BATTLE OF PICTURES.
In one corner of this very ludicrous print he has represented an auction-room, on the top of which is a weathercock, in allusion perhaps to Cock the auctioneer. Instead of the four initials for North, East, West, and South, we have P, U, F, S, which, with a little allowance for bad spelling, must pass for Puffs! At the door stands a porter, who from the length of his staff may be high-constable of the old school, and gentleman-usher to the modern connoisseurs. As an attractive show-board, we have an high-finished Flemish head, in one of those ponderous carved and gilt frames, that give the miniatures inserted in them the appearance of a glow-worm in a gravel pit. A catalogue and a carpet (properly enough called the flags of distress) are now the signs of a sale; but here, at the end of a long pole, we have an unfurled standard, emblazoned with that oracular talisman of an auction-room, the fate-deciding hammer. Beneath is a picture of St. Andrew on the cross, with an immense number of fac-similes, each inscribed ditto. Apollo, who is flaying Marsyas, has no mark of a deity, except the rays which beam from his head; he is placed under a projecting branch, and we may truly say the tree shadows what it ought to support. The coolness of poor Marsyas is perfectly philosophical; he endures torture with the apathy of a Stoic. The third tier is made up by a herd of Jupiters and Europas, of which interesting subject, as well as the foregoing, there are dittos, ad infinitum. These invaluable tableaux being unquestionably painted by the great Italian masters, is a proof of their unremitting industry;—their labours evade calculation; for had they acquired the polygraphic art of striking off pictures with the facility that printers roll off copperplates, and each of them attained the age of Methusaleth, they could not have painted all that are exhibited under their names. Nothing is therefore left us to suppose, but that some of these undoubted originals were painted by their disciples.[12] Such are the collections of fac-similes; the other pictures are drawn up in battle array; we will begin with that of St. Francis, the corner of which is in a most unpropitious way driven through Hogarth's Morning. The third painting of the Harlot's Progress suffers equal degradation from a weeping Madonna, while the splendid saloon of the repentant pair in Marriage à la Mode is broken by the Aldobrandini Marriage. Thus far is rather in favour of the ancients; but the aerial combat has a different termination: for, by the riotous scene in the Rake's Progress, a hole is made in Titian's Feast of Olympus; and a Bacchanalian, by Rubens, shares the same fate from the Modern Midnight Conversation. Considered as so much reduced, the figures are etched with great spirit, and have strong character.
In ridicule of the preference given to old pictures, he exercised not only his pencil, but his pen. His advertisement for the sale of the paintings of Marriage à la Mode, inserted in a Daily Advertiser of 1750, thus concludes:
"As, according to the standard so righteously and laudably established by picture-dealers, picture-cleaners, picture-frame makers (and other connoisseurs), the works of a painter are to be esteemed more or less valuable as they are more or less scarce, and as the living painter is most of all affected by the inferences resulting from this and other considerations equally candid and edifying, Mr. Hogarth by way of precaution, not puff, begs leave to urge that probably this will be the last sale of pictures he may ever exhibit, because of the difficulty of vending such a number at once to any tolerable advantage; and that the whole number he has already exhibited of the historical or humorous kind does not exceed fifty, of which the three sets called the Harlot's Progress, the Rake's Progress, and that now to be sold, make twenty: so that whoever has a taste of his own to rely on, and is not too squeamish, and has courage enough to own it, by daring to give them a place in a collection till Time (the supposed finisher, but real destroyer of paintings) has rendered them fit for those more sacred repositories where schools, names, heads, masters, etc., attain their last stage of preferment, may from hence be convinced that multiplicity, at least, of his, Mr. Hogarth's pieces, will be no diminution of their value."[14]
In the same year with the Battle of the Pictures he etched the subscription-ticket for Garrick in Richard III.; where, in a festoon with a mask, a roll of paper, a palette, and a laurel, he combines the drama and the arts.
Soon after the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle he visited France. A people so different from any he had before seen, and manners so inimical to his own, greatly disgusted him. Ignorance of the language, added to some unpleasant circumstances that had their rise in his own imprudence, form a slight apology for these prejudices; he told them to the world in a view of the Gates of Calais, under which article I have inserted a cantata written by his friend Forest. The portrait in a cap, with a palette, on which is the waving line of beauty and grace, he this year engraved from his own painting. Beneath the frame are three books, labelled, Shakspeare, Milton, Swift; and on one side his faithful and favourite dog Trump. As Hogarth afterwards erased the human face divine, and inserted the divine Churchill in the character of a bear, the print is become very scarce; a small copy adorns the title-page to this volume. Some despicable rhymes on the dog and painter were published in the Scandalizade. Thus do the lines conclude: