CHAPTER III.
ENGLISH ART IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY—WILLIAM HOGARTH.
HITHERTO we have seen painting in England confined to foreign artists, or to natives who more or less slavishly copied them. We have seen, likewise, that many of the English painters of the latter days of the seventeenth century were decorators rather than artists, who, forsaking all truth and nature, covered the walls and ceilings of houses with simpering shepherdesses and impossible deities. The time of change came, however, and with it the man who was to be the first original painter of his country. It is to plain William Hogarth, the son of the Cumberland schoolmaster, the apprentice of the silver-plate engraver, Ellis Gamble, that we owe the origin of the English school of painting. The term "school of painting" is, however, hardly correct, as Hogarth founded no school, nor has there existed one in England till very recently. We should rather say that Hogarth was the first English artist who forsook exhausted conventionalities for large truthfulness and original thought, and thus paved the way to a new life in art. A man who laughed at the "black masters," as he called the painters of the most popular works of the period; and who declared that copying other men's pictures was like pouring wine from one vessel to another, a process which did not increase the quality, and allowed the flavour to evaporate, was naturally regarded as an innovator of a monstrous order. Like all reformers, Hogarth had to defeat opposition and ridicule. But he dared to think for himself, and in that courage lay the secret of success.
WILLIAM HOGARTH was born in 1697 in Ship Court, Old Bailey, hard by Ludgate Hill, in a house which was pulled down in 1862. His father, who had received a good education at St. Bees, kept a school in Ship Court, and sought work from booksellers. But, like many another poor scholar, he could not make a living, and died disappointed. After spending some time at school, William Hogarth, warned by the example of his father, determined to pursue a craft in preference to literature, and was apprenticed, probably in 1711, to Ellis Gamble, a silversmith in Cranbourne Alley. Here, though his drawings and engravings were mostly confined to heraldic devices and the like, the young artist gained accuracy of touch, to which he added truthfulness of design, and prepared himself to delineate that London life which was to furnish him with models for his art. He tells us how he determined to enter a wider field than that of mere silver-plate engraving, though at the age of twenty to engrave his own designs on copper was the height of his ambition. The men and women who jostled him in London streets, or rolled by him in their coaches, were his models. Besides the keenest powers of observation, and a sardonic, sympathizing, and pitying humour, he possessed a wonderfully accurate and retentive memory, which enabled him to impress a face or form on his mind, and reproduce it at leisure. Occasionally, if some very attractive or singular face struck his fancy, he would sketch it on his thumb-nail, and thence transfer it. Hogarth tells us that "instead of burdening the memory with musty rules, or tiring the eye with copying dry or damaged pictures, I have ever found studying from nature the shortest and safest way of obtaining knowledge of my art." Thus, whether he was watching "society" on its way to court, or mingling in the midnight orgies of a tavern, Hogarth was storing portraits which were to appear, some in silks and satins, as in the Marriage à la Mode, others among the humours of Beer Street and the misery of Gin Lane. Hogarth's apprenticeship ended probably in 1718; we find him studying drawing from the life in the Academy in St. Martin's Lane. In 1721 he published An Emblematical Print on the South Sea (Scheme), which was sold at one shilling a copy, and though defective in the sardonic humour which marked his later works, shows promise of what was to come. In the same year The Lottery was published. In 1724 he engraved Masquerades and Operas, a satire, which represents "society" crowding to a masquerade, and led by a figure wearing a cap and bells on his head, and the Garter on his leg. This engraving delighted the public whom it satirised, and Hogarth lost much through piracies of his work. He was employed by the booksellers to illustrate books with engravings and frontispieces. In "Mottraye's Travels" (1723) there are eighteen illustrations by Hogarth, seven in the "Golden Ass of Apuleius" (1724), and five frontispieces in "Cassandra" (1725). Walpole says, somewhat too severely, that "no symptoms of genius dawned in those early plates." In 1726 was published, besides his twelve large prints, which are well known, an edition of "Hudibras," illustrated by Hogarth in seventeen smaller plates. Of this Walpole says, "This was among the first of his works that marked him as a man above the common; yet in what made him then noticed it surprises me now to find so little humour in an undertaking so congenial to his talents." The designs of Hogarth are not so witty as the verses of Butler, but we must remember that the painter had never seen men living and acting as they are described in the poem; they were not like the men of whom he made his daily studies. At this period he who dared to be original, and to satirise his neighbours, had much trouble. The value set upon his work in those early days may be estimated when we read that J. Bowles, of the Black Horse, in Cornhill, patronised Hogarth to the extent of offering him half-a-crown a pound weight for a copperplate just executed. In 1727, we find a certain upholsterer named Morris refusing to pay thirty pounds to the artist, because he had failed, in Morris's opinion, to execute a representation of the Element of Earth, as a design for tapestry, "in a workmanlike manner." It is on record that the verdict was in favour of Hogarth, who was paid £20 for his work and £10 for materials. In 1730, Hogarth made a secret marriage at old Paddington Church, with Jane, only daughter of Sir James Thornhill, Serjeant-Painter to the King. He had frequented Thornhill's studio, but whether the art of the court painter, or the face of his daughter was the greater attraction we know not. There is no doubt that Hogarth's technique was studied from Thornhill's pictures, and not from those of Watteau or Chardin, as has been supposed. Hogarth was painting portraits years before 1730. Mr. Redgrave, in his "Century of Painters," describes some wall pictures in the house No. 75, Dean Street, Soho, which is said to have been a residence of Sir James Thornhill. Some of the figures here are thoroughly of the Hogarth type, especially that of a black man in a turban, a familiar form in the Marriage à la Mode. For a time after his marriage Hogarth confined himself to painting portraits and conversation pieces, for which he was well paid, although Walpole declares that this "was the most ill-suited employment to a man whose turn was certainly not flattery." Truthfulness, however, is more valuable in a portrait than flattery, and we surely find it in Hogarth's portraits of himself, one in the National Gallery, and in that of Captain Coram, at the Foundling. In 1734, Hogarth published the first of those wonderful unspoken sermons against vice and folly, A Harlot's Progress, which was followed immediately by A Rake's Progress, issued in 1735. A Harlot's Progress, in six plates, met with an enthusiastic reception; it was a bold innovation on the cold stilted style of the day, and its terrible reality stirred the hearts of all beholders. A Rake's Progress, in eight plates, was scarcely so popular, and the professors of the kind of art which Hogarth had satirised found many faults with the reformer. Hogarth was now a person of consequence, and the once unknown and struggling artist was the talk of the town. The Sleeping Congregation is a satire on the heavy preachers and indifferent church-goers of that period. The Distressed Poet and A Midnight Modern Conversation soon followed. The latter, in which most of the figures are actual portraits, is considered in France and Germany the best of this master's single works. In due course appeared The Enraged Musician, of which a wit of the day observed that "it deafens one to look at it," and The Strolling Actresses, which Allan Cunningham describes as "one of the most imaginative and amusing of all the works of Hogarth."[G]
One of the best of Hogarth's life stories is the Marriage à la Mode, the original paintings of which are in the National Gallery; they appeared in prints in 1745. These well-known pictures illustrate the story of a loveless marriage, where parents sacrifice their children, the one for rank the other for money. Mr. Redgrave ("A Century of Painters") tells us that "the novelty of Hogarth's work consisted in the painter being the inventor of his own drama, as well as painter, and in the way in which all the parts are made to tend to a dramatic whole; each picture dependent on the other, and all the details illustrative of the complete work. The same characters recur again and again, moved in different tableaux with varied passions, one moral running through all, the beginning finding its natural climax in the end." Some of the most striking points in the satire of Hogarth's picture are brought out in the background, as in the first picture of Marriage à la Mode, where the works of "the black masters" are represented ludicrously, and the ceiling of the room is adorned with an unnatural picture of the destruction of the Egyptians in the Red Sea. In 1750 appeared The March of the Guards to Finchley, which is "steeped in humour and strewn with absurdities." It was originally dedicated to George II., but, so the story goes, the King was offended by a satire on his Guards, and he declared "I hate boetry and bainting; neither one nor the other ever did any good." Certain it is that Hogarth was disappointed by the reception of his work, and dedicated it to the King of Prussia. The painting of The March to Finchley, on publication of the print, was disposed of by lottery, and won by the Foundling Hospital. We cannot do more than mention some of the remaining works by which the satirist continued "to shoot Folly as she flies." Beer Street, and Gin Lane, illustrate the advantages of drinking the national beverage, and the miseries following the use of gin. The Cockpit represents a scene very common in those days, and contains many portraits. The Election is a series of four scenes, published between 1755 and 1758, in which all the varied vices, humours, and passions of a contested election are admirably represented. The pictures of this series are in Sir John Soane's Museum, Lincoln's Inn Fields.
Hogarth's last years were embittered by quarrels, those with Churchill and Wilkes being the most memorable. The publication in 1753 of his admirable book, called "The Analysis of Beauty," in which Hogarth tried to prove that a winding line is the Line of Beauty, produced much adverse criticism and many fierce attacks, which the painter could not take quietly. He was further annoyed by the censures passed on his picture of Sigismunda, now in the National Gallery, which he had painted in 1759 for Sir Richard Grosvenor, and which was returned on his hands. Two years previously Hogarth had been made Serjeant-Painter to the King. He did not live to hold this office long; on October 26th, 1764, the hand which had exposed the vices and follies of the day so truly, and yet with such humour, had ceased to move. Hogarth died in his house at Leicester Fields; he was buried in Chiswick Churchyard, where on his monument stands this epitaph by Garrick;—
"Farewel, great Painter of Mankind!
Who reached the noblest point of Art;
Whose pictured Morals charm the Mind,
And through the Eye correct the Heart.
If Genius fire thee, Reader, stay;
If Nature touch thee, drop a Tear;
If neither move thee, turn away,
For HOGARTH'S honour'd dust lies here."
And yet it is of this man that Walpole says, that "as a painter he has slender merit." Charles Lamb remarks wisely, in his fine essay on "The Genius and Character of Hogarth, that his chief design was by no means to raise a laugh." Of his prints, he says, "A set of severer satires (for they are not so much comedies, which they have been likened to, as they are strong and masculine satires), less mingled with anything of mere fun, were never written upon paper, or graven upon copper. They resemble Juvenal, or the satiric touches in Timon of Athens."
