IX. HOGARTH'S SIGISMUNDA.
TOWARD the close of the last century, the regular attendants upon the ministrations of the Rev. James Trebeck in the picturesque old church at the end of Chiswick Mall, must often have witnessed the arrival of a well-known member of the congregation. Year after year had been wheeled, in a Bath chair, from a little villa under the wing of the Duke of Devonshire's mansion hard by, a stately old lady between seventy and eighty years of age, whose habitual costume was a silk sacque, a raised head-dress, and a black calash. Leaning heavily upon her crutched cane, and aided by the arm of a portly female relative in similar attire, she would make her way slowly and with much dignity up the nave, being generally preceded by a bent and white-haired man-servant, who, after carrying the prayer-books into the pew, and carefully closing the door upon his mistress and her companion, would himself retire to a remoter part of the building. From the frequenters of the place, the little procession attracted no more notice than any other recognized ceremonial, of which the intermission would alone have been remarkable; but it seldom failed to excite the curiosity of those wayfarers who, under the third George, already sought reverently, along the pleasant riverside, for that house in Mawson's Buildings where the great Mr. Pope wrote part of his 'Iliad,' or for the garden of Richard, Earl of Burlington, where idle John Gay gorged himself with apricots and peaches. They would be told that the elder lady was the widow of the famous painter, William Hogarth, who lay buried under the teacaddy-like tomb in the neighbouring churchyard; that her companion was her cousin, Mary Lewis, in whose arms he died; and that the old servant's name was Samuel. For five and twenty years Mrs. Hogarth survived her husband, during all of which time she faithfully cherished his memory. Those who visited her at her Chiswick home (for she had another in Leicester Fields) would recall with what tenacity she was wont to combat the view that he was a mere maker of caricatura, or, at best, 'a writer of comedy with the pencil,' as Mr. Horace Walpole (whose overcritical book she had not even condescended to acknowledge) had thought fit to designate him. It was as a painter pure and simple, as a rival of the Guidos and Correggios, that she mainly valued her William. 'They said he could not colour!' she would cry, pointing, it may be, as a protest against the words, to the brilliant sketch of the 'Shrimp Girl,' now in the National Gallery, but then upon her walls. Or, turning from his merits to his memory, she would throw a shawl about her handsome head and, stepping out under the over-hanging bay-window into the old three-cornered garden with its filbert avenue and its great mulberry tree, would exhibit the little mural tablet which Hogarth had himself scratched with a nail, in remembrance of a favourite bullfinch. 'Alass poor Dick,' ran the faint-lined inscription, not without characteristic revelation of the sculptor's faulty spelling. And if she happened to be in one of the more confidential moods of old age, she would perhaps take from a drawer that very No. 17 of the 'North Briton,' which she afterwards gave to Ireland, and which her husband, she would tell you, had carried about in his pocket for days to show to sympathetic friends. 'The supposed author of the Analysis of beauty!'—she would indignantly exclaim, quoting from the opening lines of Wilkes's nefarious print, headed with its rude woodcut parody of Hogarth's portrait in 'Calais Gate,' * and then, turning the blunt-lettered page, she would point silently to the passages relating to the much-abused 'Sigismunda,' concerning which, if her hearers were still judiciously inquisitive, they would, in all probability, receive a gracious invitation to test the truth of the libel by inspecting that masterpiece itself at its home in her London house.
* The original No. 17 of the 'North Briton,' dated Saturday,
September 25, 1762, had no portrait. The portrait was added
to a reprint of Wilkes's article issued May 21, 1763, or
immediately after the appearance of Hogarth's etching of
Wilkes. Since the above paper was first published in
America, this interesting relic of Hogarth has once more
come to light. In April, 1845, it was sold with Mr. H. P.
Standly's collection. At the sale, in February, 1892, of Dr.
J. R. Joly's Hogarth prints and books, it passed (with some
of the Standly correspondence) to Mr. James Tregaskis, the
well-known bookseller at the 'Caxton Head' in Holborn, from
whom it was acquired by the present writer. By November,
1789, however, all this had become 'portion and parcel' of
the irrevocable past.
In that month Mrs. Hogarth had been laid beside her mother and her husband under the tomb in Chiswick churchyard; the little 'country box' had passed to Mary Lewis; and—by direction of the same lady—the contents of the 'Golden Head' in Leicester Fields were shortly afterwards (April, 1790) announced for sale. In the Print Room at the British Museum (where is also the original manuscript of the famous 'Five Days' Tour' of 1732) is a copy of the auctioneer's catalogue, which once belonged to George Steevens. It is not a document of many pages. At Mrs. Hogarth's death, her income from the prints, exclusive property in which had been secured to her in 1767 by special Act of Parliament, had greatly fallen off; and though she had received the further aid of a small pension from the Royal Academy, it is to be presumed that her means were considerably straitened. It is known, too, that there had been lodgers at the 'Golden Head,' one being the engraver Richard Livesay, another the strange Ossianic enthusiast and friend of Fuseli, Alexander Runciman; and obviously nothing but 'strong necessity' could justify the reception of lodgers. These circumstances must explain the slender contents of Mr. Auctioneer Greenwood's little pamphlet. Many of the treasures of William Hogarth's household had already become the prey of the collector, or had passed to admiring friends; and what remained to be finally dispersed under the hammer practically consisted of family relics. There was Hogarth's own likeness of himself and his dog, soon to become the property of Mr. Angerstein, from whom it passed to the National Gallery; there was another whole-length of painting of him; there was Roubiliac's clever terra cotta; there was a cast of the faithful Trump, and one of Hogarth's hand; there were the portraits of his sisters Mary and Ann, which now belong to Mr. R. C. Nichols. Other items were a set of 'twelve Delft ware plates,' painted with the signs of the zodiac by Sir James Thornhill; portraits of Sir James and his wife; of Mrs. Hogarth herself; of Hogarth's six servants; and there were also numerous framed examples of his prints. * But the most important object in the sale was undoubtedly the famous 'Sigismunda.'
* By a piece of auction-room humour, 'The Bathos' appears as
'The Bathers.'
'Sigismunda Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo' is the full title of the picture in the National Gallery catalogue. As one looks at it now, asylumed safely, post tot discrimina, in Trafalgar Square, it is not so much its qualities as its story that it recalls. How much heartburning, how much bitterness, would have been saved to its sturdy little 'Author,' as he loved to style himself, if it had never been projected! He was an unparalleled pictorial satirist; he was, and still is, an unsurpassed story-teller upon canvas.
'In walks of Humour, in that cast of Style,
Which, probing to the quick, yet makes us smile;
In Comedy, thy nat'ral road to fame,
Nor let me call it by a meaner name,