HOGARTH’S VANITY.
Hogarth displayed no little vanity regarding his pretensions as a portrait-painter. One day, when dining at Dr. Cheselden’s, he was told that John Freke, surgeon of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, had asserted in Dick’s coffee-house, that Greene was as eminent in composition as Handel. “That fellow, Freke,” cried Hogarth, “is always shooting his bolt absurdly, one way or another. Handel is a giant in music, Greene only a light Florimel-kind of composer.” “Ay, but,” said the other, “Freke declared you were as good a portrait-painter as Vandyke.” “There he was in the right,” quoth Hogarth; “and so I am, give me but my time, and let me choose my subject.”
Writing of himself, Hogarth says:—“The portrait which I painted with most pleasure, and in which I particularly wished to excel, was that of Captain Coram, for the Foundling Hospital;” and he adds, in allusion to his detraction as a portrait-painter, “If I am so wretched an artist as my enemies assert, it is somewhat strange that this, which was one of the first I painted the size of life, should stand the test of twenty years’ competition, and be generally thought the best portrait in the place, notwithstanding the first painters in the kingdom exerted all their talents to vie with it.”