William Hogarth:
PAINTER, ENGRAVER, AND PHILOSOPHER.
Essays on the Man, the Work, and the Time.
IV.—The Painter’s Progress.
About the year of grace 1727 the world began to hear of William Hogarth, not only as a designer and engraver of pasquinades and book-plates, but as a painter in oils. He had even begun to know what patronage was; and it was, doubtless, not without a reason that his Hudibras series was dedicated to “William Ward, Esquire, of Great Houghton, Northamptonshire.” In his early heraldic days, I find that he was once called upon to engrave an “Apollo in all his glory, azure.” He probably copied the figure from some French print; but in 1724 he was hard at work copying Apollo, and Marsyas to boot, at Thornhill’s Academy. Although he was sensible enough not to neglect the cultivation of the main chance, and with all convenient speed betook himself to the profitable vocation of portraiture or “face painting;” obtaining almost immediately, from his connection with the king’s sergeant painter, some aristocratic commissions—it is curious to observe that the young man’s bent lay in the direction of the historico-allegorical, then running neck-and-neck with the upholstery style of adornment. He had the epic-fever. Who among us has not suffered from that fièvre brulante—that generous malady of youth? How many contented sub-editors and quiet booksellers’ readers do we not know, who, in their hot adolescence, came to town, their portmanteaus bursting with the “Somethingiad,” in twenty-four cantos, or with blank-verse tragedies running to the orthodox five acts? Stipple, the charming domestic painter; Jonquil, who limns flowers and fruits so exquisitely, commenced with their enormous cartoons and show-clock oil-pictures: “Orestes pursued by the Eumenides,” “Departure of Regulus,”—la vieille patraque, in short—the old, heroic, impossible undertakings. And did not Liston imagine that he was born to play Macbeth? and did not Douglas Jerrold project a treatise on Natural Philosophy? and where is the little boarding-school miss that has not dreamt of riding in a carriage with a coronet on the panels, and being called her ladyship? Amina thinks the grandiloquent music of Norma would suit her; the maiden speech of young Quintus Briscus is a tremendous outburst against ministers. Quintus is going to shake the country, and cut the Gordian knot of red-tape. The session after next he will be a junior Lord of the Treasury, the demurest and most complacent of placemen. Peers, politicians, pamphleteers, and players: we all find our level. Rolling about the board is not to be tolerated for any length of time: we must peg in somewhere, and happy the man who finds himself in the right hole, and is satisfied with that state of life into which it has pleased heaven to call him!
Hogarth has his fièvre brulante; and, although he painted portraits, “conversations,” and “assemblies,” to eke out that livelihood of which the chief source was the employment given him by Philip Overton, Black-Horse Bowles, and the booksellers, he continued to hanker after torsos, and flying trumpets, and wide-waving wings, and flaunting drapery, and the other paraphernalia that went to furnish forth the apotheoses of monarchs and warriors in full-bottomed wigs. This preposterous school of art has long been in hopeless decay. You see the phantom caricature of it, only, in hair-dressers’ “toilette saloons” and provincial music-halls. Timon’s villa—the futile, costly caprice—has vanished. Old Montagu House is no more. Doctor Misaubin’s house, in St. Martin’s Lane, the staircase painted by Clermont (the Frenchman asked a thousand, and actually received five hundred guineas for his work), is not within my ken. Examples of this florid, truculent style, are becoming rarer and rarer every day. Painted ceilings and staircases yet linger in some grand old half-deserted country mansions, and in a few erst gorgeous merchants’ houses in Fenchurch and Leadenhall, now let out in flats as offices and chambers. If you have no objection to hazard a crick in your neck, you may crane it, and stare upwards at the ceil-paintings at Marlborough House, in Greenwich Hall, and on Hampton Court Palace staircase. The rest has ceded before stucco and stencilled paper-hangings; and even the French, who never neglect an opportunity or an excuse for ornamentation, and who still occasionally paint the ceilings of their palaces, seem to have quite lost the old Lebrun and Coypel traditions of perspective and foreshortening—overcharged and unnatural as they were (P. P. Rubens, in the Banqueting House, Whitehall, inventor)—and merely give you a picture stuck upon a rooftree, in which the figures are attenuated vertically, instead of sprawling down upon you, isometrically upside down.
Hogarth became useful to Sir James Thornhill. This last, a worthy, somewhat pompous, but industrious magnifico of the moment, a Covent Garden Caravaggio and cross between Raphael Mengs and the Groom-porter, had wit enough to discern the young designer and graver’s capacity, and condescended to patronize him. There is reason to believe that he employed William to assist in the production of his roomy works. When ceilings and domes were to be painted at two guineas the Flemish ell, it is not likely that Royal Sergeant painters and knights of the shire for Melcombe Regis could afford or would vouchsafe to cover with pigments and with their own courtly hands the whole of the required area. The vulgar, of course, imagined that the painter did all; that Thornhill lay for ever stretched on a mattress, swinging in a basket three hundred feet high in the empyrean of Wren’s dome, daubing away at his immense Peters and Pauls, or else stepping backwards to the edge of a crazy platform to contemplate the work he had done, and being within an ace of toppling over to inevitable crash of death beneath, when an astute colour-grinder saved his beloved master by flinging a brush at Paul’s great toe—cruel to be kind, and so causing the artist, in indignant apprehension of injury to his beloved saint, to rush forward, saving his own life and the toe likewise. A pretty parallel to this story is in that of the little boy in the Greek epigram who has crawled to the very edge of a precipice, and is attracted from his danger by the sight of his mother’s breast. A neat little anecdote, but—it is somewhat musty. It is a myth, I fear. The vulgar love such terse traditions. Zeuxis refusing to sell his pictures, because no sum of money was sufficient to buy them, and imitating fruit so nicely that the birds came and pecked at it; Parrhasius cozening Zeuxis into the belief that his simulated curtain was real, and crucifying a bondman (the wretch!) that he might transfer his contortions to canvas; Apelles inducing a horse to neigh in recognition of the steed he had drawn; Amurath teaching a French painter how properly to design the contracted muscles of the neck when the head is severed from the body by causing a slave to be decapitated in his presence: Correggio receiving the price of his master-work in farthings, or some vile copper Italian coinage, and dying under the weight of the sack in which he was carrying the sordid wage home; Cimabue ruddling the fleeces of his lambs with saintly triptichs, and the late Mr. Fuseli eating raw pork-chops for supper in order to design the “Nightmare,” more to the life: all these are ben trovati,—ma non son veri, I suspect.
Thornhill had not all his domes and ceilings and staircases to himself. When Augustus found Rome of brick and left it of marble, he did not execute all the quarrying and chiselling with his own imperial hands. In 1727, the painter M.P. for Melcombe Regis was at the high tide of celebrity. Many of the Flemish ells were covered by assistants. Here, I fancy, Van Shackaback of Little Britain, and sometime of Ghent in the Low Countries, was dexterous at war and art trophies, lyres, kettle-drums, laurel wreaths, bass-viols, and S. P. Q. R.’s, charmingly heaped up on a solid basis of cloud. Then little Vanderscamp, who had even been employed about the great king’s alcoves at Versailles, was wondrous cunning at the confection of those same purple and cream-coloured vapours. Lean Monsieur Carogne from Paris excelled in drapery; Gianbattista Ravioli, ex-history painter to the Seigniory of Venice, but vehemently suspected of having been a galley-slave in the Venetian arsenal, was unrivalled in flying Cupids. All these foreign aides-de-camp sprawled on their mattresses and made their fancy’s children to sprawl; goodman Thornhill superintending, touching up now and then, blaming, praising, pooh-poohing, talking of the gusto, taking snuff, then putting on his majestic wig and his grand laced hat, and departing in a serene manner in his coach to St. James’s or the House, thinking perhaps of one Rafaelle who painted the loggie and stanze of the Vatican, and of what a clever fellow he, James Thornhill, was.
To him presently entered young Hogarth. The indulgence of William’s own caustic whim had served an end he may not have recked of. He had contrived to pay Thornhill the most acceptable compliment that can be paid to a vain, shallow, pompous man. He had lampooned and degraded his rival. He had pilloried Kent in the parody of the wretched St. Clement Danes’ altar-piece, and had had a fling at him, besides, in Burlington Gate, where in sly ridicule of the earl’s infatuation for this Figaro of art, Kent’s effigy is placed on a pinnacle above the statues of Rafaelle and Michael Angelo. It is a capital thing to have a friend in court with a sharp tongue, or better still, with a sharp pen or pencil, who will defend you, and satirize your enemies. The watch-dog Tearem at home, to defend the treasure-chest, is all very well in his way; but the wealthy worldling should also entertain Snarler, the bull-terrier, to bite and snap at people’s heels. Not that for one moment I would insinuate that Hogarth strove at all unworthily to toady or to curry favour with Sir James Thornhill. The sturdiness and independence of the former are visible in his very first etching. The acorn does not grow up to be a parasite. But Hogarth’s poignant humour happened to tally with the knight’s little malices. Hogarth, there is reason to assume, believed in Thornhill more than he believed in Kent. The first, at least, could work, was a fair draughtsman, and a not contemptible painter, albeit his colour was garish, his conception preposterous, his execution loaded and heavy. He showed at all events a genuine interest in, and love for that art, in which he might not himself have excelled. Kent was a sheer meretricious impostor and art-manufacturing quack, and Hogarth was aware of him at once, and so scarified him. Moreover, a young man can scarcely—till his wisdom-teeth be cut—avoid drifting temporarily into some clique or another. Cibber must have had his admirers, who mauled Pope prettily among themselves; and moreover, Sir James Thornhill, knight, sergeant painter, and M.P., had a daughter—one mistress Jane—but I am forestalling matters again.
Although it is difficult to imagine anything more confused, misunderstood, and hampered with rags and tatters of ignorance, or—worse than ignorance-false taste, than was English Art in 1727, Cimmerian darkness did not wholly reign. There were men alive who had heard their fathers tell of the glories of Charles the First’s gallery at Whitehall; there were some princely English nobles, then as now patrons and collectors; there were treasures of art in England, although no Waagen, no Jameson, had arisen to describe them, and there were amateurs to appreciate those treasures. The young peer who went the grand tour took something else abroad with him besides a negro-boy, a tipsy chaplain, and a pug-dog. He brought other things home beyond a broken-nosed busto, a rusted medal, a receipt for cooking risotto and the portrait of a Roman beggar and a Venetian corteggiana. He frequently acquired exquisite gems of painting and statuary abroad, and on his return formed a noble gallery of art. It is unfortunately true that his lordship sometimes played deep at “White’s” or the “Young Man’s,” and, losing all, was compelled to send his pictures to the auction room; but even then his treasures were disseminated, and wise and tasteful men were the purchasers. To their credit, the few celebrated artists then possessed by our country were assiduous gatherers in this field. Sir Godfrey Kneller collected Vandykes. Richardson the elder, a pleasing painter, whose daughter married Hudson, Sir Joshua Reynolds’s master, left Rafaelle and Andrea del Sarto drawings, worth a large sum.[1] Jervas, Pope’s friend, and by that polished, partial man artistically much overrated, being at the best but a weak, diaphanous, grimacing enlarger of fans and firescreens, became rich enough to form a handsome cabinet of paintings, drawings, and engravings. We are apt to bear much too hardly on the patron-lords and gentlemen of the eighteenth century. Many were munificent, enlightened, and accomplished; but we devour the piquant satires on Timon and Curio and Bubo, and have patron and insolence, patron and ignorance, patron and neglect, patron and gaol, too glibly at our tongue’s end. Is it not to be wished that thinking people should bear this in mind: that not only were there strong men who lived before Agamemnon, but that there were strong men who lived besides Agamemnon—his contemporaries, in fine, to whom posterity has not been generous, not even just, and whose strength has been forgotten?
The earliest known picture of William Hogarth is one called the Wanstead Assembly, long, and by a ridiculous blunder, corrupted into “Wandsworth.” The term “Assembly” was a little bit of art-slang. A portrait being a portrait, and a “conversation” a group of persons generally belonging to one family; by an “assembly” was understood a kind of pictorial rent-roll, or domestic “achievement,” representing the lord, or the squire, the ladies and children, the secretaries, chaplains, pensioned poets, led-captains, body-flatterers, hangers-on, needy clients, lick-trenchers, and scrape-plates, the governesses and tutors, the tenants, the lacqueys, the black-boys, the monkeys, and the lapdogs: tutta la baracca, in fact. In the Wanstead Assembly was a portrait of the first Earl Tylney, and many of his vassals and dependants; and shortly after the completion of the picture, Mitchell, for whose opera of The Highland Clans Hogarth designed a frontispiece, complimented the artist on his performance in smooth couplets:—
“Large families obey your hand,