his sermon, which he can scarcely read by the aid of a glass. His text ends with the significant words " I will give you rest," and Hogarth has ^chosen it with satiric intent. The Communion plate on the altar and the royal arms con- spicuous above show the orthodox Anglicanism of the place and gathering. 1 Whitefield. " Stephens, No. 2,285. 124 Political Satires The last plates in this category of "satires of special allusion" are the two political pieces called "The Times, Plate I.,"i published in 1762, and "The ^^^^ ^„^ Times, Plate II. ."^ left unfinished by Hogarth p^^^ and only published after his death in 1790. These plates refer to the time of the administration of Lord Bute on whom had devolved the reins of power when Pitt was driven from office in 1761. Hogarth is on the side of Bute and the peace party, and opposed to Pitt, who in Plate I. is shown fanning a conflagration which threatens to involve Europe in destruction. The plates are crowded with figures and somewhat elaborate and forced devices, and present very little of artistic interest. They have their place among the very numerous political satires of that particular juncture, and are important in relation to Hogarth's life because they were the cause of his fierce quarrel with John Wilkes, whose North Briton was strongly on the side of Pitt. Walpole wrote of Hogarth's "Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism" that "for useful and deep satire," [the work] "on the Methodists is the most sublime." No one would now agree with this. We have already seen reason to doubt whether Hogarth knew exactly what he was doing when he satirised men like Wesley and Whitefield; but independently of this initial question, the make-up of the plate is forced and the elements are incongruous. In its earlier state the in- terest is more concentrated and the effect in every way ' Stephens, No. 3,970. '•' Ibid., No. 3,972. 125 William Hogarth superior. It is impossible to help feeling, however, that Hogarth is in all the plates of this order working below the proper standard of his genius. He was placing himself too much on a level with the ordinary political and social caricaturists of his time, whose works are all in a flutter with inscribed labels proceeding out of the mouths of the various personages, and we are glad now to be able to turn from these to some of his more spontaneous and more artistic pro- ductions, Good specimens of these are to be found in certain smaller and less important pieces which are often in the form of subscription tickets to his larger works, and are for the most part thrown off in a mood of pleasant fancy. They are in some cases not engraved with the burin but etched by his own hand, so that we can judge in them the artist's execution in line and light and shade better than in impressions from the regular copper- plates, which were most commonly engraved for him by other hands. What is said here specially applies to the subscription tickets. When Hogarth was about to issue an im- Subscrii)- ^°^^^^^ plate, or a series like one of the tion "Progresses," he issued a subscription list, Tickets ^^^ ^°^ every payment received on account he gave a receipt, at the head of which was some whimsical or significant design. Thus the print entitled "Boys Peeping at Nature" already noticed, (see page 77), the first in date of the subscription tickets, had under it the words — 126 Lighter Designs "Rec^ of half a guinea being ye first Payment for six Prints of a Harlot's Progress which I Promise to Deliver when Finished on Receiving one half Guinea more." The designs at the head of these plates, being purely fanciful, and thrown in as gifts to the subscribers, are some of Hogarth's happiest efforts in the lighter vein of humour, and we note that some of them were afterwards issued as separate prints without a form of receipt attached. The largest and most important of these pieces is the etching on a mezzotint ground,^ headed " Paul before Felix. Designed and Scratch'd in the true Dutch taste by Wm. Hogarth," which, as Stephens explains "was designed as a burlesque on what Hogarth professed to be the manner of Dutch painters, and pre- pared as a receipt for subscriptions " to two prints, one of which was the serious "Paul before Felix," an en- graving after the large picture now at Lincoln's Inn. The burlesque print, which measures 13^ by nearly 10 inches, was described in its second state as "Design'd and Etch'd in the rediculous manner of Rembrant, by Wm. Hogarth," and is a satire on a clumsiness of figure-types and coarseness of motive occasional in Rembrandt's work. It became very popular, and sold for five shillings a copy, that is, the same price that was charged for "Southwark Fair."^ Of the works under notice none is better than "The ' Stephens, No. 3,173. ^ Ibid., No. 1,949, See p. 58. 143 William Hogarth hemp with a mallet, and were subjected, moreover, to the punishment of stripes. The plate shows the harlot still in fine clothes,' dallying with the task set her, and threatened by a savage-looking labour-master who holds in one hand a formidable cane. Next to her is the figure of a man in a laced coat, evidently a gambler convicted of some roguery with the cards, and farther along the line are other figures of women engaged in the same form of penal labour. Plate V. gives evidence of another sudden change, this time a physical one, in the condition of the heroine. The Bridewell scene showed her in low fortune but buxom and well-liking, as well as smartly clad. We now see her sick to death in her lodging, where she gives up the ghost while two quack doctors are wrangling about the virtues of their rival nostrums. A new element in the situation appears here in the form of the harlot's child, a comely boy of four or five years old, who sits by the fire beside his dying mother's chair, and is engaged in tending a small joint of meat that is suspended before it. The last scene is the much-discussed one of the funeral. The coffin of the unfortunate girl, with the lid partly removed, is seen in the middle of a meanly furnished room, and is surrounded by a company of her sisters in dissipation, together with the clergyman and the undertaker, whose proceedings show them as licentious as the rest. It has been said that Hogarth intended to point a moral by showing the utter hoUow- ' Stephens, No. 2,075, note. 144 The Harlot's Funeral ness and hypocrisy of the pretended mourners, who are sipping strong waters around the coffin of their former associate. It seems rather that Hogarth has drawn them, without arrihre pensee, behaving exactly after the fashion of their kind. The maudlin grief of some, even of the beldam on the right who is roaring out a tipsy lament, is real as far as it goes. The servant of the dead woman, who has appeared in previous scenes, looks with genuine indignation at the scandalous behaviour of a couple in the left foreground. A touch of true pathos is added in the figure of the little boy, who is attired in weeds as chief mourner, but has forgotten everything in the occupation of winding up his top. The veracity that doth " Naught extenuate Nor set down aught in malice " is sometimes supposed to be an artistic endowment of our own particular age, but it would be hard to find at any epoch a rendering of a scene of human life more direct and simple, and as a consequence more telling, than this final scene of Hogarth's " Harlot's Progress." Apart from the intrinsic excellence of the plates, the sudden and marked success of this series was partly due, as we have seen, to the tact with which Hogarth gave actuality to a scene by the introduction of a real personage of the day. He brings on the stage in the series several other historical characters, such as the procuress and libertine of Scene I. and the two quack doctors of the death scene in No. V. This made of 145 L William Hogarth The 'Rake's course for the popularity of the prints, which depended also no doubt to an appreciable' extent on the eagerness of the public to view the inner life of the courtesan. Hogarth, it is to be observed, is not indiscreet in his revelations, and there is little in the series for morbid curiosity to dwell on. The "Harlot's Progress" of 1732 was followed in 1735 ^y the eight subjects_of-the-^Rak5*S~Pn)gTessJIJ^ In both cases Hogarth first executed a series of oil-paintings, from which the plates were iiM/te i I en graved, in the case of_the__imarlot's ^ hriogress " all but one of these o riginal pic- tures have perished, ^^ while as the engravings were by He gai ' th liiaiaclf wc m ay accept these as his autograph. On the other hand, the original paintings both for the " Rake's Progress" and for the later "Marriage i la Mode" are preserved in accessible public galleries in London.' The plates of the "Rake's Progress " were engraved partly, those of the " Marriage" entirely, by other hands, so that from every point of view it is preferable to describe the works from the pictures rather than from the engraving's. ,' ^^yjhe "Rake's Progress" portrays the career of a young spendthrift of loose habits, who, having been left 1 Stephens, Nos. 2,158, 2,173, 2,188, 2,202, 2,211, 2,223, 2,236, 2,246. ^ The surviving one is the picture of Scene II., in the collection of the Earl of Wemyss at Gosford House. » The "Rake's Progress" in the Soane Museum, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the " Marriage " in the National Gallery. 146 "A Rake's Progress" heir to the hoards of a miserly father, plunges into fashionable dissipation, and quickly wastes his patri- mony.^ To restore his fortunes he weds an ancient but wealthy spinster much out of repair, but loses his wife's money at the gaming-table, and Is flung into the debtors' prison. Disappointed at his failure to secure the acceptance of a play he has written, he loses his reason and perishfes miserably in Bedlam. Another thread runs through the story, for a good-hearted girl, whom he has wronged while at Oxford before the story opens, re- mains constant to him, and intervenes as a sympathetic helper and friend in the scenes of his downward career.^ In this series Hogarth has introduced more numerous figures and a more picturesque variety of incident than in the "Harlot's Progress," but it did not enjoy an equal popularity. For one thing it had not the novelty of the earlier series, which came before the public as a new form of art, nor had the representations the piquancy which belonged to the pictured proceedings of the feminine reprobate. The first picture shows us the heir, more boyish- looking than in the print, trying to put off with a gift of money the girl whom he had ruined and had promised to marry. The scene is the interior of the deceased miser's apartment, and in the engraving there is a mass of detail which does not appear in the more simply- treated picture. Scene H. is from the social point of view one of the most interesting. The Rake, a young man of fashion in a salmon-coloured dressing coat, is attended in his 147 William Hogarth drawing-room by various professors of the arts which his station obliges him to learn. The personages who surround him were for the most part well known at the time. The dancing-master who smirks and makes a leg is said to have been one Essex. Dubois, the fencing-master, is making a pass in the air, and behind him stands the massive form of Figg the prize-fighter, here introduced as teacher of the quarter-staff. A landscape gardener proffers plans for new pleasure grounds, a French-horn player gives a specimen of his skill, and in the foreground kneels a jockey holding a silver vase won at Epsom by a horse from the spendthrift's stables. The Rake is holding a letter of introduction just brought by a truculent-looking per- sonage, who is a professional bravo, prepared to take on himself any dangerous quarrel in which his patron may become involved. At the side of the picture a professor of music sits at the harpsichord, and details are introduced that exhibit Hogarth's undying hatred to the foreign virtuoso. Through an archway is seen in an ante-chamber a similar group, including a poet, a tailor, and a milliner. The lighting of the piece is even, and the effect somewhat fiat. Scene III. is brighter and in a pictorial sense more telling. It is the tavern scene, which exhibits the Rake at the close of an evening's dissipation, in the course of which, no doubt with the aid of other young sparks of his own kind, he has beaten the watch and captured a staff and lantern. We now see him enter- taining a choice party of lady friends at the notorious 148 "A Rake's Progress" Rose Tavern in Drury Lane. An excellent group in the right-hand foreground is formed by the Ralte and two girls, one of whom has stolen his watch and hands it to her companion. A negress grins in the background. Around a table in the centre of the room sit half-a- dozen courtesans, who drink and quarrel and caress after the manner of their kind, while in the foreground to the left sits a lady in rapidly advancing dishabille. She is more attractive in the picture than in the en- graved plate, and is a professional poseuse, or posture- mistress. The big pewter dish, which the porter is bringing in at the door, is to serve as a pedestal for her attitudes or gyrations. A female ballad-singer has come to the door from the street outside, and bawls out her ditty, while in the background a slender wench is " setting the world on fire " by applying a lighted candle to a map of the world that hangs on the wall. The scene here is well thought out and the different incidents are convincingly rendered. See plate oppo- site page 148. The fourth painting, in which the spendthrift is arrested for debt, is, pictorially speaking, the best of the series^ 'but in the engraved plate additions were made in the second state that seriously mar its artistic effect. The scene is in the open air, in St. James's Street, at the bottom of which appears the familiar gateway of St. James's Palace. The street is full of sedan chairs pressing on to deposit their burdens at a Court lev6e. For this function the Rake is also bound, and we see his chair in the foreground of the picture. Just as it 149 William Hogarth has entered the street however, it has been stopped by bailiffs, and the Rake is seen issuing out of it in con- sternation. He was holding a gold-headed cane, but in his confusion he lets it pass into the hands of a ragged shoeblack who is about to make off with the prize. Bareheaded, and clad in a blue coat l^ed with gold, his figure appears effectively in full light as the centre of a colour composition of more sombre hues formed by the chair, the bearers, and the bailiffs. One of these has seized him by the coat and proffers him a paper on which we can read the word "arrest," but just at this moment there appears on the scene a dea ex ■machina in the person of the Rake's discarded mistress, the girl who appeared in the first scene in such lamentable plight through her trust in her lover's promise of marriage. Sarah Young, for this we learn is her name, is now apparently a prosperous milliner, and she hurries forward holding out a well-filled purse for the satisfaction of the debt. With her amber- coloured dress and white apron and cap she seems a comely lass, though the incident of her intervention is not a little forced. The plate opposite page 95 is from the picture in the Soane Museum. The composition thus arranged is, in this picture and the first state of the print, clear and effective, and the art of the piece leaves nothing to be desired. The moralist in Hogarth, however, rose up here against the artist, and he proceeded to make additions to the plate intended to convey a lesson of the evil of gambling, to which the Rake may be supposed to owe his present 150 "A Rake's Progress" predicament. In the immediate foreground, instead of the single ragged urchin who purloins the cane, Hogarth now introduces a whole company of similar tatterde- malions busy dicing and playing cards. At the farther end of the street a house near the Palace is now labelled "White" (the notorious gaming-house), and the sky, which in the picture is a clear and pleasant blue, is now represented as overcast with storm-clouds from which darts a melodramatic flash of lightning, the barbed point of which is aimed directly at "White's." To indicate the spread of the evil of gambling through all the social strata, one of the group of ragged boys, a shoeblack, has written the word BLACK on a post beside which they are crouching over their games. There is interesting detail in the group, but it spoils the composition of the piece and divides its interest. For the further development of his story, Hogarth hit on the happy device of making his profligate repair his ruined fortunes by marriage with a wealthy spinster, whose mature charms are marred by the loss of an eye and a crooked spine. The scene of the wedding is an earlier Old Marylebone Church, which was succeeded by the present barn-like edifice a few years after Hog-arth's picture was* produced. Sarah Young, who is now seen with a child in her arms, appears with her virago-like mother at the door of the church. The plate opposite page 202 gives the scene. Hardened in his vices, the incorrigible spendthrift loses at the gaming-table the money his marriage has brought to him, and Scene VI. shows us the interior William Hogarth of a gaming-house — from certain indications the "White's" of Scene IV. — with a group of successful and unfortunate gamesters, in the foreground of which the Rake, who has torn off his wig, throws himself into a rather theatrical posture of wrath and despair. Scene VII. introduces us to the interior of the debtors' prison of the Fleet where the Rake is confined, and where he has the companionsliip alike of his one-eyed wife, now unkempt and sordidly attired, and of his old love, whose tenderness and sympathy Hogarth exhibits as unfailing. The moment chosen is a dramatic one. The hero of the story, as a last resort, has written a play and submitted it to Rich, a prominent theatrical manager of the time. Rich has just returned it with the words, " I have read ye play and find it will not doe." At the tidings Sarah Young has fallen over in a faint, and is attended by several of those present. Her child, a little girl of some three years old, is screaming at her knee. On the other side sits the unhappy prisoner, one of the most expressive figures in the whole of Hogarth's repertory. He has thrown the fatal letter from the manager on to the table at his elbow, and leans forward with his hands on his knees and his head thrust forward in stony despair. The horror of the instant has seized on his bones and stiffens every joint. Convulsively he lifts his feet from the floor and stretches rigidly out the fingers of each hand, bending back the left wrist and spreading the fingers in mute astonished protest against fate. The brows are lifted, the eyes protrude, the mouth has fallen away. There is 152 "A Rake's Progress" here no frenzy, but a tragic intensity of mental sufferingf that proves Hogarth a master in the portrayal of the deeper emotions. Nothing but this single figure would be needed to vindicate for him a place apart from those brilliant and facile delineators of surface whimsicalities, such as Randolph Caldecott or Phil May. It is true that in certain artistic qualities, such as grace of com- position and expressiveness in line, Hogarth is not equal to the artists just named or to some others of the moderns, yet his genius is of far wider range. Hogarth indeed fires much heavier metal, and fires it farther than the fascinating sketchers of the day who are some- times compared with him.' The impression of this central figure is heightened by the surroundings. The one-eyed wife, now a hideous beldam, threatens him with clenched fists and yells in 1 Charles Lamb, in The Reflector, No. III., has some apt remarks on the face of the Rake in this scene : — "I would ask the most enthusiastic admirer of Reynolds, whether in the countenances of his Staring and Grinning Despair which he has given us for the faces of Ugolino and dying Beaufort, there be anything comparable to the expression which Hogarth has put into the face of his broken-down Rake in the last plate but one of the Rakers Progress. . . . Here all is easy, natural, undis- torted. . . . Here is no attempt at Gorgonian looks which are to freeze the beholder, no grinning at the antique bedposts, no face- making, or consciousness of the spectators in or out of the picture ; but grief kept to a man's self, a face retiring from notice with the shame which great anguish sometimes brings with it — a final leave taken of hope, the coming on of vacancy and stupefaction — a beginning aliena- tion of mind, looking like tranquillity. Here is matter for the mind of the beholder to feed on for the hour together — matter to feed and fertilise the mind." 153 William Hogarth his ear, while on the other side a coarse and brutal- looking lad who has brought in a tankard of beer holds out his paw for the payment, and leaning over the- despairing prisoner from the back appears the callous turnkey with his demand for "garnish." See plate opposite page 152. The last scene of the series is that of the madhouse where the Rake, a raving lunatic, is manacled with fetters, while the ever-faithful Sarah Young weeps at his side. The picture is a social record, and the faces of the inmates of Bedlam are carefully studied. The latest in point of date of the three "series" is the world-famous " Marriage k la Mode," the prints of ^ . which were published in 1745.1 The original y pictures are in the National Gallery, and „ / represent Hogarth's work with the brush in ( its most finbhed_Jf---ttcrt-^^s^rnost_l^ expression. The paintings are so well known and so accessible\hat no elaborate description is needed, and all that need be attempted here is an indication of some of the artistic features of the works that are most worthy of study. The story is that of a loveless alliance between the weakly and profligate heir to an earldom, and the daughter of a miserly City merchant. From the outset the girl encourages the advances of an unauthorised lover in the person of a Counsellor Silvertongue, while the Viscount is prepared to continue his own course of private dissipation. Later, as Countess, we see the ^ Stephens, Nos. 2,688, 2,702, 2,717, 2,731, 2,744, 2,758. 154 "Marriage a la Mode" '*ieroine holding a fashionable levde, at which she makes a secret appointment with her lover. The g;uilty meeting which follows is broken in upon by the Earl, who dies of a sword-thrust from the hand of his wife's seducer. The latter is taken and executed, and his wretched paramour, who had returned to her father's roof, poisons herself on the receipt of the news. The story here is more carefully thought out than is the case with the two "Progresses," and except that the Countess might have been expected to fly at higher game than a Counsellor Silvertongue, it has all the needful verisimilitude. There is the same wealth of well considered detail as in all Hogarth's more elaborate works, and this detail is kept in due artistic subordination to the main interest of the pieces. The personages are strongly individualised, though without any tendency to caricature, and with the execution of the draperies and details as well as of the faces the painter has taken the utmost pains. Two of the pictures are of outstanding interest. One is popularly known as "The Honeymoon," but is better entitled " Shortly after Marriage," and shows the commencement of the wedded life of the frivolous couple. At the near end of a large and handsome apartment, divided into two by an archway carried on columns that imitate lapis lazuli, the young couple are seated one on each side of the fireplace. It is early in the afternoon, but the household is just stirring after a night spent in dissipation. The Viscountess has been entertaining a card party, and in the farther part of the 155 William Hogarth vast room a serving-man, sleepy and yawning, is set- ting in order the furniture. This room, seen in perspective, is one of Hogarth's masterpieces of painting. It is full of atmosphere and the colouring is of lovely quality. Near the foreground to the spectator's right appears the figure of the Viscount. He still wears his hat, his sword broken near the point lies on the floor beside him, and a lady's cap peeps out of the pocket of his coat. It is evident therefore that he has just returned home after a long night spent in riot and wantonness. He has flung himself back in a chair, with legs parted and thrust out before him and hands buried deep in the pockets of his small clothes. His countenance and his whole mien express the extreme of disgust and ennui, and Hogarth has carried out the intention of the figure with such easy mastery over general effect and over detail, that it ranks as an artistic creation with the best figures of the kind in the whole range of painting. On the other side of the fireplace sits the mistress of the ill-ordered establishment, characterised with hardly less of insight and skill. She appears to be enceinte, and is in loose attire consisting of a salmon- coloured wrapper and grey-green jacket, dishevelled hair escaping from under a nightcap. On her heavy eyelids and sensual features sits the weariness born of a night turned into day, and refreshing sleep too soon broken. She stretches herself lazily and seems, as Stephens suggests, to be leering at her husband. The moral of the scene is emphasised by the third "Marriage a la Mode" figure of the group, that of the house-steward, who is carrying away a bundle of unpaid bills of which the precious pair will take no notice, and throwing up his hand lifts his eyes to heaven with a tragi-comic expression of despair. Another scene, as well conceived as it is rendered, a representation of which appears opposite page 158, is that where the heroine, who has become a Countess, is receiving a fashionable company at her leviSe. The Countess, who is evidently now a mother, is seated by her dressing-table under the hands of her coiffeur, and beside her, lolling on a sofa, is the figure of Counsellor Silvertongue, who is apparently urging her to attend the masquerade, their visit to which brings about the catastrophe of the story. To the left of the picture, where in the background of the room a curtained bed, surmounted with a coronet, is seen in an alcove, is gathered a company of worthies which give Hogarth the opportunity of expressing his scorn for the fashion- able foibles of the day. In the immediate foreground sits a burly, much bejewelled, but fatuous-looking personage, who holds in his hand a music-book. From his open lips there is proceeding a long drawn out note, that seems to fill with rapture the attentive company. The most demonstrative of these is a lackadaisical lady in white, who sits opposite the spectator, and spreading her hands is leaning forward towards the singer in sentimental ecstasy. She is said to represent the Lady Bingley who uttered one night at the opera the blasphemous ejaculation, "One God, one Farinelli!" 157 William Hogarth Between her and the singer Hogarth has introduced one of his most exquisite creations in the person of a thin little middle-aged beau in blue, with his front hair in curl-papers, who sips a cup of chocolate with a rapt expression on his vacant countenance that is irresistibly comic. The singer is said to be the famous Carestini, noted not only for a voice of surpassing quality but for a handsome and animated person. Hogarth, true to his role, has made him look as ridiculous as possible. There is no space to comment on the further scenes in this series, nor to describe any of the other figures or faces, some of which, like the form of the Earl in the duel scene as he is just collapsing under his wound, or the face of horror and remorse the guilty wife turns up at him, or her countenance as she sinks back in the final tableau, represent Hogarth's power of delineation at its best. The last is well described by F. G. Stephens: — -"The lady has fallen backwards. . . . She is in the languid stupor of dissolution. Her eyes are lightless; their dim pupils are visible between the relaxed lids that are half closed by defect of action ; her lips have parted, her lower jaw has fallen, and her limbs are loose and unnerved." i Of the remaining works that have been grouped Other under the heading "Social Studies," "A Studies of ^'^^i^ht Modern Conversation," ^ of 1733, Social Life ^''^ibits a convivial scene of tavern life of some social interest ; " The Cockpit," ' 1759, is the classic representation of the scene denoted by 1 Stephens, No. z,7s8. ^ lOid., 'Ho. 2,122. ' /Wrf., No. 3,706. 158 "The Distressed Poet" the title, and is crowded with characteristic figures, and the " Stage Coach "or " Country Inn Yard," i 1747, affords a pleasant glimpse at Old English inn-life in the days when everybody travelled by road. The piece called "The Enraged Musician,"^ 174I) has been already referred to as illustrating London life {ante, p. 96), and is also noteworthy as containing one of Hogarth's bonniest damsels, in the person of the milkmaid who is one of the most conspicuous figures. The earlier print of " The Distressed Poet,"^ 1736, to which the "Musician" was a pendant, is worthy of some notice, as it introduces us to a side of ' ' The Hogarth's art too little represented in his better-known works. The scene is a poorly- „ furnished garret wherein the poet is vainly endeavouring, by the aid of Bysshe's Art of English Poetry, to hammer out some verses with the title "Poverty: a Poem." He is disturbed by the entrance of a virago-like milkmaid, who holds out a tally and from the door vociferates her demand to be paid. Roused by the noise, a baby in a bed at the foot of which the poet is sitting lifts up its voice to add to the unhappy man's distress, which is painted in the liveliest fashion on his features. In the middle of the apartment sits the faithful spouse of the poet, whose small-clothes she is engaged in darning, and she looks up at the intruder with ' Stephens, No. 2,882. ^ j^i^^^ jj(j_ ^^tjig. ' Ibid., No. 2,309. William Hogarth perplexity and pain upon her comely features. There is a homely winsomeness about this brisk and cheerful- looking little body that makes her an ideal helpmeet for the despairing poetaster. See plate opposite this page. " Southwark Fair," " Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn," and "The March to Finchley," are three of the best-known of Hogarth's works, and are universal favourites. Each of them is crowded with incident and detail, and enlivened with the artist's characteristic strokes of humour. " Southwark Fair "' is the earliest of the three, and appeared in ^ ■ .. 17'5'i- Next to Bartholomew Fair held in Fair . Smithfield, that of Southwark attracted, in Hogarth's early days, the largest crowds. In the plate, facing page 50, an open space in the foreground, bounded on either side by buildings and tem- porary booths, is crowded with a motley assemblage, conspicuous in which is the figure of the comely drum- mer-girl, already referred to on page 51 as an example of the Hogarthian type of beauty. She is beating up recruits for a dramatic entertainment in which she is no doubt to play a prominent part, and the looks and demeanour of two rustic admirers at her side, whom she has already enthralled, give earnest of success. Meanwhile there is evidence that a rival dramatic per- formance has just come to a sudden and disastrous end, for at the left hand of the plate we witness the downfall of a temporary wooden staging on which a company ^ Stephens, No. 1,960. 160 " Strolling Actresses " was performing (appropriately enough) "The Fall of Bajazet." The whole ruin, actors, actresses, and all, is coming crashing on to the top of a stall charged with crockery that has been established below. Other enter- tainments are advertised on all the buildings which surround the open space, and the crowd presents specimens of the mummers, charlatans, vendors, per- formers, showmen, hussies, bullies, and vagrants who came together on occasions of the kind. On the extreme right is the dour-looking figure of Figg the prize- fighter. The tower of Old Newington Church, which gives the locality of the fair, is seen in the middle distance, and in front of it are booths hung with show cloths. From the tower of the church a rope-flyer is descending. Beyond the church the fair is still seen in progress, and a view of the Norwood hills finally bounds the picturesque and well-considered com- position. " Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn,"i 1738, introduces us behind the scenes, and exhibits the patched and seamy reverse of the fair show frcy„„77,-„_ which the public admires across the foot- . . „ lights. A whimsical fancy has sought out all the contrasts between the sordid reality of an ill- appointed strolling troupe, and the fine make-believe of the actual performance. Hogarth must have chuckled to himself as he elaborated all the quaint conceits, but the effort is one rather in the sphere of literature than of art. ' Stephens, No. 2,403. l6l M William Hogarth "The March to Finchley,"^ of which the sub-title is ' ' A Representation of the March of the Guards towards ^ Scotland in the year 1745," was published in 1750, when the political events to which it f '^ "" referred were matters of the past, and there •'^ could be no reasonable objection on the score of taste or patriotism to a burlesque of what was at the moment a movement of serious import. In September 1745, when the Young Pretender with his army threatened the South, a camp was formed at Finchley for the protection of the capital, and a strong body of troops was ordered to march towards the North to oppose the invasion, and the incidents accompanying the departure of the martial host from London furnish Hogarth with his motives. He has represented the warriors as divided in allegiance — Bacchus and the Cyprian goddess urging a counter-claim that Mars on his part is puzzled to resist. Hogarth's satire is true enough to nature and is not malicious, but the aspect under which he has chosen to exhibit his Majesty's Foot Guards could not be expected to please their titular head. It shows the naivete and unworldliness of Hogarth that he sought to gratify George II. by dedicating to him the plate, and submitting the picture itself for royal approval. Considering that one of the most conspicuous figures in the composition is that of a veteran guardsman, renversd in a pool of water, and stretching out his hand for a further supply of the gin to which he owed his plight, and that on his haversack are ' Stephens, No. 2,639. 163 " ine March to Finchley" conspicuous the letters G.R. and a crown, it is not to be wondered at that the G.R. in question exclaimed, "Does the fellow mean to laugh at my guards? .... What! a bainter burlesque a soldier? He deserves to be picketed for his insolence! Take his trumpery out of my sight." The victor of Dettingen furthermore took occasion to utter the classic remark, "I hate hainting, and boetry too! Neither the one nor the other ever did any good!'" The affronted painter retaliated by alter- ing the dedication, and the plate appeared with the name of the King of Prussia, written however, for Hogarth's spelling was weak, with a single "s" — Prusia. These minor details are of little importance compared with the work itself, which is one of Hogarth's master- pieces. The picture has been from the first in the possession of the Foundling Hospital, and, with the artist's noble portrait of Captain Coram, forms the chief artistic treasure of the Society. In handling it seems to lack the lightness of touch which gives such charm to parts of the "Marriage" series, but it is solid and workmanlike in execution, with a rich and ample colour-scheme, and excellent effect of relief gained by chiaroscuro even more telling than in the black-and- white reproduction. Here as elsewhere in Hogarth's best work the details are not allowed to interfere with the general impression of the piece, which is broad and pictorial. As is not uncommon in Hogarth's compositions, the ' So John Ireland in Hogarth Illustrated, II. 140 f^ The story may have been a little dressed-up in the telling. 163 William Hogarth field of the picture is bounded to right and left by buildings,' the space between whith is filled by the crowd, while in the distance is a road along which the main body of the troops is marching. A glimpse of Highgate on its hill bounds the horizon. Of the numerous groups that supply the fun and satire of the piece, the most conspicuous is that of the youthful guardsman, with dire perplexity written on his comely face, walking between two ladies who are apparently urging rival pretensions. The one on his right hand, who has an obvious claim to his protection, is young and pretty and casts up her eyes at him in love-lorn anguish ; the other on the left is a virago who conscious of her personal disadvantages is making up for the want of youth and good looks by shrill vocifera- tion. Both ladies seem to be concerned with the sale of ballads and newspapers, but while the pretty one provides nothing but loyal and Protestant literature, the other, who has a cross embroidered on her cape, purveys The Jacobite Journal, and flourishes in the soldier's face a roUed-up copy of The Remembrancer— an Opposition print of the time. The title of this is supposed to be of sinister significance for the soldier, who may be supposed to have transferred his affections from the old love to the new, while the opposition of Protestant and Catholic is a whimsical addition to the perplexities of the situation. About the prints entitled "The Four Times of the Day" something has already been said in connection * See p. 87. 164 "Times of the Day" with Hogarth's London, of which they give character- istic scenes under the titles, "Morning,"! "Noon,"* " Evening,"^ and " Night."* In "Morning," the scene of which is opposite St. Paul's, Covent Garden (see page 91), occurs one of Hogarth's best pieces of ^, ^ characterisation. On a frosty morning in winter, just before eight o'clock, a lady ° richly dressed but meagre and gaunt of aspect, and evidently intended for a typical " old maid," is crossing the square on her way to early service. The chilly soul of her bids defiance to the nipping air without, and she walks with head uncovered but for a cap, and with a flat and bony bosom exposed. Close by, a late roysterer is making ardent love to a buxom market- girl, whose bust is round and full, and in the prim face and pinched lips of the ancient virgin is a shocked expression of disapproval, very comically rendered. In attendance on my lady and carrying her prayer-book is a delightful figure of a tiny, wizened serving-lad, in laced hat and smart attire, whose countenance grimaced with cold wears a ludicrous expression of misery. In all Hogarth's work there is nothing better than the series of four pictures giving the humours of an English election. The originals hang in the Soane ^ . „ Museum, and are admirable examples of . Hogarth's execution in oil paint. The first of the series, called "An Election Entertainment"' ' Stephens, No. 2,357. "• /did., No. 2,382. ^ Ih'ii., No. 2,370. * /did.. No. 2,392. 5 /did., No. 3,285. 165 William Hogarth (1755), is an interior crowded with figures and incidents, but of comparatively small pictorial interest. The description of it occupies ten pages in Stephens's Catalogue. The second piece, entitled " Canvassing for Votes,'" may be singled out from among all the artist's compositions for its pictorial charm. It is an open-air piece, and takes us for the moment beyond the limits of Hogarth's beloved London into a village street, where in and about three country inns are being carried on the recognised manoeuvres for securing the wavering or the wily voter. The group of the candidate, or agent, treating the ladies in the balcony to "fairings" has been already noticed (see page 102). He stands under the tree that flanks the Royal Oak Inn, and is beautifully painted in half-tone, the light just catching his shirt front and the gold lace on his coat. The damsels in the balcony above are touched with an elegance that reminds us we are in the century of Watteau. An admirable group is formed in the centre of the fore- ground by the farmer beset by the rival hosts of The Royal Oak and The Crown, who both offer him invita- tions to dinner accompanied by bribes. Apart however from the incidents portrayed, the picture delights the eye by its colour and atmosphere. The buildings, the foliage, the sky, the distant hill in a fold of which nestles a hamlet, are painted with freedom and liquidity, and the light plays about them in a thoroughly outdoor fashion. Number III., "The PoUing,"^ gives a view of the ' Stephens, No. 3,298. See plate opposite page 102. " Stephens, No. 3,309. 166 'Election" Pictures hustings, to which are brought the maimed, the blind, the imbecile, the dying, to record their votes for the candidates, who are seated at the back of the hustings. Lastly, the picture called "Chairing the Members'" is again an open-air rural scene, and takes us to the out- skirts of a country town, along the street of which are descried advancing two processions, headed in each case by a successful candidate borne aloft on a chair. In the foreground a combination of whimsical incidents brings about the imminent fall of one of the candidates, a stout fatuous-looking personage, said to represent George Bubb Doddipgton. His face of terror, as he clutches the arms of the chair, is comically rendered, and his danger so affects a lady who had seated herself by the churchyard wall to watch his triumph, that she faints in an elegant pose. ' Stephens, No. 3,318. 167 CHAPTER VII. portraits: hogarth as a graphic artist and as a maker of british art. Hogarth as artist — Portrait-painting — Characterisation — Not a cari- caturist — His execution — Line and composition — Modelling and chiaroscuro — Hogarth a born painter — Handling unequal — "Captain Coram" — "The Shrimp Girl" — "iiis genre pictures- Compared with the Dutch — His perspective — Founder of the British School — His insularity — Hogarth a national type. In what sense was Hogarth an artist ? Was he one of the gifted few in whom expression in form and colour is instinctive, and who satisfy their own natures iiogartn as-^^ ^^ very act of expression, without ulterior A.Ttist considerations ; or was he only one of those who translate more or less laboriously their thoughts and impressions into pictorial and plastic shape? It must be admitted that Hogarth ran considerable risk in a his own person of sinking the artist in the moralist and ' the wit. In some of his work, as we have seen,^ he deliberately takes this plunge, and would rather by his art save animals from cruel treatment than create Raphael's Cartoons ; or again he spoils the composition of "The Arrest" in "A Rake's Progress" through his 1 See p. 78. 168 Portraiture anxiety to point a moral. The multiplication of signifi- cant details, not only in the didactic pieces but also in the social studies, brings the unity of effect into danger, while the satires of special allusion have been already relegated to the category of the non-artistic. Yet for all this Hogarth is a true artist. From the point of view of design there are artistic qualities in his work that outweigh the literary elements, while in technique, if Hogarth had no feeling for black and white in their own special artistic capabilities, he can be claimed as a born painter delighting in touch, and in the texture as well as the broken hues of oil pigment. A review of Hogarth's work from the standpoint indicated in the preceding sentences leads to the following results. Portraiture is a form of representative art in which it is impossible to ignore the claims of " subject." No portrait can attain the highest excellence n f u merely for its pictorial qualities. The . . artist's insight into and grasp of character ^ " is a measure of excellence that must always be applied. Tested in this way, many of Hogarth's portraits deserve a high place. For the most part these exist in two forms, as pictures and as engraved plates, but one of the best, that of John Wilkes, already referred to,i was etched by the artist from a surreptitious sketch. Equally effec- tive with the " Wilkes " is the etched portrait of Simon Lord Lovat,^ 1746, of which a reproduction is here given, and of him there is also a rapidly-executed oil sketch ' See p. 70, Stephens, No. 4,050. ^ /iid., No. 2,801. 169 William Hogarth in the National Portrait Gallery. The Jacobite laird was portrayed by Hogarth when on his way to London for his trial, which ended in his condemnation, on account of his share in the rising of 1745; and by the crafty, half-humorous expression, and the action of the fingers, we are to suppose him counting over the High- land clans 041 which the Pretender's cause relied. The artistic excellence of work like this no one can question, and the critics who find Hogarth's chiaroscuro wanting in depth and mystery, his line in suggestion, cannot refuse admiration to a power of characterisation so incisive. Very many of the single pictures in Hogarth's numerous subject-compositions possess the same merit in characterisation as the " Wilkes " and the . " " Lovat." The secondary actors in his pictured dramas are sometimes portraits of persons of the day who could be named. The catalogue of Hogarth's prints in J. B. Nichols's Anecdotes gives many identifications; but on the other hand, the artist himself has warned us against this identifying process, for in his own note to his whimsical plate called " Char- acters and Caricaturas "^ he protests against a personal application for the figures in the " Marriage k la Mode.'' He admits however, that a prototype was by others actually found for each of these, and explains the fact on the plea that " a general character will always bear some resemblance to a particular one."^ It is of little ^ Stephens, No. 3,591. ^ J. B. Nichols, Anecdotes, p. 61. 170 "Simon, Lord Lovat" (p. 170). Characterisation importance however, from the artistic side, whether or not Hogarth was in these cases working directly from the life. These figures are undoubtedly substantial creations which have all the vitality and distinct char- acterisation of real persons. Among those that occur in the illustrations given in this volume may be instanced the spinster in "Morning," said to be taken from an actual relative of the painter, but acknowledged by novelist and poet' as a permanent type of universal validity; the singer and the lean little fop in curl-papers in the Countess's Levde in the " Marriage k la Mode "; the farmer and the two landlords in "Canvassing for Votes"; the hautboy-player in "The Enraged Musician"; the bonny drummer-girl in " Southwark Fair." Nearly all of these were known characters, but Hogarth has done far more with each than merely to represent an individual portrait. In the presentation of these types it is well to note that Hogarth has no resort to such exaggeration as is generally understood by caricature. It has . been already shown that Hogarth did much to emancipate social and political satire from its bondage to literature, and if in his satires he de- pends little on the lame devices of inscribed labels and the like, without which lesser men could not be in- telligible, he also discards the cheap device of exag- geration, out of which the pictorial satirists of the eighteenth century in general sucked no small ad- vantage. Hogarth's personages are strongly, even ' Fielding and Cowper. See Austin Dobson, Memoir, p. 62. 171 William Hogarth whimsically individualised, but all is duly kept within the limits of the natural. The plate just mentioned, " Characters and Caricaturas," is designed to defend in this sense his own work. This power of characterisation, of revealing the soul in portraiture, and of imparting an air of life and sub- stance to the creations of the imagination, forms a substantial part of Hogarth's assets as an artist, and we go on to ask by what technical facilities in execution the power was served. Hogarth's plates, as is well known, were not by any means all engraved by his own hand, so that the execution of these as a whole hardly comes into the account. A certain number however he worked himself, sometimes by the pro- cess of etching, and the most elaborate of these is the plate called "The Five Orders of Periwigs."! This was a satirical production aimed at "Athenian" Stuart, the joint author of The Anti- quities of Athens, and Hogarth pretended to measure and classify different kinds of wigs as Stuart measured and classified antique capitals. To find fault with de- tailed scientific work like this of Stuart's^ was a little bit of Hogarth's narrowness, and the satire, as we have noticed already, only amused the genial student of antiquity. The plate is worth looking at for its ela- borate and delicate execution, as well as for some ably ' Stephens, No. 3,812. ^ Stephens, in his notice of the plate, No. 3,812, actually contends that Hogarth was right in ridiculing this painstaking analysis of Greek architectural forms ! 172 Chiaroscuro characterised heads in the lowest line of it. Of the plates reproduced in this volume that entitled ' ' The Laughing Audience" ^ gives us the best idea of Hogarth's touch with the point and of his feeling for chiaroscuro. It cannot be pretended that there is any depth or rich- ness in the latter, or that Hogarth's line has any con- summate quality, but for all that there is real artistic freedom and verve in the handling of the piece, which we can look at with pleasure from the point of view of technique as well as of design. The truth is that as a "black and white man," to borrow a modern phrase, Hogarth's limitations are obvious. He arranges his groups in such a way as to tell his story clearly and to avoid obvious faults in composition, but of abstract beauty in balance of masses and relations of " line he lacked the sense that was so strong in Flaxman, or, more recently, in Randolph Caldecott. Again, of such a use of light and shade as we find in Rembrandt or Turner he knew nothing. To employ these as in themselves vehicles of artistic expres- j ^r, • sion, as in the "Liber Studiorum," or in etchings like "Jan Six at the Window," or "The Three Trees," was outside the range of his artistic ideals. To work for depth and roundness, and bathe the figure or the object in atmosphere, formed no part of his ambition. Furthermore, his line had not in itself the significance, the sensitive suggestive quality, of that of some brilliant modern draughtsmen such as ' Opposite page 128. See the description of the plate on that page. 173 William Hogarth Charles Keene, or even Phil May, still less the exquisite finesse of the etched line of Rembrandt or of Whistler. On the other side, as engraver he makes no attempt to emulate the precision and fastidious finish of the strokes of the burin, that we find in the best French engravers of the eighteenth century. Hogarth, in a word, makes no claim to great technical excellence on this side of his art. His composition, his chiaroscuro, his modelling, his line, are all sufficient for the purpose he had in view. They served the paramount interests of de- lineation, and made no claim, in Millet's phrase, "to open a shop on their own account." On the other hand, in painting, in the use of the brushj Hogarth possessed, as we have seen, the facility of handling, the delight in the medium for _, * its own sake which mark the born executant. Bo fit ^ If as an artist in black and white his place is in the antechamber, as a master pf the brusk he challenges admission to the inner sanctum:. On the subject of Hogarth's oil painting something' has already been said. It is unequal in quality, and is: at times flat, heavy, even leathery ; but in his pest work it is wrought into a texture where crisp touches sparkle on a ground of blended tints. The numerous *" heads he painted, whether as portraits or as ^ studies, afford an opportunity for epcamining his execution. One of the least pleasing is the portrait of Martin Folkes, President of the Royal Society. It is dated 1741, and is somewhat coarsely handl^(f. There are others which are executed in a solid, straightforward '74 Oil Painting fashion without much pretence at quality of handling, and among these slands out the monumental portrait of Captain Coram, of 1739, at the Foundling Hospital. This was Hogarth's own favourite among all his portraits, 1 and remains still one of the masterpieces of the British school. With all due recognition of the excellence of William Dobson, Hogarth's "Coram" may be claimed as the best portrait produced up to that date in ,,^ . . . England, by a native artist uninfluenced by ^ „ Van Dyck or any foreign tradition. It owes this pre-eminence not so much to any special magic of technique, as to the massiveness and dignity of the pre- sentment. Hogarth ^ rises here _ to the he ight of the monumental style, and shows that he belojigs-to an artistic rank altogetjigx-above that ot merely facile and brilliant sketchers. The ' ' Captain Coram " portrait has of course none of the pictorial quality of a Rembrandt, a Velasquez, or a Reynolds, and if we were to seek a parallel to it in older art we might com- pare it with the " Pope Julius H." or the " Leo X. with his Cardinals" of Raphael. There is in all these the same solid, unpretentious handling, the same life-like presentation, the same elevation of style. In Hogarth's picture, the worthy founder of the Foundling Charity is seated by an opening which gives a view of the sea. His red coat with buff collar is worn over black, and the head is relieved against a curtain of dark green. The broad, honest face is framed in masses ' Hogarth Illustrated, m. 51. 17s William Hogarth of wavy white hair, and Hogarth has made these appear soft and full, and has treated them with a painter's sense of texture and colour. More brilliant in execution are the sketches from heads of his servants, which he has thrown together, six in one frame, on a canvas in the National Gallery. As the plate shows (see p. 52), there is an air of life and spirit in these vigorous studies which proves that they were dashed off in a happy artistic mood. The colour- ing is fresh, the handling crisp and masterly, and the way the pigment is laid on the canvas, as for example in the parts about the eyes of the central male head, tells of a hand that loved the brush as the warrior's hand might love the sword. The boy's head above is a delightful study. The piece which above all others reveals most delight in wielding the pencil is Hogarth's extraordinary sketch ^^ of the " Shrimp Girl."' Nothing more than this is needed to show that Hogarth as a A7W/) painter inherited a good artistic tradition. ^^ The laughing mouth, the dancing eyes, are touched in with a freedom and a bravura that suggest at first sight a sketch by Hals or Brauwer. The reds, greens, and greys of the study are lightly and rapidly brushed over the canvas, and we note how the carmine ^ The plate of the " Shrimp Girl" by Baitolozzi, published in 1781, is inscribed "Engraved from an original sketch in oil by Hogarth in the possession of Mrs. Hogarth." The picture was sold at Mrs. Hogarth's sale in 1790 for £,^ 10s. See Austin Dobson, Memoir, pp. 261, 313. 176 "The Shrimp Girl" (p. 176). Pictures of Genre of the cheek is carried out in the front of the dress and in the shrimps in the basket above. When we mention in this connection the name of Hals, it must be understood that there is in Hogarth's work no display of those firm, masterful touches, that "handwriting" of the Haarlem artist, as he himself called it, which wake to such vivid life the studies he had laid in with oily, softly-blended pigments. At the best the Hogarth is a Hals in the making. It has ease and freedom, and a sure grasp of the form that the sweeping brush-strokes accuse with- out insistence, but it lacks the commanding strokes of the greater master. Richard Muther goes far when he calls it "a masterpiece to which the nineteenth century can hardly produce a rival."' Passing from the portraits and studies fully or nearly life-size, we may regard from the present point of view those pictures, most characteristic of Hogarth's genius, in which small figures ^ " are set m scenes packed with mcident and detail. Here we can estimate his sensibility as a colourist, his mastery of perspective, linear and aerial, his drawing of the figure and of objects of still life, and above all his method with the oil pigments and his touch. If the "Shrimp Girl" has led us to think of Hals, the genre pictures cannot fail to suggest a comparison with Dutch or Flemish masters such as Terborch or Metsu, Teniers or Jan Steen. The last of these has ' The History of Modern Painting, Eng. Trans., Lond. 1895, I. 29. 177 N William Hogarth in common with Hogarth a pronounced satirical vein, though in the Dutch painter this is not developed nearly so amply, nor in such varied forms, as in the Londoner. Hogarth followed these men in their sound and workmanlike technique. It is a fact of °^ui.^ the utmost importance, as serving to separate ' Hogarth from Reynolds and his contem- poraries and successors, that his technical practice in oils was simple, unexperimental, and safe.^ In this he belonged to the past instead of the future of the English school. On the other hand, as a manipu- lator Hogarth is not the equal of the painters mentioned over-page. Any visitor to the National Gallery can con- vince himself of this by examining with a magnifying- glass the faces, the heads, the dresses, the accessories, in the pictures of the " Marriage k la Mode," and com- paring them with similar passages in the Dutch master- pieces of the Peel or Wynn-EUis Collections in the same building. He will admire the English painter's dainty touch, his suggestion of character, his broken colours, his nice sense of degradation of tone, and his good drawing of a room, of figures, and of furniture ; but he will at the same time recognise that Hogarth stands a long way behind the best of the seventeenth century genre painters. For absolute certainty of drawing, ^ "Hogarth used no bitumen, like those who came after him, and tried no experiments with fugitive colours. . . . Hogarth's colours are as clear, pure, and serene as when first painted."— John C. Van Dyke in the Century Magazine^ July 1897 ; quoted in Austin Dobson, Memoir, p. 211, 178 Hogarth's Interiors and a precision of handling that never falls into the fault of hardness, these masters are, from the executive point of view, in a class by themselves. It is a high honour for Hogarth that he can be brought into com- parison with them. It would be absurd to claim him as their peer. An excellent painter of to-day has expressed to the writer his admiration for Hogarth's artistic taste and exactitude in putting a room into perspec- tive for the background of his pictures. He not only chooses suitable angles and draws . his lines correctly, but fills his spaces with -^ atmosphere and gives true distance. The room in the second picture of the " Marriage k la Mode" is a good example of what is meant. Of equal merit is the less ambitious interior, in which are seated the Strode family, in the " Conversation Piece" of uncertain date, exhibited on the same wall as the " Marriage" in the National Gallery. The perspective effect is admirable, and the background sets oif well the dainty figure of the lady of the party, who, in pale pink with white cap, fichu, and apron, is deliciously rendered. There are indeed in this one small section of the national collec- tion nearly a dozen pieces that any living painter of to-day would be proud to claim as his work. As a fact, the estimate formed by competent living painters of Hogarth's powers as an executant tends to grow higher the more his best work is examined, and Hogarth may have the full credit of this, without any undue exaltation of his merits. 179 William Hogarth Hogarth as a "Maker of British Art" claims a concluding word. To no one of the artists dealt with _ , in this series of small monographs does the title of the series more justly apply. Hogarth „ ... , not only adorns the muster-roll of British painters, but m a sense he heads it. Hogarth's painting was, as we have seen, based on the previous practice of the school. An artistic ancestor may be found for him as a portraitist in the Scotsman, Michael Wright. As decorator he follows Thornhill. His technique is the sound one which the eighteenth century had inherited from the Dutch and other schools of the seventeenth century. But though he rests more on the past than has been generally supposed, it is none the less true that his work opens a new era in the history of insular art. The British school had already achieved high distinction in miniature painting, and had produced not a few painters of portraits on a large scale of real merit, not to speak of decorative artists such as Streater and Hogarth's father-in-law. But miniature painting ranked as a minor form of the art, and the portraitists and decorators, good as they may have been, were confessedly inferior to foreign masters like Rubens, or Van Dyck, or Verrio, who worked in England at the same epoch and whose genius overshadowed native talent. Hogarth was the first British painter who struck out a distinct line of his own, and who had genius enough to secure for his work a European reputation. Hogarth's works were pretty 1 80 Hogarth's Patriotism well known on the Continent, and in his person insular painting claimed for the first time a place beside the recognised achievements of the older schools. It was also the fact that Hogarth's design in its more obvious aspects was characteristically British, so that he is not only the first prominent representative of the school, but makes the , , . iTistilciyitv qualities of the school conspicuous from the -^ outset. The pronounced intellectual element, the didactic vein in his work, are insular peculiarities, for the inhabitants of these islands can never, like the Latin races, dissociate the form of art from its content, and the moral element in representative design is in their minds always a matter for consideration. Further, Hogarth was national also in his patriotic resistance to the foreign fashions in art which in his time were predominant. Several of his satires and satirical touches were, as we have noted already, aimed at foreign musical and theatrical virtuosi, and in the domain of painting he was vigorous in inveighing against the " dark pictures " foisted off by dealers upon English buyers under names like Raphael and Titian. The prints entitled "The Battle of the Pictures "^ (1745), the Frontispiece and Tailpiece to the catalogue of one of the picture exhibitions that preceded the foundation of the Royal Academy (1761),^ "Time Smoking a Picture"^ (1761), and, as regards its title, his last 'Stephens, No. 2,622. " Nos. 3,808, 3,809. » No. 3,836. 181 William Hogarth production, "The Bathos'" (1764), are inspired by the same impatience at the pretence of connoisseurship that at a later date was to animate John Constable. The last-named print is an autobiographical docu- ment, and brings us into contact again with Hogarth's personality, which, through the last three chapters, has retired from view behind his works. It is the one production of his genius that is distinctly subjective in character. He was preparing it in the final months of his life, to serve as "tail piece" to a collected volume of his engraved works, and it was advertised as "a print called 'Finis.'" With the sense upon him of the failure of power and of his own approaching end, he has roused himself to a last effort in the old whimsical vein of "The Strolling Actresses," and has heaped together all sorts of fanciful devices to signify the end of all things. He has sketched an open-air scene, and shown in the sky the charioteer of the sun stricken dead in his car, while on the earth is reclined in a moribund condition Father Time himself. The old gaifer has been smoking, and the pipe drops broken from his hand, while on the last puff of smoke issuing from his lips is inscribed the word "Finis." A shivered scythe and cracked hour-glass lie beside the dying Time, while, strewn around, all the works of men, their monuments, their arms, their implements of art and of household toil, lie ruined and outworn in the foreground of a ' Stephens, No. 4,106. The full title is "The Bathos, or Manner of Sinking in Sublime Paintings, inscribed to the Dealers in Dark Pictures," See Genuine Works, I. 382. 1S2 His Last Plate desolate landscape. It is a curious sudden revelation of m artistic self-consciousness that had been through a long life studiously concealed. The little microcosm, William Hogarth, so cunningly adjusted, would revolve no longer; the dust of it was returning to the earth; the spirit was soon to house where there would be no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom. But with it would crack the mighty world. With the brief candle of the one waning life all would go out; the sun, and the light, and the moon, and the stars be darkened too, and the cosmic wheels no longer turn! It was a strange thought, but the expression of it seems to bring the artist nearer to our hearts, and gives us a glimpse, just as we are parting from him, into his inner life. To the critic of his art, moreover, the piece is of value just for the very reason that it is so excep- tional. It serves to emphasise more strongly the outstanding fact about his work, that it was as a rule so markedly objective. His productions in general were of course far from being mere transcripts of nature. Into every one of them there entered his own artistic personality, but the expression of this personality was in each case struck from him by the impact of things without. It was something he had seen or heard of that stirred the creative impulse, and his pictures or drawings were primarily intended to make the spec- tators see the things that he had seen or divined, and to see them in the aspects which gave them importance in the artist's eyes. This healthy objectivity is again a characteristic of the 183 William Hogarth British school, and in this Hogarth is once more fs representative as well as its virtual founder. Insiv'ar art and literature are in the main happily free fromihe morbid introspection that is the spirit in which in tSese days the muses are sometimes wooed. Our writers of romance do not describe their own decadent sekes in situations flattering to their vanity, nor do we hear too much from our artists in design about their duty to their own individuality. Yet the example of Hogarth's robust common-sense in art is not wholly unneeded on the English side of the Channel. Hence a final word of acknowledgment may justly be given to one of the fathers of British Art for his sturdy simplicity of spirit, in which we recognise a true scion of the island stock- Hogarth's art was in a word as characteristically English as was his personality, and alike as man and as artist he is worthy of his place at the head of the British School of Painting. 184 Appendices. I. Principal Works. II. Bibliographical Note. III. Limits of Hogarth's London. IV. The Literary Remains of "Ald Hoggart," the Painter's Uncle. 185 I. Chronological Review of the Artistic Activity of William Hogarth, with an indication of his principal works. [P = Painting; E = Engraving.] 1720. Hogarth's Shop Card, " W. Hogarth, Engraver" (E). 1721-C. 1724. Satirical Plates for the Booksellers, e.g. "The Lottery" (E), "The South Sea Scheme" (E). c. 1 723- 1 730. Book Illustrations for the Booksellers, e.g. Plates to the Travels of Aubry de la Motraye (E) and to Hudibras (E). 1724. " Masquerades and Operas " (E), first satirical plate published by Hogarth on his own account. 187 William Hogarth c. \Ti%- Conversation Pieces, Groups of Portraits on a small scale in oils (P). 1732- "A Harlot's Progress," six pictures and six plates engraved by Hogarth himself (P and E). 1733- "A Midnight Modern Conversation" (P and E). "Southwark Fair" (P), (E, 1735). Sarah Malcolm" (P and E). I73S- " A Rake's Progress,'' eight pictures and eight plates engraved partly by Hogarth (P and E). "the Distressed Poet" (P), (E, 1736). 1736. " The Pool of Bethesda " \ Decorative canvases at St. Bar- "The Good Samaritan" / tholomew's Hospital (P). " The Sleeping Congregation " (E). 1738- " The Four Times of the Day " (P and E). " Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn" (P and E). 1739- " Captain Coram," portrait at the Foundling Hospital (P). 1741. "The Enraged Musician" (P and E). "Martin Folkes, Pres. Royal Soc," portrait at the Royal Society (P). ^ 1742. " Taste in High Life" (P), (E, 1746). 188 Appendix I I74S- " Marriage k la Mode," six pictures in National Gallery, and six plates (P and £). " The Battle of the Pictures " (E). " Hogarth with Pug Dog," self-portrait in National Gallery (P), (E, 1749). 1746. "David Garrick as Richard III." (P). "Simon, Lord Lovat" (P and E). 1747- " Industry and Idleness," twelve plates (E). "The Stage Coach," or « A Country Inn Yard" (E). 1748.- " Paul before Felix," picture at Lincoln's Inn (P), (E, 1752). 1749. " The Gate of Calais" (P and E). 1750. "March of the Guards to Finchley," picture at Foundling Hospital (P and E). 1751. "Beer Street" and "Gin Lane" (E). " The Four Stages of Cruelty " (E). 1752. " Moses brought to Pharaoh's Daughter," picture at Foundling Hospital (P and E). I7S5- "Four Pictures of an Election," in Soane Museum (P), (E, 1755-58)- 189 William Hogarth 1756. Altar-piece for St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, in the possession of the Bristol Academy of the Fine Arts, but not now visible (P). " The Invasion," two plates (E). 1758. " Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse," self-portrait at National Portrait Gallery (P and E). 1759- "The Cockpit" (E). "The Lady's Last Stake" (P), (E, 1825). " Sigismunda," picture in National Gallery (P), (E, 1793).^ 1761. Frontispiece and Tailpiece to Catalogue of Pictures exhibited in Spring Gardens, 1761 (E). " The Five Orders of Periwigs " (E). " Time Smoking a Picture " (E). 1762. " Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism " (E). " The Times," Plate I. (E). "The Times," Plate II. (E, 1790). ■ 1763. " John Wilkes, Esq." (E). " The Bruiser, C. Churchill" (E). 1764. "The Bathos, or Manner of Sinking in Sublime Paintings inscribed to the Dealers in Dark Pictures" (E). 190 II. Bibliographical Note on the Chief Original Authorities for the Life of Hogarth, and for the Elucidation of his Works. The student of Hogarth is frequently confronted with the names Nichols and Ireland, and less often with those of Steevens and Reed; he is moreover constantly referred to two works, one entitled Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth, and the other Hogarth Illustrated. There are two commentators of the name Nichols, a father John Nichols, and a son John Bowyer Nichols; and two of the name Ireland, John Ireland and Samuel Ireland, who were in no way related to each other. John Nichols, the elder, collaborated with Steevens and Reed in the production of the Biographical Anecdotes, while John Ireland is responsible for Hogarth Illustrated. John Nichols, F.S.A., 1745-1826, was by profession printer and publisher, but by taste, education, and habit, antiquary and author. For many years he was closely connected with the Gentleman's Magazine. He not only printed Johnson's Lives of the Poets, but was his intimate friend and correspondent, and 191 William Hogarth was similarly associated with Richard Gough the antiquary, Bishop Percy, and Edward Gibbon. He was also a friend of Horace Walpole, who praises highly his Biographical Attecdotes, though in another connection Walpole reflects on Nichols's tendency in biography to make all the geese swans. John Bowyer Nichols, F.S.A., 1779-1S63, printer and antiquary, was the eldest son of John Nichols, and carried " on his father's work. Amongst other things he " superintended the passing through the press of nearly all the important County histories published during the first half of the [nineteenth] century" {Diet, of Nat. Biog.). Both father and son were men whose statements derive weight from their high reputation, alike as antiquaries and managers of a large and important business. Neither of the two Irelands held anything like the position of John Nichols and his son. One of the two, Samuel Ireland, who died in 1800, an engraver and writer and collector of Hogarthiana, was intimately involved, though more as dupe than accomplice, in the famous Shakespearian forgeries carried out by his son William Henry Ireland. John Ireland, who died in 1808, was an author of respectable repute, and a well-known frequenter of the Three Feathers Coffee House in Leicester Fields. Like his namesake he was a great admirer and collector of the works of Hogarth, and after the painter's death was employed by Messrs. Boydell to edit his works with a commentary. This appeared in two volumes in 1791, under the title Hogarth Illustrated. John Ireland, however, comes into connection with Hogarth in a far more important capacity, for it was into his hands that there passed the artist's original memoranda concerning his own life and works, and the publication of these by Ireland in 1798 as the third volume oi Hogarth Illustrated viz.s the most important of all Hogarthian events subsequent to the death of the artist. George Steevens, F.R.S., F.S.A., 1736-1800, the well-known 192 Appendix II. commentator on Shakespeare, was also an ardent collector of the works of Hogarth. He was a man of great learning and of assured position and fortune, but his faults of temper and still more of taste were flagrant and notorious. " Steevens's irrepressible saturnine humour overshadowed his virtues," remarks the Dictionary of National Biography. In view of the collaboration of Steevens with John Nichols in his Biographical Anecdotes of Hogarth, it is necessary to know that he had a cynical vein that would show itself in the depreciation of popular favourites, and also that he had a very serious quarrel with one of the Hogarth household. This was Mary Lewis, cousin of Mrs. Hogarth. Hogarth died in her arms, and she continued to live with the widow at one or other of the houses, occupying herself with the sale of the artist's prints, till 1789, when Mrs. Hogarth died, leaving to Mary Lewis all she possessed. The latter soon afterwards, in consideration of an annuity of ^250, handed over the stock of engraved copper-plates to the well-known publisher Alderman Boydell. Now after Hogarth's death there had evidently been a certain amount of controversy between the artist's family and John Ireland on the one side, and Nichols and Steevens the authors of the Biographical Anecdotes on the other,' and Mary Lewis had expressed strong dissent from some of the strictures on Hogarth contained in the latter work. George Steevens nursed against her bitter wrath, and in the third edition of the Biographical Anecdotes published in 1785, he launched at her one of the most disgraceful personal attacks that ever soiled the pages of literature. His language is so odious that it can- not well be quoted, and he actually adds in a footnote, " She is still living, and has been loud in abuse of this work, a 1 See especially the Preface to the second edition of Nichols's Bio- graphical Anecdotes, published in 1782. The Preface is reprinted in the third edition of 1785. 193 O William Hogarth circumstance to which she owes a niche in it!" All Steevens's sins pale into insignificance before this one, and it is difficult to believe how any one calling himself a man, still more how a gentleman and a member of learned societies can so have dis- graced himself. Steevens's depreciatory notes on Hogarth in the Biographical Anecdotes must be judged of as the con- tribution of one who could be capable of this unmanly performance. Isaac Reed, 1742-1807, a Shakespearian scholar and authority on matters theatrical, was of a retiring disposition and cared little to see his name in print. He worked with Nichols and Steevens on the Biographical Anecdotes. We will turn now to the two important works of which the titles have been already mentioned. In 1781 appeared the first edition of the Biographical Anecdotes just referred to. The full title runs: Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth; and a catalogue of his works chronologically arranged; with occasional re/narks. London, printed by and for J. Nichols, MDCCLXXXI. It is in octavo, unillustrated. There are about 60 pages of the Life, while the rest of the brochure, which runs to 1 57 pages, is taken up with a catalogue raisonne of the works and with notes. A second and a third edition, enlarged, were published in 1782 and 1785 in the same form, but that of 1785 runs to 529 pages, and contains at the end the metrical version of the account of the " Five Days' Peregrination." It has been already explained that this was from the first the joint work of John Nichols, George Steevens, and Isaac Reed. It would not be possible to distribute the matter among these collaborators were it not the case that what is practically a fourth edition of the work was issued in 180B-10, still under the editorship of John Nichols, in two volumes of quarto size, 194 Appendix II. illustrated with i6o plates, re-engraved on a smaller scale.' In this edition the contributions of Steevens, who had died in 1800, are indicated by inverted commas. This is a most fortunate circumstance, for it enables us to see that certain paragraphs, some of which occur in the first edition but which are more numerous in the later ones, of a kind derogatory to the memory of the painter, are neither by Nichols nor Reed, but by their crabbed and cynical associate. We are thus able to make due allowance in estimating the value of these com- ments, some of which we are able to test by other evidence. It may be worth while here to notice briefly some of the most important of these paragraphs, with a reference to the pages in the text in which the matter of them is discussed. Ed. 1781, p. 34; ed. 1785, p. 55; ed. 1808, 1., p. 234, a para- graph, in which there is a considerable substratum of truth, about Hogarth's affecting to "tJespise every kind of knowledge which he did not possess." Ed. 1785, p. 49; ed. '1808, 1., p. 143 (not in the 1781 ed.), a pas- sage extremely, and we must hope unduly, severe on Hogarth's arrogant behaviour while on the Continent. (See p. 62 f.) Ed. 1785, p. 91; ed. 1808, I., p. 393 (not in the 1781 ed.), an ill-natured passage about Hogarth's breeding, attempting to justify the statement that " he continued to the last a gross un- cultivated man." (See p. S3 f.) Ed. 1781, p. 36; ed. 1785, p. 59; ed. 1808, i., p. 401, a passage reproaching Hogarth for the indelicacies in his works. (See P- 77-) Ed. 1785, p. 114, is the reference for the attack on Mary Lewis. This is not in ed. 1781, and it is suppressed in ed. 1808, 1 The title-page of this edition reads : The Genuine Works of Williami Hogarth, illustrated with Biographical Anecdotes, etc. , but it is essentially an extension of the original work entitled Biographical Anecdotes, 195 William Hogarth I., p. 412, where in a half-apology for it it is acknowledged as the work of Steevens. (See p. 193 f.) Ed. 1785, p. 4, note; ed. 1808, I., 7 (not in ed. 1781). The depreciatory comment on the works of "Aid Hoggart" is the work of Steevens. (See Appendix IV.) After due allowance has been made for the splenetic com- ments by Steevens, the Biographical Anecdotes remains the standard authority for Hogarth's life as a whole. The autobio- graphic memoranda published by John Ireland, though of higher value than any other material, are fragmentary, whereas the Nichols Anecdotes fairly covers the artist's career, and in the main stands the test of a comparison with the autobiography without loss of credit. John Ireland's two volumes of Hogarth Illustrated, published in 1791, have a continuous pagination. In Vol. I., pp. i. to cxxii. contain a memoir going over the same ground as that of Nichols and controverting many points in it. The rest of Vol. I. and the whole of Vol. II. — that is, pp. 1-607 are devoted to a notice of the works. In estimating the comparative value of the biographies by John Nichols and John Ireland it must be remembered that, so far as we know, neither Nichols nor his collaborators were per- sonally acquainted with the Hogarths, whereas Ireland was certainly US with Mary Lewis, from whom he received the memoranda, and from her, if not from Mrs. Hogarth, he may have been favoured with private information, which he incor- porated in his Hogarth Illustrated oi 1791. The reader will not forget, however, that in writing these two volumes Ireland made no use of the Hogarth memoranda, which did not come into his hands till later. He tells us himself that till he received the memoranda from Mary Lewis (about 1796) he "had neither seen the MSB. nor even heard that Hogarth had written anything for the press, except the Analysis of Beauty:^ This looks as if 196 Appendix II. Ireland had not had any intimate communication with Mrs. Hogarth on the subject of her husband's life and work. Of all the materials for the life of Hogarth incomparably the most valuable are his own memoranda and notes. These first saw the light in 1798. John Ireland, who published them as the third volume or supplement of the work entitled Hogarth Illustrated, states in the advertisement: "The manuscripts from which the principal parts of this volume are compiled, were written by the late Mr. Hogarth; had he lived a little longer, he would have methodised and published them. On his decease they devolved to his widow, who kept them sacred and entire until her death; when they became the property of her relation and executrix, Mrs. Lewis, of Chiswick, by whose kindness and friendship they are now in my possession." Hogarth, who died in 1764, probably wrote the memoranda in the last years of his life, and of this they contain internal evidence. Mrs. Hogarth lived till 1789, and the papers passed from her executrix to Ireland probably about the year 1796. They consisted of (i) a sketch of his own life, (2) some notes on the condition of the arts in his time and on the projects for the formation of an Academy of Art, (3) the MS. of his book The Analysis of Beauty, (4) some memoranda on the subjects of certain of his works, (5) letters and papers about his "Sigismunda," etc. It needs hardly to be said that the original matter thus furnished has formed the groundwork of what has been written about Hogarth's life in the previous chapters. It should be noted here that this invaluable matter was republished in a later work, for which was responsible John Bowyer Nichols, the son. This was entitled Anecdotes of William Hogarth, Written by Himself, with Essays . . . and Criticisms, etc., and saw the light in 1833. It 's a most useful compilation, consisting in: — (l) A reprint of Hogarth's Autobiography from John Ireland's volume of 1798, with the artist's disquisition on Academies of Art, and memoranda about the Analysis of Beauty, " Sigismunda," 197 William Hogarth the quarrel with Wilkes, etc., and finally Hogarth's remarks on some of his prints. (2) A collection of criticisms on Hogarth both as man and artist, from that by Horace Walpole in his Anecdotes of Paint- ing, vol. IV., 1771-80, to that of Allan Cunningham, in his Lives of the most Eminent British Painters, 1829. These criticisms do not rank among original authorities, but they are a valuable early set of testimonies to Hogarth's reputation as an artist (3) A reprint of a " Biographical Essay " prefixed to the re- issue of Hogarth's engraved work from the original plates retouched by James Heath, R.A., which saw the light in 1822. (4) Catalogues and indices, occupying the last 250 pages of the volume. On the whole, this is the most practically useful single pub- lication among all the older works that may claim to rank as original authorities for the life and work of Hogarth. Among the books which bear rather on the elucidation of the works of Hogarth than on his life may be mentioned the following : — In point of date the first things written about Hogarth after his death are contained in a work entitled Hogarth Moralized, published in 1768.' This was a joint work partly due to the Reverend John Trusler, a voluminous writer of the time, who supplied a moral and edifying commentary on poor Hogarth's plates, which he treated like texts of a sermon, and Mrs. Hogarth, who joined in the venture to protect her own interests, and who supplied explanations and illustrations of the prints from the stores of her own personal knowledge. There have been various subsequent editions of this work, with additions and modifications in the letterpress. The plates, re-engraved on a 1 See p. 177 of the Bibliography appended by Mr. Austin Dobson to Ms Mimmr. 198 Appendix II. smaller scale, are given without much attention to chronological order, and each is accompanied by a moralising comment. Previous to this issue, in Hogarth's own lifetime there had appeared many " explanations," mostly quite unauthorised, but an exception must be made in the case of a couple of pamphlets in French, by Jean Rouquet, an artist in enamels, which were published about 1746-50 to serve as letterpress to the copies of Hogarth's prints which were sold on the Continent. We are informed that Hogarth suggested the publication, so that we may assume that the explanations were supplied, or at any rate endorsed, by himself.' All other bibliographical notes on the various explanations of Hogarth's plates are rendered needless by the publication of F. G. Stephens's elaborate Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the Print Room of the British Museum. Almost all Hogarth's prints that are of importance in his ceuvre are included in this Catalogue, and in each case there is a full and sagacious explanation of the .incidents and allusions involved, as well as a notice of the different states of the plate under review. This Catalogue is an indispensable aid to the comprehension of Hogarth's works as well as to their artistic study. It is unfortunately not furnished with an index, but the description of any of Hogarth's plates can be found by ascertaining the date of the plate, given e.g. in Mr. Austin Dobson's list at the end of his Mevtoir, and looking under the year in question in the Catalogue^ which is chronologically arranged. The book for which Samuel Ireland was responsible appeared in 1794-9, and was entitled Graphic Illustrations of Hogarth from Pictures, Drawings, and Scarce Prints in the possession of Samuel Ireland, etc. The first volume of the work, 1794, ^ Biographical Anecdotes, 1785, p. 103. '■' Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, Division I., Political and Personal Satires. Printed by order of the Trustees, 1870-83. Four vols, in five. 199 William Hogarth contains, first of all, notes and illustrations of Hogarth's earliest works such as shop cards and the like, and then a series of other little known and unimportant works, some of which are of doubtful authenticity. The matter in the second volume published in 1799 continues of the same character. The Graphic Illustrations preserves for us a certain amount of matter not otherwise available, a valuable item being a print of Hogarth's portrait of his wife, Jane Thornhill, which shows her to have been a stately-looking dame who certainly would not have eloped with a lover of boorish manners, after the type Steevens seeks to create in the paragraph already referred to. A notice of the actress, Lavinia Fenton, afterwards Duchess of Bolton, the subject of Hogarth's attractive portrait in the National Gallery, is also of interest. These come at p. 4 and p. 49 of vol. II. Finally it may be noted that in 1780^ there appeared the account of Hogarth in the fourth and concluding volume of Horace Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting in England. This of course cannot be neglected by any student of Hogarth, but so far as original information is concerned, Walpole himself acknowledges in his later edition that it was inferior to that published in 1781 by John Nichols, which he pronounces "not only more accurate, but much more satisfactory than mine." ^ ■ The volume had been printed earlier but was kept back from publica- tion, the date on the title-page is 1771. 2 Anecdotes of Painting, newed., Lend. 1888. Vol. Iii., p. 1, note. 200 III. The Limits of Hogarth's London. Hogarth's London, in and near which his whole life was passed, the Eondon of the artistic, literary, and theatrical world of the eight^nth century, centred in Leicester Square, or, as it was then called, Leicester Fields, in Covent Garden, and the St. Martin's ! Lane district between them. Steele calls Covent Garden, in & social sense, " the Heart of the Town." ' East- wards from this central block the town extended past Clare Market and Lincoln's Inn to Fleet Street and the City, while beyond the City London proper ended somewhere about Goodman's Fields to the north of the Tower, though along the river it extended much farther. To the north of the central block London embraced, first, the present district of Soho, whose Square, still in part surrounded by stately mansions, was in the middle of the eighteenth century a chosen residence of ambassadors and nobles ; and, next, St. Giles's and part of Bloomsbury, though not farther north than the line of Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury Square, and Great Ormond Street ; for Queen Square, built in the time of Queen Anne, had its north side left open " for the sake of the beautiful landscape, which is formed by the hills of Highgate and Hampstead, together with the adjacent fields." ^ About and beyond Gray's 1 Steele, To^rni Talk, No. i. 2 Ralph, A Critical lievieic of the Publick Buildings, ete,, Loncl. 1734. p. 98. 201 William Hogarth Inn and eastwards by Smithfield, the Charterhouse and Goswell Road, all the way to Moorfields, the groiind was covered with streets and houses, that did not however extend i.iorthwards far beyond the line of Old Street. East of Moorfields and north of Whitechapel the population was far scantier. Returning to Leicester Fields and facing towards the west, we should then have found Coventry Street and Piccadilly — the name, apparently derived from an ordinary or eatimg-house, only applied then to the eastern portion of the thoroughfare— carry- ing the town westwards, past a fashionable distjrict round St. James's Square, to about the spot where the dej^ression of the ground midway along the Green Park marks th(a old valley of the Tyburn Brook. North of this line of Piccad illy the town, comprising the districts round Golden Square, Conduit Street, and Hanover Square, extended in Hogarth's early life not farther west than Bond Street save along Piccadilly, where it reached to Half Moon Street; while it overflowed the northern boundary of this district, the Tyburn Road, now Oxford Street, to about the line of Mortimer and Wigmore Streets. The western limit of London in this region when Hogarth was young was approximately marked by a natural line that is still to be traced in the modern streets and mews. It was the line of the Tyburn Brook, which entered the London limits near some famous pleasure-gardens close to Old Marylebone Church. This church still exists in High Street, Marylebone, just at the back of the newer and more handsome Marylebone Church facing the New Road, and it has Hogarthian associations, for in the church which preceded the present barn-like edifice Hogarth's Rake is married to the one-eyed wealthy spinster (see Plate). The map prefixed to Strype's edition of Stow's London of 1720 shows Marylebone as a country hamlet, and gives the course of the Tyburn as an open brook from thence to the Thames. In the map given in Noorthouck's London of 1772, about the time of Hogarth's death, the brook is covered in, but certain streets I < Appendix III. are shown as following exactly its ancient course, and along these streets we can still walk, and can trace in their winding and oblique lines the ancient turns of the watercourse. The sinuous Marylebone Lane carries us along this line to Oxford Street, and across it South Molton Street, on one of the houses of which not long ago the date 172 1 could be read, and Avery Row follow its slant, while farther on the curious windings of the long mews between the top of Bruton Street and the foot of Hay Hill have the same origin. Thence the stream, crossing what are now the gardens of Lansdowne House, and curving round at the top or north end of Half Moon Street, took its course to the Green Park. Flowing thence by Buckingham Palace, or as it then was Buckingham House,^ it was finally responsible for the ornamental waters in St. James's Park,^ and for the pools and marshes that in old time made Westminster the island of Thorney. About 1720, as we have noticed, this line formed the limit of the town to the west. To the south of Leicester Fields past Charing Cross, White- hall led on to the city of Westminster, and beyond this again there were houses along Millbank and inland from the river as far as the Artillery Ground near the present Army and Navy Stores, and Tothill Fields, where now rises the stately Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster. Pimlico was of course open fields and marsh land. To the south of the Thames the London of Hogarth's day seems to have suffered little change during his lifetime. The population lined the river bank from Rotherhithe to opposite the Temple and more sparingly to Stangate, and extended inland to St. George's Fields, which formed a large open space of which the present obelisk marks about the centre. ' Buckingham House was Ijought in 1762 by George III. and settled upon Qneen CSiarlotte. ' A sister brook, the West Bonme, formed the Serpentine. 203 William Hogarth Any one therefore who desires to peregrinate the London of Hogarth, may start, say, from the corner of Marylebone Lane and High Street and trace the old Tyburn Brook to Piccadilly, thence crossing the Green Park by Buckingham Palace, to the Army and Navy Stores. He will then follow the Horseferry Road to Lambeth Bridge, and there crossing the river get to Lambeth Marsh, and keep to this line across the Waterloo Road, where he will turn a little inland, and keeping about half- a-mile from the river make Bermondsey, thence hugging the bank more closely till beyond Rotherhithe, he will again cross and return westwards along the northern shore till he reaches the longitude of Goodman's Fields. He must there strike north and skirt an inhabited territory by Shoreditch as far as the beginning of Hoxton, whence a westward course should be taken along Old Street, above the Charterhouse atid Clerken- well Green and past Mount Pleasant to Great Ormond Street, and then along the line of Great Russell Street and Mortimer Street to the original point of departure. This tramp often or a dozen miles would embrace the London proper of the lifetime of Hogarth, for during this it changed comparatively little. It must not be supposed, however, that all outside this London was open fields. There already existed, beyond the area thus circumscribed, centres of population that were in time to be embraced in the growing city. London as we know it is the result of a crwolKiats. Within its huge compass there still exist in quasi-independence what were once separate centres of urban, village, or ecclesiastical life. There are the British and Roman capital that still bears in Anglicised form the name of " civitas," a distinct city of ecclesiastical origin at Westminster, and an ancient borough of Southwark. There are also a score or two of originally independent settlements, proclaimed Saxon by their appellations, that possessed the same configuration and features which we find to-day in the rural villages that stud the English counties— Paddington and 204 Appendix III. Kensington, Brixton, Kennington, Camberwell, Stepney, Hoxton, and the rest. We find their names in land-charters older than the Conquest, and to this day they possess in many cases a High Street, a parish church, a village green, or even a manor house, that bring a pleasant flavour of the country into what is now the heart of town. These places all existed in the eighteenth century, but they were to Londoners places for semi-rural excursions, and were the localities of those tea-gardens and places of entertainments which played such a part in the social life of the times. Paddington has a special Hogarthian associa- tion, for it was in the church of the village that the artist effected his runaway marriage with Jane Thornhil). 205 IV. The Literary Remains of " Aid Hoggart," the Uncle of the Painter. George Steevens, against whom the reader has already received a caution, speaks of the main body of Thomas Hoggart's effusions as in " every way contemptible. Want of grammar, metre, sense, and decency," he says, "are their invariable characteristics."' Dr. Craig Gibson on his part lamented that they were " sadly beneath the standard of poetry at the present time" {c. 1850). As the reader may be glad to have the opportunity of judging for himself as to the truth of these gloomy sayings, one of the best specimens is here printed. Dr. Gibson classified the poems as follows: — There was largely represented "a class of compositions now obsolete, what the author styles ' Play-jigs,' short dramas in verse, the interest arising from the incidents of low, rustic intrigues. . . . These 'jigs' appear to have been acted by old Hoggart and some of his neighbours. . . . The next, or perhaps the first, class of compositions in point of importance are his songs, — play songs" (songs introduced into the historical and classical dramas mentioned by Adam Walker; see ante, p. 9), "love songs, Bacchanalian songs, satirical songs, humorous songs, lascivious songs, and songs which cannot be classed." There were also 1 Biographical Anecdotes, 1785, p. 4, note. 206 Appendix IV. allegorical pieces, ballads, satires, dialogues, and a considerable number of epigrams and epitaphs. Gibson could find, however, no poems in the Westmorland dialect. A selection from these poems has recently appeared in the columns of a local West- morland paper, and has been reprinted in a cheap form, by Mr. George Middleton, Ambleside, so that "Aid Hoggart's" effusions may now become better known. The following is one of the best of the pastoral pieces, and appears to be fairly supplied with the " grammar, metre, sense, and decency," which Steevens failed to discern in any of the poems: — CA Song.) MOPSUS AND MARINA. Mop. — Come, Marina, let's away, Whilst the bride and bridegroom stay. Fy for shame ! are maids so long Finning of their headgear on ? Dost not see, None but we 'Mongst the swains are left unready ? Come make haste ! The bride is past — FfoUow nowe and I will lead thee. Mar. — Oh, my loving Mopsus, on, I am ready — all is done ; Ffrom my head e'en to my ffoot, I am ffitted each way to 't. Busk't so gaye, In gowne of graye, Best that all our flocks can render ; Hatt of straw, Platted through, Cherry lip, and middle slender. 207 William Hogarth Mop.—kxA I think you shall not find Mopsus any whitt behind; For he loves as brave to goe As most part of shepherds doe; Cap of browne, Bottle crowne; This tight leg so rare at dancing ; Foot in pump, So light to jump, When we shepherds fall a prancing. Mar. — But, I feare — Mop — what dost feare? Mar. — Crowd, the fiddler, is nott here; And my foot delighted is With no stroke so well as his. Mop. — If not he. There will be Drone, the pyper, that will trounce it. Mar. — But if Crowd Strike aloud. Lord, methinks how I could bounce it. Mop. — Bounce it. Mall! I know thou will, Well I wott that thou hast skill; And I know that there thon'lt find Measures slow to please thy mind; Roundelayes, Irish Hayes, Cogs and rongs, and Peggy Ramsay; Spaneleto, The Veneto, John, come kiss me, Wilson's Fancy. Mar. — But of all there's none so sprightly To my ears as " Touch me lightly," 'Tis that which doth most blithely move, "Tis that which most we shepherds love. ' 208 Appendix IV. There, there, there! Aye to a hayre; O, Tim Crowd, methinks I heare theel Young or old. Ne'er could hold. All must trip if they come near thee! Here the editor breaks off with the remark " that there are two more stanzas of this lively pastoral, but they become rather too lively to suit the fastidious taste of modern readers." Index. (The items quoted axs titles of pictures by Hogarth.) Academy, English, of Arts, pro- ject of, 65 f Royal, foundation of, 4, 181 Hogarth's picture in, 48 St. Martin's, 29, 48, 67 Sir J. Thornhill's, 30, 48 Adam and Eve Gardens, 87 " Aid Hoggart," Literary Remains of, 206 All Souls' College, Oxford, Fuller's picture in, 38 Analysis of Beauty, 106, 129 "Arrest," 95, 168 "Ascension," 33, 41, 59 Barry, James, i "Bathos," 182 "Battle of the Pictures," 181 Beer Street, 136 f Beggar's Opera, 120 "Bench," 129 Berenstat, Cuzzoni, and Senesino, 121 Besant, Sir Walter, referred to, 73, 85. 94, 97, 98, loi Eingley, Lady, 157 Black and White, 108 "Boys Peeping at Nature," 77, 126 Brauwer, 176 Bridewell, interior of, 143 British Gallery, Hogarth's pictures in. 35 British Museum, Print Room,/(U- sim Burlington, Earl of, 69 "Burlington Gate," 24, 26, 122 " Burning of the Kumps at Temple Bar," 113 f Bute and Pitt, 124 Bysshe's Art of English Poetry, 159 "Calais Gate," 47, 62 f Caldecott, Randolph, 153, 173 Callot, Jacques, Ii5f Canaletto, 83 "Canvassing for Votes," 102, 166, 171 Carestini, 158 Carlyle, Thomas, on eighteenth century, referred to, 71 Ceiling paintings — Oxford, Hamp- ton Court, Greenwich, 38, 39 " Chairing of the Members," 167 Chandos, Duke of, 69 Characterisation, 170 f "Characters and Caricaturas," 129, 170, 172 Charing Cross, 87 211 William Hogarth Charteris, Colonel, 142 Cheselden, 56 Chiaroscuro, 173 Chiswick, 105 Churchill, Charles, and Hogarth, 70 Classification of prints, 109 "Cock Pit," 158 Coffee houses, 93 Cole, Dr. W., 53 "Columbus Breaking the Egg," 129 Constable, John, 84, 182 "Conversation Pieces," 30, 42, 179 Copyright Act, Hogarth and, 28 "Coram, Captain," 33, 73, 163, I7S Covent Garden, 91, 201 " Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism," 74, 122 f Crowd, a good, 134 Didactic pieces, 130 Dilke, Lady, Art in the Modern State, referred to, 66 "Distressed Poet," 159 Dobson, Austin, William Hogarth, referred to, 22, 28, 33, 34, 48, SO, 60, 93, 171, 176, 178 William, 175 Dodington, G. Bubb, 167 Dubois, fencing-master, 148 Eighteenth century, character- istics of, 3, 71 ff "Election Entertainment," 165 "Election" series, 118, 130, 141, 165 Engraved plates, 108 Engraving on copper, 14, 15 Engraving, French, 14 "Enraged Musician," 88, 96, 159, 171 "Enthusiasm Delineated," 74, 122 f Essex, dancing-master, 148 "Evening," 104, 165 Extravagance in religion, 1 22 Farinelli, 121, 157 Fielding and Cowper, 171 Figg, Prizefighter, 148, 161 "Finis," 182 " Five Orders of Periwigs," 129, 172 Flaxman, 173 "Folkes, Martin,'' 174 Foundling Hospital, 41, 52, 65, 79. 163, 17s " Four Stages of Cruelty," 75, 78, 130, 136 " Four Times of the Day," 87, 96, IS9. 171 Freke, Mr. John, S7 Gamble, Ellis, 13, 29 his shop card, 60 Garrick, David, 26 his epitaph on Hogarth, 107 as Richard III., 59 Gay, referred to, 88, 96, 98, 1 20 Genre pictures, 177 George II. and the "March of the Guards," 163 Gibson, Dr. Craig, 9, 206 "Gin Lane," 130, 136, 138 Golden Ass, The, of Apuleius, 115 Golden Head, and Van Dyke, 93 Gonson, Sir John, his likeness of, 58. 143 "Good Samaritan," 32, 41 Grand Style, the, 37 f, 43 f Index Gray, 56 Guy, Thomas, 73 Hals, 176 f Harleian Miscellany, "Art of Living in London," referred to, 102 "Harlot's Progress," 18, 46, 58, 60, 62, 7S, 141 f, MS fr Haydon, 44 Highgate Hill, 161 Historical painting, the " Grand Style," 43 f Hogarth, Mary and Ann, 1 1 ; their shop card, 11, 12 Hogarth, Richard, his Dispuia- tionts Grammaiicales, 8; his death, 24 n Hogarth William, aliens, dislike of, 61, 66 fr . Analysis of Bemity, 67 V apprenticed to silver-plate engraver, 13 birth of, 7-12 British School, his place in, 3f, 34f, 180 caricaturist, not a, 171 characteristics, 47 f, 61, 68, . 73 chiaroscuro, his, 173 Chiswick, and, 105 f "Comedy" plates, 18 f, 25 "Conversation Pieces," 30, 33. 42, 179 • copper engraver, 14 f, 20, 21, 32 f, 34 Copyright Act, and, 28 cruelty to animals, and, 78 death, 107 declining health, 107 didactic plates, 75 f Dutch painters, compared with, 178 Hogarth, earliest plates, 22, 24 early y^ars, 8, 11, 12, 21 epitaph by Garrick, 107 family, his, 7, 11, 24 n frontispieces to books, 21, 22 funeral at Chiswick, 107 handling unequal, 174 history painter, as, 31 f insularity, his, 180 literary style, his, 67 f Londoner, born and bred, 81 London, in his time, 81 f, 201 f marriage, 30 n, 45 monumental canvases, 39 f morality of, 3, 51 moral and satirical plates, 19, 24.25 moral influence of, 77 objectivity, his, 180 painter, as, 20, 29 f, 32 f, 174 ff patriotism of, 2 perspective, his, 179 • philanthropy, and, 73, 79 portraits by him, 2, 31, 33, 41 f, 70, 169 f portraits of himself, 48, 49 prices of his works, 58 f publisher, his own, 24, 28 pugnacity, his, 61 quarrels on behalf of friends, 68 f Raphael's cartoons, and, 168 Reynolds, and, 41 f roquelaure, his scarlet, 50, 97 self-consciousness, his, 183 sergeant-painter, 59 shop cards, II, 22 sky-blue coat, his, I, 97 South Lambeth, and, 103 technical dexterity, S technical memory, 16, 18 213 William Hogarth Hogarth, thumb-nail sketches, i6 versatility, his^ 20 Wesleyanism, and, 74, 123 f Hoggart, Thomas, 9 ; Literary Remains of, 206 " Honeymoon, The," or " Shortly after Marriage," 155 Howard, John, 73 Hudibras, III f " Idle Apprentice Executed," 96 Illustrations of books, ill " Industry and Idleness," 130 f Insularity of Hogarth, 181 " Invasion," 64 Ireland, John, Hogarth Illustrated, referred to, passim Samuel, Graphic Illustra- tions, referred to, 94, 199 James, William, his London scenes, 83 Jervas, 42 Joanne, Guides, France, Le Nord, 62 n Jones, Inigo, his water-gate, 83 Keene, Charles, 174 Kensington Palace, Wm, James's pictures in, 83 Kent, William, architect, 27, 68, 69, 120 King, Dr. Arnold, 55 King's Head Tavern, 87 Kirby's Perspective, 129 " Kitty Fisher," Reynolds's, 102 Lamb, Charles, in The Reflector, 153" " Large Masquerade Ticket,'' I2i Larwood and Hotton's The History of Signboards, referred to, 95 " Laughing Audience," 127 f, 172 Law, Ernest, Mr., Historical Cata- logue of Pictures in Hampton Court Palace, referred to, 83 f Lawrence, Sir Thomas, "Satan calling up his Legions," 44 Leicester Fields, 93, 20l " Leo X. with his Cardinals," 175 Lewis, Mary, and George Steevens, 1^"^, passim Lincoln's Inn, paintings in, 33, 41 Line and composition, 173 "Literary" plates, 119, 120 London in eighteenth century, 83 f, 201 f costumes, 97 cries, 96 new thoroughfares in, 186 f "Lottery," 117 ff "Lovat," Simon, Lord, portrait of, 59, 60, 169 f Maitland, History of London, referred to, 72 Malcolm, Anecdotes of Manners and Customs of London during the Eighteenth Century, referred to, 80 " March of the Guards to Finch- ley," 87, 96, 102, 130, 160, 162 "Marriage a la Mode," 18, 58, 59. 97. 103, 130, 141 f, 146, 154 f, 170 f, 178 f "Masquerades and Operas," n6, 119 May, Phil, 153, 174 Metsu, 177 Middle-class houses, 92 "Midnight Modern Conversa- tion," 158 Miniature painting, British school, 42 f Modelling and chiaroscuro, 173 !I4 Index "Morning," 91, 103, 165, 171 "Moses before Pharaoh's Daugh- ter," 33, 41 Mother Needham, 142 Mather, Richard, The History of Modem Painting referred to, 177 " Mystery of Masonry,'' 122 National Gallery, Hogarth's paintings in, 30, 33, 36, 47, 48, S3, 62, 121, 154, 176, 178 f National Gallery, Samuel Scott's paintings in, 84 National Portrait Gallery, Ho- garth's paintings in, 31, 49, 59, 170 Nelly O'Brien, Reynolds's, 102 "New Metamorphosis," 115 Nichols, John, Biographical Anec- dotes, referred to, passim; Genuine Works of Hogarth, referred to, 31, 46, 52, 56, 62 Nichols, John Bower, Anecdotes of William Hogarth, referred to, passim Nicholson and Burn, History and Antiquities of the Counties of Westmorland and Cumberland, referred to, 7 "Night," 96, 16s Noblemen's houses, disappearance of, 8s Nonconformity in the eighteenth century, 74 " Noon," 89, 9S, 164 Northcote, Supplement to Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds, referred , to, 35 Notes and Queries, referred to, 12, III, 113 Novels, eighteenth century, loi Old Marylebone Church, isi, 202 Old Newington Church, 161 "Oratorio," or "A Chorus of Singers," 129 Oxford Street, 88 "Paul before Felix," 33, 41, S9, 127 Peel Collection, 178 Pepys, 100 Pleasure gardens, 97 Political pieces, 124 "Polling," 166 " Pool of Bethesda,'' 32, 40, %i " Pope Julius II.," Raphael's, 173 Portrait-painting, 169 f; British School of, 42 f "'Prentice" series, 74, 7S " Procession of the Skimmington," 113 f Professional beauties, 102 "Rake's Progress," 18, s8, 75, 95, 103, 141, 146 f, 168 Ralph, A Critical Refview of Public Buildings, referred to, 92 Raphael, 37, I7S. 181 Reed, Isaac, referred to, 194 Regent Street, 86 Rembrandt, 173 f Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 178 and historical painting, 44 and Hogarth, 4, 35, I7S Rich, theatrical manager, 152 " Rich's Triumphant Entry," 91 Riley, 42 Riverside London, 83 "Roman Military Punishments," "5 Rose Tavern, Drury Lane, 149 Roubiliac, sculptor, 49 William Hogarth Rouquet, Jean, 199 Royal Academy, foundation of, 4, 65 f, 181 Rubens, 180 Sadler's Wells, 104 St. Bartholomew's Hospital, Ho- garth's paintings in, 32, 40, 41 St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, Ho- garth's paintings in, 33, 41 Scott, Samuel, marine painter, 55, 84 " Setting Forth," 113 Shipway, Colonel, 106 Shop cards, etc., II, 60, no signs, 94 " Shrimp Girl," 33, 34 n, 176 " Sigismunda," 33, 36, 106 Silver plate, Georgian, 13 "Sleeping Congregation," 74, 124 Smith, J. T., Nolkkens and his Times, referred to, I, 2, 13, 17, 50, 89, 90 Mr. Wood, referred to, in Soane Museum, Hogarth's pictures in, 78, 102, 146 n, 150, 165 Social studies, list of, 140 Soho, 90, 201 South Sea Bubble, 116 f "South Sea Scheme," iiS f "Southwark Fair," 127 f, 130, 141, 160, 171 Spas and wells, 104 f "Stage Coach," or a "Country Inn Yard," 159 Steen, Jan, 177 Steevens, George, passim Stephens, F. G., his Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, referred to, passim Streater, Robert, 39, 180 " Strode Family," 179 "Strolling Actresses," 130, 160 f, 182 Stuart, "Athenian," 2, 129, 172 "Subscription Tickets," 126 Swift, Dean, and Hogarth, 69 "Taste," "Man of Taste," see "Burlington Gate" "Taste in High Life," 97 "Taste of the Town," see " Bur- lington Gate" Taverns and bagnios, 103 Teniers, 177 Terborch, 177 Thames waterway, the loss of, 82 f Thornhill, Jane (Mrs. Hogarth), 4S. 46. 54. 58 Lady, 46 Sir James, 30, 39, 45, 46 n, 67, 68, 180 "Tiddy Doll," 135 "Time Smoking a Picture," 181 " Times, The," 106, 125 Trump, Hogarth's dog, 48, 49, 52 Trusler, Rev. John, 75 Hogarih Moralised, referred to, 198 Van Dyck, 42, 175, 180 Vauxhall, lOO, 114 Velasquez, 175 Verrio, 39, 180 "View on the Thames," 83 "Visit to the Lawyer," 113 "Visit to Sidrophel," 113 Walker, Adam, 9, 206 Walker, portrait-painter, 42 Walpole, Horace, 56 Anecdotes of Painting, re- ferred to, 200 216 Index Walpole, on Hogarth, 34, 125 V' Waterloo Bridge, Opening of," 84 Wesley, 123, 125, 134 West, Benjamin, 50 Wheatley, London Past and Pre- ■ sent, referred to, 85, 91 Whistler, 174 "White's," 151 f Whitefield, 123, 125 "Who'lRide?"u6 Wilkes, John, Hogarth's portrait of, 2, 60, 106 f, 125, 169 f quarrel with, 70 Wright, John Michael, 42, 43, 180 Wroth, Warwick, London Pleasure Gardens of Eighteenth Century, referred to, 98, 99, 100, loi Young person, the unattached, lOI «hej;^ Y^^'V I