Ere I quit the subject of the Harlot’s Progress, it is meet to advert to a little dictum of good Mr. Fuseli, the ambidextrous Anglo-Swiss, who painted the Lazar-house and other horrifying subjects, who used to swear so dreadfully at the clerks in Coutt’s banking-house, and who called for his umbrella when he went to see Mr. Constable’s showery pictures. “The characteristic discrimination and humorous exuberance,” says Fuseli, in a lecture, “which we admire in Hogarth, but which, like the fleeting passion of a day, every hour contributes something to obliterate, will soon be unintelligible by time or degenerate into caricature: the chronicle of scandal, and the history book of the vulgar.” I have the highest respect for the learning and acumen of Fuseli; but I think he is wholly wrong in assuming that Hogarth’s humour or discrimination will ever become “unintelligible by time,” or will “degenerate into caricature.” Look at this Harlot’s Progress. Who cares to know, now, that Charteris continues to rot; that he was guilty of every vice but prodigality and hypocrisy—being a monster of avarice and a paragon of impudence; that he was condemned to death for a dreadful crime, and only escaped the halter by the interest of aristocratic friends; that he was a liar, a cheat, a gambler, a usurer, and a profligate; that he amassed an estate of ten thousand a year; that he was accused while living, and that the populace almost tore his body from his remote grave in Scotland? Who cares to know how many times Mother Needham was carted—although you may be sure they were not half so frequent as she deserved. Is it important to know exactly whether the Caucasian financier was intended for Sir Henry Furnese, or for Rafael Mendez, or Israel Vanderplank. The quack Misaubin[11] and his opponent are forgotten. Stern Sir John Gonson[12] and his anti-Cyprian crusades are forgotten. For aught we can tell, the Bridewell gaoler, the Irish servant, the thievish harridan, the Fleet parson, the glowering undertaker, may all be faithful portraits of real personages long since gone to dust. It boots little even to know if Kate were really Kate or Mary Hackabout, or Laïs, or Phryne, or Doll Common. She is dead, and will sin and suffer stripes no more. But the humour and discrimination of the painter yet live, the types he pourtrayed endure to this hour. I saw Charteris the day before yesterday, tottering about in shiny boots beneath the Haymarket Colonnade. The quacks live and prosper, drive mail-phætons, and enter horses for the Derby. The Jew financier calls himself Mr. Montmorenci de Levyson, and lends money at sixty per cent., or as Julius McHabeas, Gent., one of her Majesty’s attorneys-at-law, issues a writ at the suit of his friend and father-in-law Levyson. And Kate decoys and cozens the financier every day in a cottage ornée at Brompton or St. John’s Wood. Kate! there is her “miniature brougham” gliding through Albert Gate. There is her barouche on the hill at Epsom. There she is at the play, or in the garden, flaunting among the coloured lamps. There she is in the Haymarket, in the Strand, in the New Cut, in the workhouse, in the police cell, in the hospital. There she is on Waterloo Bridge, and there—God help her!—in the cold, black river, having accomplished her “progress.” Take away the whipping-post from Bridewell; and for the boudoir paid for by the Jew, substitute the garish little sitting-room that Mr. Holman Hunt painted in his wonderful picture of the Awakened Conscience, and one can realize the “humour” and “discrimination” of Hogarth in a tale as sad that progresses around us every day.
Every one who has the most superficial acquaintance with a Hogarthian biography has heard the story of how Mrs. Hogarth, or her mamma, Dame Alice Thornhill, placed the six pictures of the Harlot’s Progress in Sir James’s breakfast-parlour one morning, ready for the knight on his coming down. “Very well, very well,” cried the king’s sergeant painter, rubbing his hands, and well nigh pacified: “the man who can paint like this wants no dowry with my daughter.” I am glad to believe the story; but I don’t believe, as some malevolent commentators have insinuated, that Sir James Thornhill made his son-in-law’s talent an excuse for behaving parsimoniously to the young couple after he had forgiven them. There is nothing to prove that Sir James Thornhill was a stingy man. He had a son who was a great crony of Hogarth, accompanied him on the famous journey to Rochester and Sheerness, and afterwards became sergeant-painter to the navy. I fancy that he was a wild young man, and cost his father large sums. It is certain, however, that Sir James frequently and generously assisted his daughter and son-in-law. He set them up in their house in Leicester Fields; and he appears to have left Hogarth a considerable interest in his house at 104, St. Martin’s Lane, whither he had removed from Covent Garden, and the staircase of which he had painted, according to his incorrigible custom, with “allegories.” The great artists of those days used to employ one another to paint the walls and ceilings of each other’s rooms. Thus Kneller gave commissions to the elder Laguerre, and Thornhill himself employed Robert Brown, the painter who was so famous for “crimson curtains,” and who justified having painted two signs for the Paul’s Head Tavern, in Cateaton Street, on the ground that Correggio had painted the sign of the “Muleteer.” Be it mentioned likewise, to Thornhill’s honour, that he fruitlessly endeavoured to persuade Lord Halifax to found a Royal Academy in the King’s Mews, Charing Cross. It would be better, perhaps, in this place to make an end of goodman Thornhill. Besides Worlidge’s portrait, there is one by Hogarth, in oil, of which a vigorous etching was executed by Samuel Ireland. The portrait was purchased of Mrs. Hogarth, in 1781, and was deemed by her an excellent likeness. Thornhill died at his seat, “Thornhill,” near Weymouth, in 1734.[13] He had transferred his academy or drawing-school, call it what you will, from Covent Garden to St. Martin’s Lane; and to Hogarth he bequeathed all his casts and bustos, all his easels and drawing-stools, all the paraphernalia of his studio. These William ultimately presented to the academy held in St. Peter’s Court St. Martin’s Lane, in premises that had formerly been the studio of Roubiliac the sculptor.
I told you that at about the time of his marriage our artist took summer lodgings at Vauxhall, and first made the acquaintance of Mr. Jonathan Tyers, the “enterprizing” lessee of the once famous “Royal Property.” With Tyers he ever maintained a fast friendship, and he materially and generously assisted him in the decoration of the gardens; for, frugal tradesman as Hogarth was, and sturdily determined to have the rights he had bargained for, he was continually giving away something. We have noticed his donation to the Petro-Roubiliac Academy; to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, of which he was a governor, he gave the picture of the Pool of Bethesda; and the governors of the Foundling Hospital know how nobly munificent was this honest Christian man to the nascent charity. He gave them handsome pictures; he gave them a large proportion in the shares of other picture-auctions—shares as good as money: he painted a splendid portrait of Thomas Coram, the grand old sea-captain, who spent his fortune in cherishing deserted children, and in his old age was not ashamed to confess that he had spent his all in doing good; that his fortune was funded in Heaven—let us trust he is drawing his dividends now; and that here below he was destitute.[14] His example incited many more notable artists to contribute pictures to the charity: and the halls of the Foundling became the chief art-lounge in London. The Royal Academy Exhibition, even, with its annual revenue of infinite shillings, sprang from this odd germ. The Foundling Hospital, I have heard, has wandered from its original purpose; and few of its first attributes are now recognizable in its constitution; but I hope they still teach every little boy and girl foundling to murmur a prayer for Thomas Coram and William Hogarth.
For the embellishment of the supper-boxes at Vauxhall, William made several designs; but there is not much evidence to prove that he painted any of them with his own hand. The paintings were mostly executed by Hogarth’s fast friend, Frank Hayman, and perhaps by Lanscroon, singer and scene-painter, son of old Lanscroon, Riario’s condisciple with Laguerre’s son-in-law Tijou, and the author of a meritorious set of prints illustrating Hob at the Well. For Vauxhall, Hogarth made the designs of the Four Parts of the Day, which he afterwards himself engraved, and which had great success.
Most of us have seen a very ugly, tasteless mezzotinto engraving representing Henry VIII. in an impossible attitude, leering at a coarse Anne Boleyn. I am always sorry to see the words “Hogarth, pinxit,” in the left-hand corner of this inelegant performance, and sorrier to know that he did indeed achieve that daub; and that the picture was hung in the “old great room at the right hand of entry into the gardens.” Indeed it is a barbarous thing. The background is, I suppose, intended to represent an apartment in Cardinal Wolsey’s sumptuous mansion at York Place; but it would do better for a chamber at the “Rose,” or at the “Three Tuns,” in Chandos Street. I can speak of it no more with patience. Why paint it, William? Yet it had all the honours of the mezzotint scraper; it is engraved likewise in line; and Allan Ramsay—“Gentle Shepherd” Ramsay—who should have known better, wrote some eulogistic verses by way of epigraph. Nor did Jonathan Tyers of Vauxhall look the gift horse in the mouth. He was glad to hang the sorry canvas in his old great room; and in testimony of many kindnesses received from the painter, who had “summer lodgings at South Lambeth,” presented him with a perpetual ticket of admission to the gardens for himself and friends. Fancy being on the free-list of Vauxhall for ever! The ticket was of gold, and bore this inscription:—
In perpetuam beneficii memoriam.
Hogarth was a frequent visitor at the “Spring Gardens,” Vauxhall. There, I will be bound, he and his pretty young wife frequently indulged in that cool summer evening’s stroll which the French call prendre le frais. There he may have had many a bowl of arrack punch with Harry Fielding—he was to live to be firm friends with the tremendous author of “Tom Jones;” there I think he may have met a certain Ferdinand Count Fathom, and a Somersetshire gentleman of a good estate but an indifferent temper and conversation, by name Western, together with my Lady Bellaston (in a mask and a cramoisy grogram sack, laced with silver), and, once in a way, perhaps, Mr. Abraham Adams, clerk. There is an authentic anecdote, too, of Hogarth standing one evening at Vauxhall listening to the band, and of a countryman pointing to the roll of paper with which the conductor was beating time, and asking what musical instrument “that white thing was?” “Friend,” answered William, “it is a single handed drum”—not a very bright joke, certainly; but then, as has been pertinently observed, a quibble can be excused to Hogarth, if a conundrum can be pardoned to Swift.
We would paint our pictures and our progresses in 1730-1-2-3. We were gaining fame. The Lords of the Treasury, as related by old under-Secretary Christopher Tilson, could examine and laugh over our plates even at the august council board, in the cockpit, and, adjourning, forthwith proceed to purchase impressions at Bakewell’s shop, near Johnson’s Court, in Fleet Street. “Frances Lady Byron”—more of her lord hereafter—was sitting to us for her portrait. Theophilus Cibber had pantomimised us. “Joseph Gay”—the wretched pseudonym of some Grub Street, gutter-blood rag-galloper—had parodied in “creaking couplets” the picture-poem of Kate Hackabout.[15] Vinny Bourne had headed his “hendecasyllables,” ad Gulielmum Hogarth Παραινετικον. Somerville, author of the Chase had dedicated his Hobbinol to us; we were son-in-law to a knight and M.P., but we were not yet quite emancipated from struggles, and hardship and poverty. As yet we were very badly paid, and our small earnings were gnawed away by the villanous pirates soon to succumb to the protective act of Parliament which Huggins was to draw—how strangely and frequently that detested name turns up—and draw not too efficiently on the model of the old literary copyright statute of Queen Anne. Morris had paid us the thirty pounds adjudged for the Element of Earth: but no munificent, eccentric old maid had as yet arisen to gratify us with sixty guineas for a single comic design: Taste in High Life. We were poor, albeit not lowly. The wolf was not exactly at the door. He didn’t howl from morning to night; but, half-tamed, he built himself a kennel in the porch, and snarled sometimes over the threshold. Let it be told again that we, William, were “a punctual paymaster.” So it behoved us to paint as many portraits and conversations as we could get commissions for, and do an occasional stroke of work on copper-plate for the booksellers. Coypel and Vandergucht, both approved high Dutch draughtsmen of the time, shared the patronage of the better class of booksellers with us; but none of us worked for the polecat Edmund Curll.