And of all self-portraits is there one more self-revealing than “Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse”? He was then sixty-one. With his short-cropped grey hair he looks like a pugilist, and a pugilist he might have been had not Nature, so casual, so inexplicable in her gifts, chosen to plant the seeds of real artistic genius in the soul of belligerent, brave, preposterously British William Hogarth.
[VII]
THE SOANE MUSEUM AND FOUNDLING HOSPITAL
The “Picture Room” of the Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, that hushed, dim, small apartment, lighted by a lantern light, approached by a glazed door from the crowded corridor of this dignified house, crowded to excess with works of art collected by Sir John Soane (1753-1837), is virtually a Hogarth Room. You enter, and facing you, hung frame to frame, are the eight paintings illustrating “The Rake’s Progress,” purchased by Sir John Soane in 1802 for five hundred and seventy guineas. You turn to the left and your eyes alight upon Nos. 1 and 2 of the “Four Prints of an Election,” called “The Entertainment,” and “The Canvassing for Votes”; you turn to the right and there are the second pair, “The Polling,” and “The Chairing of the Member.”
Reams have been written about these pictures. I will be reticent—space compels it—and content myself with quoting one word, the word “matchless,” used by Charles Lamb to describe the first of the Election series. There are passages of beauty in all the scenes, as in “The Rake’s Progress,” but I find so large a meal as twelve “pictur’d morals,” hustling each other, a little difficult to digest. The Hogarth surfeit, a well-known ailment, always assails me in this lantern-lighted room of the Soane Museum. Perhaps it is the obsession of the “movable planes.” Opening at a touch, the walls slide away and disclose more, more, and more works of art. But I do not suffer from Hogarth surfeit at the Foundling Hospital, over which his fatherly spirit ever seems to brood.
The eighteenth century and the twentieth meet at the Foundling Hospital; the art of Hogarth, the art of his contemporaries, of young Mr. Joshua Reynolds, and the artless lives of the foundlings who patter the note of a past day in revivified Bloomsbury.
You will seek in vain for modernity at the Foundling Hospital. A reproduction of a popular picture of our day called “For Ever and Ever, Amen,” was the only example of a modern work of art in the playroom of the little girl foundlings at the Foundling Hospital where I found myself one Sunday.
Of course the little girls understood the picture. Their dawning minds can grasp a simple representation of the human gamut of love, loyalty, and grief from childhood to age. Not for them is Hogarth’s forcible, chaotic, amazingly clever “March to Finchley,” that hangs in one of the rooms.
But the little girls understand Hogarth’s bold and picturesque “Captain Coram” displayed in the place of honour, even though the gallant and charitable seaman may frighten them on darkening evenings by his very life-likeness, Hogarth’s great gift.
