“There he was in the right,” quoth Hogarth.
And Mrs. Hogarth thought well too of the painter quality in her “sturdy, outspoken, honest, obstinate, pugnacious little man,” who—one is glad to believe—once pummelled a fellow soundly for maltreating the beautiful drummeress who figures in “Southwark Fair.” In one of his “Eighteenth Century Vignettes,” Mr. Austin Dobson tells us that Mrs. Hogarth, who survived her husband twenty-five years, thought that his pictures had beautiful colour, and that he was more than a painter of morals.
Mrs. Hogarth had insight, or perhaps she remembered what the little man of genius must often have told her. He knew what he was worth, he knew the illuminating power of his light, and it was not his way to hide it under a bushel.
[III]
TWO BOOKS ABOUT HOGARTH
Tardily, perhaps, I mention Mr. Austin Dobson’s name. In writing of Hogarth and the vigorous part he played in the art life of the “worst-mannered” century, as it has been called, Mr. Dobson is as indispensable as a Blue Book to a politician. But unlike Blue Books, his writings are delightful. He is the eighteenth century, and his volume on William Hogarth is definitive. Originally published, I believe, in 1879, it has passed through several editions, being continuously improved and enlarged. One of its avatars was the stately and sumptuous art monograph of 1902, with some prefatory pages by Sir Walter Armstrong on the painter’s technique. The volume has now reached a new, enlarged, and small edition, a combination of Hogarthian lore, apt gossip, and reference book.
The text—well, the text is by Mr. Dobson; just to say that suffices. And at the end are thirty-five pages of a Bibliography of Books, &c., relating to Hogarth; thirty pages of a Catalogue of Paintings by or attributed to Hogarth; and sixty-three pages of a Catalogue of the Principal Prints by or after Hogarth. As a postscript to the Catalogue of Prints is this note: “It has also been thought unnecessary to include several designs, the grossness of which neither the ingenuity of the artist nor the coarse taste of his time can now reasonably be held to excuse.” There you have the eighteenth century of which Hogarth was child and master.
In writing of him it would be agreeable to confine one’s remarks entirely to his paintings, but that must not be. And why should it be? The more one peers into that busy, brutal, bewildering eighteenth century, the more interesting it becomes. Names start out. You dip here and there, and the names become clothed with personality. Mr. Dandridge, for example, who painted William Kent. Of them more anon. The first entry in Mr. Dobson’s Bibliography contains a mention of Dandridge, under the date 1731, when Hogarth was thirty-four. I copy it. The extract opens a fuzzy window to the eighteenth century.
“Three Poetical Epistles. To Mr. Hogarth, Mr. Dandridge, and Mr. Lambert, Masters in the Art of Painting. Written by Mr. Mitchell. Dabimus, capimusque vicissim. London: Printed for John Watts, at the Printing Office in Wild-Court near Lincoln’s Inn Fields. MDCCXXXI. Price sixpence. 4to.
“The epistle to Hogarth, whom the poet styles his friend, and ‘Shakspeare in Painting,’ occupies pp. 1-5, and is dated ‘June 12th, 1730.’ Passages are quoted at p. 32. The following, from that to the ‘eminent Face Painter,’ Bartholomew Dandridge, p. 6, gives the names of Hogarth’s artistic contemporaries:—
‘Nor wou’d I, partial or audacious, strive
To show what artists most excel alive: ...
How Thornhill, Jervas, Richardson and Kent,
Lambert and Hogarth, Zinks (Zincke) and Aikman paint;
What Semblance in the Vanderbanks I see,
And wherein Dall (Dahl) and Highmore disagree;
How Wooten, Harvey, Tilliman and Wright,
To one great End, in diff’rent Roads delight,’ &c.”
The verse is sorry stuff, is it not? One might go on for pages quoting from this bovrilised Bibliography. Under the date 1753 is the announcement of Hogarth’s unfortunate experiment in æsthetics—“The Analysis of Beauty. Written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas of Taste.” It would be pleasant to contrast Lamb’s eulogy from the famous essay in “The Reflector” with Mrs. Oliphant’s sorrowful comments. Space permits a few words only. “I contend,” says Lamb, “that there is in most of his subjects that sprinkling of the better nature, which, like holy-water, chases away and disperses the contagion of the bad.” Says Mrs. Oliphant: “Before his pictures the vulgar laugh, and the serious spectator holds his peace, gazing, often with eyes awestricken, at the wonderful unimpassioned tragedy. But never a tear comes at Hogarth’s call. It is his sentence of everlasting expulsion from the highest heaven of art.”