This animated satire was etched as a receipt-ticket for a print of Sigismunda. It represents Time, seated upon a mutilated statue, and smoking a landscape, through which he has driven his scythe, to give proof of its antiquity,—not only by sober, sombre tints, but by an injured canvas. Beneath the easel on which it is fixed the artist has placed a capacious jar, on which is written VARNISH,—to bring out the beauties of this inestimable assemblage of straight lines. The frame is dignified with a Greek motto:
Crates,—Ὁ γὰρ χρόνος μ' ἔκαμψε, τέκτων μὲν σοφὸς,
Ἅπαντα δ' ἐργαζόμενος ἀσθενέστερα.
See Spectator, vol. ii. p. 83.
This, though not engraved with precise accuracy, is sufficiently descriptive of the figure.
Time has bent me double; and Time, though I confess he is a great artist, weakens all he touches.
"From a contempt" (says Mr. Walpole) "of the ignorant virtuosi of the age, and from indignation at the impudent tricks of picture-dealers,[32] whom he saw continually recommending and vending vile copies to bubble-collectors, and from having never studied, indeed having seen few good pictures of the great Italian masters, he persuaded himself that the praises bestowed on those glorious works were nothing but the effects of prejudice. He talked this language till he believed it; and having heard it often asserted, as is true, that Time gives a mellowness to colours, and improves them, he not only denied the proposition, but maintained that pictures only grew black and worse by age, not distinguishing between the degrees in which the proposition might be true or false."
Whether Mr. Walpole's remarks are right or wrong, Hogarth has admirably illustrated his own doctrine, and added to his burlesque, by introducing the fragments of a statue, below which is written,
As statues moulder into worth. P. W.
By part of this print being in mezzotinto and the remainder etched, it has a singularly striking and spirited appearance.
Hogarth, the following year, published that admirable satire, The Medley, which completely refutes the reproach thrown on his declining talents by his political opponents, whose violent, and in some respects vindictive attack, is erroneously said to have hastened his death. That he was wounded with a barbed spear, hurled by the hand of a friend, it is reasonable to suppose; but armed with the mailed coat of conscious superiority, he could not be wounded mortally. What!—broken-hearted by a rhyme!—pelted to death with ballads!—He was too proud! I am told by those who knew him best, that the little mortification he felt, did not arise from the severity of the satire, but from a recollection of the terms on which he had lived with the satirist.