PLATE VIII.—PEG WOFFINGTON
(In Sir Edward Tennant’s Collection)
Delightful Peg, actress, daughter of a Dublin bricklayer, known in staid biographies as Margaret Woffington. “Her beauty and grace, her pretty singing and vivacious coquetry, and the exquisite art, especially of her male characters, carried all hearts by storm.” Here she is, not “dallying and dangerous” on a couch as in the version at the Garrick Club, but very charming, with a touch of primness that suits her. Note the daintiness of the flower in her bosom, the delicious colour of the dress, and the importance of the accent of the knot of black ribbon against the gleaming pearls. Oh yes! Hogarth knew his business.
Captain Coram is very much alive, “all there.” Another moment and he will start from his chair. But this founder of the hospital will not shout at the children. This big man had a big, kind heart. His life was a long whisper of love to the fatherless.
It was here, at the Foundling Hospital, that Hogarth was instrumental in forming the first public collection of pictures in this country. Long before the National Gallery was thought of, before the Royal Academy was born, this Foundling Hospital collection was one of the sights of London. It was the fashionable lounge in the reign of George II.; here was held the first exhibition of contemporary portraits. And Hogarth, a governor and guardian of the Foundling Hospital, originated it.
He started the collection by presenting this portrait of Captain Coram in 1740, and he wrote, some years later, that it is “the best portrait in the place, notwithstanding the first painters in the kingdom exerted all their talents to vie with it.” But “the first painters” were not a very mighty lot; they were Allan Ramsay, Cotes, Hudson, Shackleton, Wilson, Highmore, and a young man called Reynolds, who twenty years after Hogarth had given his “Captain Coram” presented his “Lord Dartmouth.” It is a pretty piece of delicate work, but Reynolds was not then in his prime, and I have a shrewd suspicion that when, in 1787, he produced his magnificent “Lord Heathfield,” great Sir Joshua had cast many a glance at Hogarth’s “Captain Coram,” painted forty-seven years before.
This is a problem for the elder foundlings. The mites are content with “For Ever and Ever, Amen.”
I watched them, after the long service in the chapel, silently and somewhat timorously enjoying their cold mutton and hot potatoes. Sullen rows and rows of them, all stamped by that sad something that characterises the homeless waif, something of degradation and the menace of the fight to come all uphill.
But as I mused sadly on this spectacle my eyes caught sight of a tablet on the wall, a list of many names of foundlings who had died for their country in the Boer War.
Well, the tears do start still sometimes. Think of that leap! Here a foundling by chance, later a hero by choice, one of that great brotherhood, equal in death, equally adored, of the privileged and the brave. “Dulce et decorum est——”
I am sure that Hogarth, of whom Dr Trusler wrote, “Extreme partiality for his native country was the leading trait of his character,” would approve that tablet, and so would Captain Coram.