“The Lady’s Last Stake” was a commission from Lord Charlemont. In 1757, in one of his periodical fits of vexation, Hogarth said he would “employ the rest of his time in portrait painting,” but three years afterwards we find him, in weathercock mood, “determined to quit the pencil for the graver.” Lord Charlemont begged him, before he “bade a final adieu to the pencil,” to paint him one picture. The result was this morality of the handsome, wicked officer, and the young and virtuous married lady. Mrs. Thrale was wont to allege that she sat for the fair gambler.
“The Stay Maker” should hang beside Watteau’s “Gersaint’s Sign,” each a representation of a costumier’s shop, each a masterpiece, but as it is impossible to bring together these two works by these two geniuses who were contemporaries, and who brought about the rebirth of art in France and England, I am quite content that “The Stay Maker” should remain where it is, helping to decorate an exquisite room in Mr. Edmund Davis’s house. There is only one other picture on the wall—a Gainsborough portrait. “The Stay Maker” is a sketch, almost in monochrome, showing a man-milliner measuring a lady, while another mondaine kisses a baby fondly, but not on its chubby face. This little picture (thirty-five by twenty-seven inches) is full of life and gaiety, and is as delicate in its humour as “The Enraged Musician” at Oxford is forcible.
When I first saw the “George II. and his Family” at the Dublin National Gallery, I had a thrill similar to that I experienced when I first saw “Miss Rich.” It is an unfinished sketch, made when Hogarth was Sergeant Painter. Looking at it, again we wonder what heights this man might have reached had he received the encouragement that is given to eminent painters of our day. But, as it was, in spite of everything, Hogarth boxed the compass, and when he wrote “genius is nothing but labour and diligence,” the “ingenious Mr. Hogarth,” as Fielding called him, did not take into account that something else (which is genius) that was born in him, and that he struggled to express, and succeeded in expressing so triumphantly. And the end of all was “The Bathos,” his last design, humorous, cynical, his finis, inscribed to his old enemies, “the dealers in dark pictures.” Game to the end was William Hogarth!
[VI]
SOME PICTURES IN NATIONAL COLLECTIONS
If it interests you to study the variety of Hogarth’s achievement in paint, his ladder-like progress, now up, now down, visit the Hogarth Room at the National Gallery and turn from the prim and meticulous handling of “A Family Group” (No. 1153) to the dash and brilliancy of his “Sister” (No. 1663); from “Sigismonda Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo,” painted late in life, in one of his reactionary, “grand manner” moods, a commission that the patron, Sir Richard Grosvenor, refused to take; turn from academic, tear-sprinkled Sigismonda to the sparkle and impulse of “The Shrimp Girl.” I have already expressed my admiration for this amazing sketch, and Sir Walter Armstrong, in his technical analysis of the painting of “Hogarth’s Sister,” has said all there is to say on the vivacious and original way in which Hogarth handled this sympathetic subject, and the skill with which he has, as it were, substituted light and colour for paint. Sir Walter notes that the system of colour is that followed by Eugene Delacroix a century later, who was under the impression that he was the innovator; that “the high lights and the deep shadows are in each case two primaries, which unite to form a half tone. The dress which produces the effect of yellow is yellow in the high lights, red in the deepest shadows, and orange in the transitions; so with the scarf, the three tints of which are yellow, green, and blue.”
PLATE VII.—SIMON FRASER, LORD LOVAT, 1666-1747
(In the National Portrait Gallery, London)
Here is the chief of the Fraser clan (patriot or traitor, which you like), a study in reds, browns, corpulency and craftiness, in the act of narrating some of his adventures, or perhaps detailing the various Highland clans on his fingers. Lord Lovat was executed for high treason. Hogarth journeyed to St. Albans to get “a fair view of his Lordship before he was locked up.”
In no other painting of Hogarth’s that I have seen does he make this striking use of primaries and complementaries. He adopted a different technique for the robust and cheerful portrait of “Miss Lavinia Fenton” (who became Duchess of Bolton) as “Polly Peachum” in the “Beggar’s Opera,” and also for the lively representation of a scene from the opera which he saw at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1723. This vivacious development of the Conversation Piece genre hangs close to “Hogarth’s Sister,” and to the right is the group of his “Servants”—six heads rather less than life size, one of the most quietly beautiful renderings of character, seen with the eyes of affection, with which master has ever immortalised his dependents. After this, the “Calais Gate,” or “The Roast Beef of Old England,” a record of his collision with the Calais authorities, seems grotesque and gratuitously ugly in spite of its Hogarthian brio and beautiful colour. The carrion crow on the top of the gate is an example of his ingenuity in extricating himself from a difficulty. The picture, when finished, fell down, and a nail ran through the cross above the gate. Failing to conceal the rent, Hogarth substituted for the cross a crow, and was quite pleased. In the engraving the cross appears in its rightful place. Carrion crow or cross! It was all one to this capable, confident, eighteenth-century Britisher, who would as lief paint a murderess in the condemned cell as a miss in yellow and laces, a Teniers-like “Distressed Poet” in a garret as a Velazquez-like “Scene from The Indian Emperor,” a “Right Reverend Father in God” as the portrait of Quin the actor, Garrick’s portly rival, in full-bottomed grey wig, lace ruffle, and brown coat richly frogged with gold. There can be no mistake as to the identity. The portrait is inscribed “Mr. Quin.” Note the eloquent eye and the voluble mouth of this hearty eighteenth-century mummer.