Next to this house is another large house, built by Portman Seymour, Esq., which ‘being laid into Leicester House, was inhabited by their present Majesties’ (George II. and Queen Caroline) ‘when Prince and Princess of Wales.’ It was then that it was called ‘the pouting place of princes.’ Lisle Street is then described as coming out of Prince’s Street, and runs up to Leicester Garden wall. Both Lisle and Leicester Streets are ‘large and well-built, and inhabited by gentry.’
In 1737 the ‘Country Journal, or Craftsman,’ for April 16, contained the following acceptable announcement: ‘Leicester Fields is going to be fitted up in a very elegant manner, a new wall and rails to be erected all round, and a basin in the middle, after the manner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and to be done by a voluntary subscription of the inhabitants.’
It was to Hogarth’s house Walpole went, in 1761, to see Hogarth’s picture of Fox. Hogarth said he had promised Fox, if he would only sit as the painter liked, ‘to make as good a picture as Vandyck or Rubens could.’ Walpole was silent. ‘Why, now,’ said the painter, ‘you think this very vain. Why should not a man tell the truth?’ Walpole thought him mad, but Hogarth was sincere. When, after ridiculing the opinions of Freke, the anatomist, some one said, ‘But Freke holds you for as good a portrait-painter as Vandyck,’ ‘There he’s right!’ cried Hogarth. ‘And so, by G——, I am—give me my time, and let me choose my subject.’
If one great object of art be to afford pleasure, Hogarth has attained it, for he has pleased successive generations. If one great end of art be to afford instruction, Hogarth has shown himself well qualified, for he has reached that end; he taught his contemporaries, and he continues teaching, and will continue to teach, through his works. But is the instruction worth having? Is the pleasure legitimate, wholesome, healthy pleasure? Without disparagement to a genius for all that was great in him and his productions, the reply to these questions may sometimes be in the negative. The impulses of the painter were not invariably of noble origin. It is said that the first undoubted sign he gave of having a master-hand arose from his poor landlady asking him for a miserable sum which he owed her for rent. In his wrath he drew her portrait in caricatura. Men saw that it was clever, but vindictive.
There is no foundation for the story which asserts of George II. that he professed no love for poetry or painting. This king has been pilloried and pelted, so to speak, with the public contempt for having an independent, and not unjustifiable, opinion of the celebrated picture, the ‘March to Finchley.’ Hogarth had the impertinence to ask permission that he might dedicate the work to the King, and the latter observed, with some reason, that the fellow deserved to be picketed for his insolence. When this picture was presented as worthy of royal patronage, rebellion was afoot and active in the north (1745). The Guards were sent thither, and Hogarth’s work describes them setting out on their first stage to Finchley. The whole description or representation is a gross caricature of the brave men (though they may have sworn as terribly then as they did in Flanders) whose task was to save the kingdom from a great impending calamity. All that is noble is kept out of sight, all that is degrading to the subject, with some slight exceptions, is forced on the view and memory of the spectator. It has been urged by way of apology for this clever but censurable work, that it was not painted at the moment of great popular excitement, but subsequently. This is nothing to the purpose. What is to the purpose is, that Hogarth represented British soldiers as a drunken, skulking, thieving, cowardly horde of ruffians, who must be, to employ an oft-used phrase, more terrible to their friends than their enemies. The painter may have been as good a Whig as the King himself, but he manifested bad taste in asking George II. to show favour to such a subject; and he exhibited worse taste still in dedicating it to the king of Prussia, as a patron of the arts. Hogarth was not disloyal, perhaps, as Wilkes charged him with being, for issuing the print of this picture, but it is a work that, however far removed from the political element now, could not have afforded much gratification to the loyal when it was first exhibited.
Hogarth died in Leicester Square in 1764, and was buried at Chiswick. There was an artist on the opposite side of the square who saw the funeral from his window, and who had higher views of art than Hogarth.
Towards the close of Hogarth’s career Joshua Reynolds took possession of a house on the west side of Leicester Square. In the year in which George III. ascended the throne (1760) Reynolds set up his famous chair of state for his patrons in this historical square.
It has been said that Reynolds, in the days of his progressive triumphs in Leicester Square, thought continually of the glory of his being one day placed by the side of Vandyck and Rubens, and that he entertained no envious idea of being better than Hogarth, Gainsborough, and his old master, Hudson. Reynolds, nevertheless, served all three in much the same way that Dryden served Shakespeare; namely, he disparaged quite as extensively as he praised them. Hogarth, on the east side of Leicester Square, felt no local accession of honour when Reynolds set up his easel on the western side. The new comer was social; the old settler ‘kept himself to himself,’ as the wise saw has it. ‘Study the works of the great masters for ever,’ was, we are told, the utterance of Sir Oracle on the west side. From the east came Hogarth’s utterance, in the assertion, ‘There is only one school, and Nature is the mistress of it.’ For Reynolds’s judgment Hogarth had a certain contempt. ‘The most ignorant people about painting,’ he said to Walpole, ‘are the painters themselves. There’s Reynolds, who certainly has genius; why, but t’other day, he offered a hundred pounds for a picture that I would not hang in my cellar.’ Hogarth undoubtedly qualified his sense with some nonsense: ‘Talk of sense, and study, and all that; why, it is owing to the good sense of the English that they have not painted better.’
It was at one of Reynolds’s suppers in the square that an incident took place which aroused the wit-power of Johnson. The rather plain sister of the artist had been called upon by the company, after supper, as the custom was, to give a toast. She hesitated, and was accordingly required, again according to custom, to give the ugliest man she knew. In a moment the name of Oliver Goldsmith dropped from her lips, and immediately a sympathising lady on the opposite side of the table rose and shook hands with Miss Reynolds across the table. Johnson had heard the expression, and had also marked the pantomimic performance of sympathy, and he capped both by a remark which set the table in a roar, and which was to an effect which cut smartly in three ways. ‘Thus,’ said he, ‘the ancients, on the commencements of their friendships, used to sacrifice a beast betwixt them.’ The affair ends prettily. A few days after the ‘Traveller’ was published Johnson read it aloud from beginning to end to delighted hearers, of whom Miss Reynolds was one. As Johnson closed the book she emphatically remarked, ‘Well, I never more shall think Dr. Goldsmith ugly.’ Miss Reynolds, however, did not get over her idea. Her brother painted the portrait of the new poet, in the Octagon Room in the Square; the mezzotinto engraving of it was speedily all over the town. Miss Reynolds (who, it has been said, used herself to paint portraits with such exact imitation of her brother’s defects and avoidance of his beauties, that everybody but himself laughed at them) thought it marvellous that so much dignity could have been given to the poet’s face and yet so strong a likeness be conveyed; for ‘Dr. Goldsmith’s cast of countenance,’ she proceeds to inform us, ‘and indeed his whole figure from head to foot, impressed every one at first sight with the idea of his being a low mechanic; particularly, I believe, a journeyman tailor.’ This belief was founded on what Goldsmith had himself once said. Coming ruffled into Reynolds’s drawing-room, Goldsmith angrily referred to an insult which his sensitive nature fancied had been put upon him at a neighbouring coffee-house, by ‘a fellow who,’ said Goldsmith, ‘took me, I believe, for a tailor.’ The company laughed more or less demonstratively, and rather confirmed than dispelled the supposition.