Whatever private admiration Sir Joshua may have had for Hogarth as a painter, there are few signs of it in his public utterances. Was it because “our late excellent Hogarth imprudently, or rather presumptuously, attempted the great historical style”? But Hogarth had some praise from the President in the Fourteenth Discourse, delivered on December 10, 1788, twenty-four years after Hogarth’s death. He is accredited with “extraordinary talents,” with “successful attention to the ridicule of life,” with the “invention of a new species of dramatic painting.” Lamb, dear Lamb, took up the cudgels for Hogarth even as a historical painter, arguing that “they have expression of some sort or other in them. ‘The Child Moses before Pharaoh’s Daughter,’ for instance, which is more than can be said of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Repose in Egypt.’” Well, it does not matter either way. Neither Hogarth nor Sir Joshua live by their “excursions into the Holy Land.”
The point I wish to labour is that the admiration of Hogarth’s contemporaries was almost entirely for his “pictur’d morals,” not for his paintings. It was his engravings that made him known; few saw the paintings, and it was only when the paintings began to be studied long after his death, that his greatness was revealed. Selections of his works were brought together in 1814, 1817, and 1862. By the latter date connoisseurs acknowledged that Hogarth “was really a splendid painter.”
Who can be surprised that the “pictur’d moral” engravings were popular—“The Harlot’s Progress,” “The Rake’s Progress,” “Marriage à la Mode”? They were a new thing in British art. Here was the life of the day reproduced, accented stridently and humorously. The people were interested, bought the engravings, found their satire amusing, and remained unregenerate. The pirates copied them, Hogarth fought the pirates, and he found that the success of “these pictures on canvas similar to representations on the stage,” enabled him to meet the expenses of his family, which portraits and “Conversation Pieces” had failed to do. It was the engravings that were popular, that sold. The pictures themselves brought him little fame and little money. It was six years before the “Marriage à la Mode” series found a purchaser. In 1751, Mr. Lane of Hillingdon bought the set for one hundred and twenty pounds at the queer sale devised by Hogarth, one of the stipulations being that no dealers in pictures were to be admitted as bidders. There was no crush. Only three people were present at the sale—Hogarth, Dr. James Parsons, and Mr Lane, the buyer.
Connoisseurship in painting was at a low ebb in the first half of the eighteenth century. The old masters, the “old dark masters,” whom Hogarth attacked so vigorously, were supposed to have said the last word in painting. There was no national collection, and no display of pictures until Hogarth originated the exhibition at the Foundling Hospital in 1740 with the presentation to the institution of his “Captain Coram.” Between 1717 and 1735, when “The Rake’s Progress” appeared, Hogarth had issued a vast number of prints, and he continued to do so until the end of his life, closing the amazing series with “The Bathos,” done with cynical humour just before his death.
Walpole asserted that “as a painter Hogarth had but slender merit,” Churchill called him a “dauber,” and Wilkes spoke of his portraits as “almost beneath all criticism,” but these gentlemen were prejudiced. Lamb made the neat remark that we “read” his prints, and “look” at other pictures; Northcote said, “Hogarth has never been admitted to rank high as a painter;” but Walter Savage Landor atoned for these depreciations by proclaiming that “in his portraits he is as true as Gainsborough, as historical as Titian,” which is neither true nor good sense.
To-day, of course, everybody, with a few exceptions, extols Hogarth as a painter, and students of the manners of the eighteenth century continue to peer at his engravings.
Hogarth, of course, thought well of himself.
“That fellow Freke,” he said once, “is always shooting his bolt absurdly one way or another.”
“Ay,” remarked his companion, “but at the same time Mr. Freke declared you were as good a portrait-painter as Van Dyck.”