HOGARTH.—HIS EARLY HISTORY.—HIS SETS OF PICTURES.—THE HARLOT’S PROGRESS.—THE RAKE’S PROGRESS.—THE MARRIAGE A LA MODE.—HIS OTHER PRINTS.—THE ANALYSIS OF BEAUTY, AND THE PERSECUTION ARISING OUT OF IT.—HIS PATRONAGE BY LORD BUTE.—CARICATURE OF THE TIMES.—ATTACKS TO WHICH HE WAS EXPOSED BY IT, AND WHICH HASTENED HIS DEATH.
On the 10th of November, 1697, William Hogarth was born in the city of London. His father, Richard Hogarth, was a London schoolmaster, who laboured to increase the income derived from his scholars by compiling books, but with no great success. From his childhood, as he tells us in his “Anecdotes” of himself, the young Hogarth displayed a taste for drawing, and especially for caricature; and, out of school, he appears to have been seldom without a pencil in his hand. The limited means of Richard Hogarth compelled him to take the boy from school at an early age, and bind him apprentice to a steel-plate engraver. But this occupation proved little to the taste of one whose ambition rose much higher; and when the term of his apprenticeship had expired, he applied himself to engraving on copper; and, setting up on his own account, did considerable amount of work, first in engraving arms and shop-bills, and afterwards in designing and engraving book illustrations, none of which displayed any superiority over the ordinary run of such productions. Towards 1728 Hogarth began to practice as a painter, and he subsequently attended the academy of sir James Thornhill, in Covent Garden, where he became acquainted with that painter’s only daughter, Jane. The result was a clandestine marriage in 1730, which met the disapproval and provoked the anger of the lady’s father. Subsequently, however, sir James became convinced of the genius of his son-in-law, and a reconciliation was effected through the medium of lady Thornhill.
At this time Hogarth had already commenced that new style of design which was destined to raise him soon to a degree of fame as an artist few men have ever attained. In his “Anecdotes” of himself, the painter has given us an interesting account of the motives by which he was guided. “The reasons,” he says, “which induced me to adopt this mode of designing were, that I thought both writers and painters had, in the historical style, totally overlooked that intermediate species of subjects which may be placed between the sublime and the grotesque. I therefore wished to compose pictures on canvas similar to representations on the stage; and further hope that they will be tried by the same test, and criticised by the same criterion. Let it be observed, that I mean to speak only of those scenes where the human species are actors, and these, I think, have not often been delineated in a way of which they are worthy and capable. In these compositions, those subjects that will both entertain and improve the mind bid fair to be of the greatest public utility, and must therefore be entitled to rank in the highest class. If the execution is difficult (though that is but a secondary merit), the author has claim to a higher degree of praise. If this be admitted, comedy, in painting as well as writing, ought to be allotted the first place, though the sublime, as it is called, has been opposed to it. Ocular demonstration will carry more conviction to the mind of a sensible man than all he would find in a thousand volumes, and this has been attempted in the prints I have composed. Let the decision be left to every unprejudiced eye; let the figures in either pictures or prints be considered as players dressed either for the sublime, for genteel comedy or farce, for high or low life. I have endeavoured to treat my subjects as a dramatic writer: my picture is my stage, and men and women my players, who, by means of certain actions and gestures, are to exhibit a dumb-show.”
The great series of pictures, indeed, which form the principal foundation of Hogarth’s fame, are comedies rather than caricatures, and noble comedies they are. Like comedies, they are arranged, by a series of successive plates, in acts and scenes; and they represent contemporary society pictorially, just as it had been and was represented on the stage in English comedy. It is not by delicacy or excellence of drawing that Hogarth excels, for he often draws incorrectly; but it is by his extraordinary and minute delineation of character, and by his wonderful skill in telling a story thoroughly. In each of his plates we see a whole act of a play, in which nothing is lost, nothing glossed over, and, I may add, nothing exaggerated. The most trifling object introduced into the picture is made to have such an intimate relationship with the whole, that it seems as if it would be imperfect without it. The art of producing this effect was that in which Hogarth excelled. The first of Hogarth’s great suites of prints was “The Harlot’s Progress,” which was the work of the years 1733 and 1734. It tells a story which was then common in London, and was acted more openly in the broad face of society than at the present day; and therefore the effect and consequent success were almost instantaneous. It had novelty, as well as excellence, to recommend it. This series of plates was followed, in 1735, by another, under the title of “The Rake’s Progress.” In the former, Hogarth depicted the shame and ruin which attended a life of prostitution; in this, he represented the similar consequences which a life of profligacy entailed on the other sex. In many respects it is superior to the “Harlot’s Progress,” and its details come more home to the feelings of people in general, because those of the prostitute’s history are more veiled from the public gaze. The progress of the spendthrift in dissipation and riot, from the moment he becomes possessed of the fruits of paternal avarice, until his career ends in prison and madness, forms a marvellous drama, in which every incident presents itself, and every agent performs his part, so naturally, that it seems almost beyond the power of acting. Perhaps no one ever pictured despair with greater perfection than it is shown in the face and bearing of the unhappy hero of this history, in the last plate but one of the series, where, thrown into prison for debt, he receives from the manager of a theatre the announcement that the play which he had written in the hope of retrieving somewhat of his position—his last resource—has been refused. The returned manuscript and the manager’s letter lie on the wretched table (cut No. 203); while on the one side his wife reproaches him heartlessly with the deprivations and sufferings which he has brought upon her, and on the other the jailer is reminding him of the fact that the fees exacted for the slight indulgence he has obtained in prison are unpaid, and even the pot-boy refuses to deliver him his beer without first receiving his money. It is but a step further to Bedlam, which, in the next plate, closes his unblessed career.
No. 203. Despair.
Ten years almost from this time had passed away before Hogarth gave to the world his next grand series of what he called his “modern moral subjects.” This was “The Marriage à la mode,” which was published in six plates in 1745, and which fully sustained the reputation built upon the “Harlot’s Progress” and the “Rake’s Progress.” Perhaps the best plate of the “Marriage à la mode,” is the fourth—the music scene—in which one principal group of figures especially arrests the attention. It is represented in our cut No. 204. William Hazlitt has justly remarked upon it that, “the preposterous, overstrained admiration of the lady of quality; the sentimental, insipid, patient delight of the man with his hair in papers, and sipping his tea; the pert, smirking, conceited, half-distorted approbation of the figure next to him; the transition to the total insensibility of the round face in profile, and then to the wonder of the negro boy at the rapture of his mistress, form a perfect whole.”
No. 204. Fashionable Society.
