Hogarth

MASTERPIECES IN COLOUR EDITED BY—T. LEMAN HARE
HOGARTH (1697—1764)
PLATE I.—THE SHRIMP GIRL. (In the National Gallery, London)
This brilliant, impressionist sketch, done long before the era of impressionism, is something of a marvel. “The Shrimp Girl” cries out from Hogarth’s works, a tour de force , done without premeditation, in some happy hour when the unerring hand unerringly followed the quick eye.
BY C. LEWIS HIND
ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR
IN SEMPITERNUM.
LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.
The plates are printed by Bemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and London The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh

The auction was proceeding leisurely and without excitement. It was an “off day.” I was present because these pictures of the Early British School included a “Conversation Piece” ascribed to Hogarth, and a medley of prints after him, worn impressions, the vigour gone, merely the skeletons of his bustling designs remaining. They fetched trivial prices: they were not the real thing. And there was little demand for the portraits by half-forgotten limners of the period, portraits of dull gentlemen in eighteenth-century costume, examples of wooden Thomas Hudson, famous as the master of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and of such mediocrities as Knapton and Shackleton. Yet they evoked a sort of personal historical interest, recreating, as portrait after portrait passed before our eyes, the level highway of art of those days before Hogarth delivered it from the foreign thraldom.
Tranquilly I contemplated the procession of lifeless portraits, noting with amusement the contrast between the grimy but very real hands of the attendant who supported the canvases upon the easel, and the painted hands in the pictures. The attendant’s body was hidden by the canvas, but his hands appeared on either side of the frame clutching it. I indicated the contrast to my companion, a connoisseur, but he saw no humour in the comparison. He was almost sulky. A decorative Francis Cotes, and a luminous Richard Wilson, that he hoped to acquire for a few pounds, had gone into the fifties. He indignantly refused to make a bid for the “Conversation Piece” ascribed to Hogarth. “What a period! what an outlook!” he cried. “William Kent the arbiter of taste, portraits with the clothes done by drapery men. Conversation Pieces with stupid gentlemen and stupid ladies doing nothing stupidly, and Hogarth flooding the town with his dreadful moralities. Pah!” He shook himself, emitted an exclamation of disgust that made the auctioneer glance quickly in his direction, and then said brusquely, “What do you think of Matisse?”