[II]
HOGARTH AS DELIVERER

I refused absolutely to consider Matisse. Let all thought of Matisse be banished. The subject of this little book is Hogarth, and in studying him or any other artist, I entirely disagree with my friend, the connoisseur, that one must disregard his period, ignore his birth-date, and consider only his achievement. Hogarth was born in 1697, and being an original he turned his back upon convention and faced realities. But although he reproduced, with consistent forcefulness, the life of his day, now and again he suffered himself to be influenced by convention. Did not he write: “I entertained some hopes of succeeding in what the puffers in books call the first style of history painting: so that without having a stroke of this grand business before, I quitted small portraits and familiar conversations, and with a smile at my own temerity commenced history painting, and on a great staircase at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital painted the Scripture stories, ‘The Pool of Bethesda’ and ‘The Good Samaritan,’ with figures seven feet high.” These are his failures, because he was looking not at life, but at picture-land. A failure, too, was the altar-piece for St. Mary Redcliffe at Bristol, painted as late as 1756, when he was fifty-nine. For this huge altar-piece, in three compartments, he received five hundred and twenty-five pounds. Removed in 1858 to the Bristol Fine Arts Academy, this immense triptych was last year sent to London for sale, which seems unkind, if not cruel, to the memory of Hogarth. He painted these “grand manner” canvases because, as he says, “I was unwilling to sink into a portrait manufacturer.” Had Hogarth succeeded in “the first style of history painting,” had he continued in that facile convention, he would never have been hailed as the Father of English Painting, and Sir Walter Armstrong would assuredly never have written in his survey of “Art in Great Britain and Ireland” these words: “At the end of the seventeenth century fortune sent a deliverer.”

A deliverer from what? From the thraldom of foreign artists, and artists of foreign extraction, and from the monotonous level of mediocrity into which British art had sunk after the “Kneller tyranny.” Perhaps two parallel lists of portrait painters will be the best exemplification, one beginning with Holbein, who was born just two hundred years before Hogarth, the other with Hogarth—the deliverer. Many minor names are, of course, omitted.

BEFORE HOGARTHENTER HOGARTH
Holbein1497-1543Hogarth1697-1764
Bettes?1530-1573Hudson1701-1779
Jonson1593-1664Ramsay1713-1784
Van Dyck1599-1641Reynolds1723-1792
Dobson?1600-1658Cotes1725-1770
Walker1610-1646Gainsborough1727-1788
Lely1618-1680Romney1734-1802
Mary Beale1632-1697Raeburn1756-1823
Kneller1646-1723Hoppner?1758-1810
Richardson1665-1745Opie1761-1801
Thornhill1675-1734Lawrence1769-1830
Vanloo1684-1745

In pre-Hogarthian days first Holbein and later Van Dyck dominated British art, Van Dyck’s being by far the stronger influence. Indeed it has lasted until to-day. Dobson, a sterling painter, was a pupil of Van Dyck’s. Lely was born at Soest near Utrecht, Kneller at Lübeck, and Vanloo at Aix. The residuum of native-born painters is not very important, and although one might add a score of names to those included in the pre-Hogarthian list, it is obvious that before the day of the “sturdy little satirist,” with his hatred of all things foreign, including the “black old masters,” and his love of all things English, except William Kent and his circle, and such folk as happened to annoy him, art in England had no independent growth. It certainly was not racial, and it was not characteristic in any way of the English temperament or the English vision. After Hogarth, excluding his minor contemporaries, Hudson, Ramsay, and Cotes, the art of Great Britain was illumined by the light of genius, native born, which began with Reynolds and Gainsborough, and spread out in varying and decreasing splendour down to the prettinesses of Lawrence.

Had Hogarth any influence? In one way he had. He was the founder of the anecdotic school. But, in the eighteenth century, he was regarded as a satirist, as a maker of “moral pieces,” and, with a few exceptions, he won small esteem as a painter. Sir Joshua hardly mentions him, although they both lived for years in Leicester Fields, and Sir Joshua must have known his portraits well, and must often have seen the little man, twenty-six years his senior, walking within the enclosure “in a scarlet roquelaure or ‘rockelo,’ with his hat cocked and stuck on one side, much in the manner of the Great Frederick of Prussia.”

PLATE III.—MISS FENTON
(In the National Gallery, London)

Here we have the famous actress, Miss Lavinia Fenton, as “Polly Peachum” in the “Beggar’s Opera.” Born in 1708, she married, as his second wife, Charles Paulet, third Duke of Bolton: she died in 1760. The “Beggar’s Opera” was produced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1728.