The Man of Taste
Flanking the ex-coach-painter, Hogarth has placed reclining figures of Raphael and Michael Angelo, who regard the modern architect with respectful admiration! On the platform is Pope rough-casting the front of the structure, and {106} incidentally bespattering the passers-by with whitewash from his huge brush. Chief amongst these is the Duke of Chandos, who vainly strives to protect himself with his hat. Ascending the ladder is Lord Burlington, who carries up more whitening for the beautifying of his own gate and the defilement of his neighbours’ clothes. Over the gate Hogarth has sarcastically inscribed the solitary word “TASTE.” The double distribution of flattery and satire is an excellent pictorial burlesque of the Epistle to Lord Burlington, and who can say that it was not richly deserved? At any rate, stroke and counterstroke were fierce and unhesitating in those days, and, although Pope’s and his patrons’ influence was sufficient to get Hogarth’s witty plate suppressed, it is a tribute to the wholesome respect which the poet had for the artist, that, pugnacious and irrepressible as his pen generally was, Pope never ventured to make any written retaliation upon the libeller.
It should be mentioned that this was not the first occasion upon which Hogarth had attacked the charlatanry of Kent. In the first plate published on his own account, in 1724—“Masquerades and {107} Operas”—he had included him in his ridicule of what Mr. Dobson calls “foreign favourites and dubious exotics.” In that plate, also, he had ridiculed “Burlington Gate,” and, curiously prompted by the spirit of prophecy, had labelled it “Accademy (sic) of Arts!” He had also, in the following year, burlesqued Kent’s scandalous altarpiece at St. Clement Danes, which had lately been taken down in response to the outcry against its sacrilegious impudence.
By the kindness of the publisher of The Builder, I am enabled to reproduce a wood engraving of Burlington Gate as it actually was, which appeared in that journal on October 28, 1854. Comparing this with the cartoon, it will be seen that Hogarth did not scruple to heighten the effect of his satire by depriving Lord Burlington’s edifice of such merits as it undoubtedly possessed.
So much for Hogarth in his polemic with Pope. We will now turn for a moment to Hogarth and his quarrel with Wilkes and Churchill, in which we shall find him working over an old plate as in the case of “Enthusiasm Delineated,” but with a very different object in view. Here he adopts a method {108} of retaliation which, as we shall learn from later chapters of this book, had become already customary amongst the producers of political broadsides in the seventeenth century. Hitherto Hogarth had kept clear of politics, but now, in his sixty-fifth year, he threw himself into the fray. John Wilkes had started a paper called The North Briton in opposition to The Briton, the organ of the Tory party of which Lord Bute was the leader. Hogarth had long enjoyed Bute’s favour. He had also until now been on friendly terms with Wilkes and his henchman Charles Churchill, the poet. On September 7, 1762, taking sides with his patron, he published The Times (Plate I.). This so enraged Wilkes that he retaliated on the Saturday following, in the seventeenth number of The North Briton, with a violent attack on Hogarth both as man and artist. In the May following Hogarth retorted by publishing a portrait of John Wilkes which, professing to be a likeness, cleverly exhibited his most repulsive characteristics. Wilkes being now on his trial for libel, Churchill came to the rescue with his savage and slashing Epistle to William Hogarth. This was published on August 1. {110} With a promptitude astonishing in those days of tardy copper-plate engraving, Hogarth, by a clever expedient, retaliated within a month with his exceedingly venomous print of “The Bruiser.” The plate from which this was printed had already done duty as a portrait of Hogarth himself with his dog Trump, engraved from the well-known painting now in the National Gallery.
Burlington Gate as it appeared prior to 1868
Pressed for time, in ill-health, and apprehensive lest the public might attribute delay in replying to inability to do so, he took the old plate, burnished out his own portrait, and substituted in its place the head of a bear, with torn and soiled clerical bands about its neck, ruffles on its wrists, and clasping against its chest a foaming pot of beer, in allusion to the personal habits of the poet and ci-devant parson. With his left paw the beast clasps a huge club, the knots of which are labelled “Lye 1,” “Lye 2,” referring to the falsities of The North Briton. There are other minor alterations which may be seen at a glance. The whole was entitled “THE BRUISER, CHARLES CHURCHILL (once the Revd.!) In the character of a RUSSIAN HERCULES, regaling himself after having killed {111} the MONSTER CARICATURE, that so sorely gall’d his virtuous friend, the Heaven-born Wilkes.” The plate thus altered is to be found in five states, particulars of which may be found on p. 286 of Mr. Austin Dobson’s William Hogarth, 1891. That here reproduced is from a copy of the last state engraved by Dent for John Ireland.[22] It is only in the last two states that the clever little engraving in front of the palette is to be found.
[22] In copying, the design, as will be seen, has been turned from left to right.