Hogarth Part 1

Hogarth.

by C. Lewis Hind.

I

AN AUCTION AND A CONVERSATION

The auction was proceeding leisurely and without excitement. It was an "off day." I was present because these pictures of the Early British School included a "Conversation Piece" ascribed to Hogarth, and a medley of prints after him, worn impressions, the vigour gone, merely the skeletons of his bustling designs remaining. They fetched trivial prices: they were not the real thing. And there was little demand for the portraits by half-forgotten limners of the period, portraits of dull gentlemen in eighteenth-century costume, examples of wooden Thomas Hudson, famous as the master of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and of such mediocrities as Knapton and Shackleton. Yet they evoked a sort of personal historical interest, recreating, as portrait after portrait pa.s.sed before our eyes, the level highway of art of those days before Hogarth delivered it from the foreign thraldom.

Tranquilly I contemplated the procession of lifeless portraits, noting with amus.e.m.e.nt the contrast between the grimy but very real hands of the attendant who supported the canvases upon the easel, and the painted hands in the pictures. The attendant's body was hidden by the canvas, but his hands appeared on either side of the frame clutching it. I indicated the contrast to my companion, a connoisseur, but he saw no humour in the comparison. He was almost sulky. A decorative Francis Cotes, and a luminous Richard Wilson, that he hoped to acquire for a few pounds, had gone into the fifties. He indignantly refused to make a bid for the "Conversation Piece" ascribed to Hogarth. "What a period! what an outlook!" he cried. "William Kent the arbiter of taste, portraits with the clothes done by drapery men. Conversation Pieces with stupid gentlemen and stupid ladies doing nothing stupidly, and Hogarth flooding the town with his dreadful moralities. Pah!" He shook himself, emitted an exclamation of disgust that made the auctioneer glance quickly in his direction, and then said brusquely, "What do you think of Matisse?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE II.--HOGARTH'S SISTER

(In the National Gallery, London)

This das.h.i.+ng and brilliant portrait probably represents Ann Hogarth, the artist's younger sister, who died, unmarried, in 1771. Note the vivacious and original way in which Hogarth has handled this sympathetic subject, and the skill with which he has, as it were, "subst.i.tuted light and colour for paint."]

I was not going to be drawn into that. I knew that Matisse was _le dernier cri_, the newest "master," the idol of the moment among the "advanced," who had pa.s.sed beyond the re-discovery of Cezanne and Van Gogh. Hogarth, the painter Hogarth, not the "pictur'd moralities"

Hogarth, had also had his period of re-discovery. Perhaps it began that day in the eighties when Whistler was admiring, "almost smelling," the Ca.n.a.lettos in the National Gallery, while his companion, Mr. Pennington, was seeing for the first time Hogarth's "Marriage a la Mode" series, "fairly gasping for breath," to quote his own words.

"Come over here, quickly," cried Pennington. "What's the matter?" said Whistler, turning round. "Why! Hogarth! He was a great painter!"

"Sh--sh," said Whistler (pretending he was afraid that some one would overhear), "Sh--sh. Yes! _I know it.... But don't you tell 'em._"

Whistler had known that Hogarth was a great painter for years. His appreciation of the pugnacious little man of genius, with "a sort of knowing jockey look," to quote Leigh Hunt, dated from his boyhood.

"From then until his death," says Mr. Pennell, "Whistler always believed Hogarth to be the greatest English artist who ever lived, and he seldom lost an opportunity of saying so."

Well, it is a long time since the eighties, and to-day the fame of Hogarth as a painter is as great as was his fame as a moralist and satirist in the eighteenth century. Indeed I observe that some writers are beginning to resent praise of Hogarth as a painter, considering that the incident is closed, that all are agreed. That is not so. My friend, the connoisseur, who sat by my side at the auction sale, dissents. When he asked me fiercely what I thought of Matisse, I countered with the question--"What do you think of Hogarth?"

His answer was short and to the point. "There are only two of his things that interest me. They're great. I mean, of course, 'The Shrimp Girl,' and 'The Stay Maker.' No! I don't care about his moralities, and satires, and progresses. Single figures and incidental pa.s.sages are charming, as good as the best episodes in Frith, but as a whole they're dowdy, and every one of them shouts. I object to shouts and screams in art. Exaggeratedly exact and humorous records of eighteenth-century life and topography they may be, but I don't want to be reminded of the eighteenth century. Give me the present or the real past, not the past of yesterday. It's too near, too like us in our Bank Holiday moods, to be pleasant. Whistler called him the greatest English artist, did he? Merely another example of Whistler's extravagance. Hogarth has his place. Let us keep cool and keep him there."

"But consider his portraits," said I, "and the charm and skill of his oil paintings. Consider them apart altogether from the engravings, which do not do the pictures any sort of justice. 'The Stay Maker,' I remember, was hung at the Old Masters in 1908 with twenty-eight other Hogarths. What a display that was. Consider 'Garrick and his Wife,'

'Mary Hogarth,' 'Miss Lavinia Fenton,' 'The Servants,' the superb 'Marriage a la Mode,' 'Captain Coram,' 'Peg Woffington,' 'The Fis.h.i.+ng Party,' 'Pall Mall,' 'George II. and his Family,' at Dublin, the water piece from the 'Idle Apprentice' series. And above all consider the time when he lived--you _must_ consider that. He was born in 1697.

Like Giotto and Watteau, he was a pioneer."

"I don't take the slightest account of an artist's period," said my companion, as we moved away from the auction room. "The date of his birth doesn't interest me in the least. I ask myself only, Was he a great artist? Call Hogarth the Father of English Painting if you like, say that he set the ball rolling, that he gave life to dry bones, then recall his achievement, and where does he stand? What are his six best works against Gainsborough's best six? What is his 'Captain Coram' to Reynolds's 'Lord Heathfield,' and much as I admire his 'Stay Maker,'

what is it to Watteau's 'Gersaint's Sign'? Compliment Hogarth as much as you like, say that he was half-a-dozen men in one--satirist, publicist, draughtsman, engraver, moralist, caricaturist, painter--but keep him in his place. I admit that he had an extraordinary gift for putting on the colour clean, swift, and straight, but don't magnify his gifts. Hogarth was a fighting preacher, an eighteenth-century Dr.

Clifford with a natural apt.i.tude for drawing and painting. He was half publicist, half artist. Now Matisse was artist all through. Maurice Denis understands him perfectly, and that article of Denis's in 'L'Occident' was--But you haven't told me what you think of Matisse?"

II

HOGARTH AS DELIVERER

I refused absolutely to consider Matisse. Let all thought of Matisse be banished. The subject of this little book is Hogarth, and in studying him or any other artist, I entirely disagree with my friend, the connoisseur, that one must disregard his period, ignore his birth-date, and consider only his achievement. Hogarth was born in 1697, and being an original he turned his back upon convention and faced realities. But although he reproduced, with consistent forcefulness, the life of his day, now and again he suffered himself to be influenced by convention. Did not he write: "I entertained some hopes of succeeding in what the puffers in books call the _first style of history painting_: so that without having a stroke of this _grand_ business before, I quitted small portraits and familiar conversations, and with a smile at my own temerity commenced history painting, and on a great staircase at St. Bartholomew's Hospital painted the Scripture stories, 'The Pool of Bethesda' and 'The Good Samaritan,' with figures seven feet high." These are his failures, because he was looking not at life, but at picture-land. A failure, too, was the altar-piece for St. Mary Redcliffe at Bristol, painted as late as 1756, when he was fifty-nine. For this huge altar-piece, in three compartments, he received five hundred and twenty-five pounds. Removed in 1858 to the Bristol Fine Arts Academy, this immense triptych was last year sent to London for sale, which seems unkind, if not cruel, to the memory of Hogarth. He painted these "grand manner" canvases because, as he says, "I was unwilling to sink into a _portrait manufacturer_." Had Hogarth succeeded in "the first style of history painting," had he continued in that facile convention, he would never have been hailed as the Father of English Painting, and Sir Walter Armstrong would a.s.suredly never have written in his survey of "Art in Great Britain and Ireland"

these words: "At the end of the seventeenth century fortune sent a deliverer."

A deliverer from what? From the thraldom of foreign artists, and artists of foreign extraction, and from the monotonous level of mediocrity into which British art had sunk after the "Kneller tyranny." Perhaps two parallel lists of portrait painters will be the best exemplification, one beginning with Holbein, who was born just two hundred years before Hogarth, the other with Hogarth--the deliverer. Many minor names are, of course, omitted.

BEFORE HOGARTH ENTER HOGARTH Holbein 1497-1543 Hogarth 1697-1764 Bettes ?1530-1573 Hudson 1701-1779 Jonson 1593-1664 Ramsay 1713-1784 Van Dyck 1599-1641 Reynolds 1723-1792 Dobson ?1600-1658 Cotes 1725-1770 Walker 1610-1646 Gainsborough 1727-1788 Lely 1618-1680 Romney 1734-1802 Mary Beale 1632-1697 Raeburn 1756-1823 Kneller 1646-1723 Hoppner ?1758-1810 Richardson 1665-1745 Opie 1761-1801 Thornhill 1675-1734 Lawrence 1769-1830 Vanloo 1684-1745

In pre-Hogarthian days first Holbein and later Van Dyck dominated British art, Van Dyck's being by far the stronger influence. Indeed it has lasted until to-day. Dobson, a sterling painter, was a pupil of Van Dyck's. Lely was born at Soest near Utrecht, Kneller at Lubeck, and Vanloo at Aix. The residuum of native-born painters is not very important, and although one might add a score of names to those included in the pre-Hogarthian list, it is obvious that before the day of the "st.u.r.dy little satirist," with his hatred of all things foreign, including the "black old masters," and his love of all things English, except William Kent and his circle, and such folk as happened to annoy him, art in England had no independent growth. It certainly was not racial, and it was not characteristic in any way of the English temperament or the English vision. After Hogarth, excluding his minor contemporaries, Hudson, Ramsay, and Cotes, the art of Great Britain was illumined by the light of genius, native born, which began with Reynolds and Gainsborough, and spread out in varying and decreasing splendour down to the prettinesses of Lawrence.

Had Hogarth any influence? In one way he had. He was the founder of the anecdotic school. But, in the eighteenth century, he was regarded as a satirist, as a maker of "moral pieces," and, with a few exceptions, he won small esteem as a painter. Sir Joshua hardly mentions him, although they both lived for years in Leicester Fields, and Sir Joshua must have known his portraits well, and must often have seen the little man, twenty-six years his senior, walking within the enclosure "in a scarlet _roquelaure_ or 'rockelo,' with his hat c.o.c.ked and stuck on one side, much in the manner of the Great Frederick of Prussia."

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE III.--MISS FENTON (In the National Gallery, London)

Here we have the famous actress, Miss Lavinia Fenton, as "Polly Peachum" in the "Beggar's Opera." Born in 1708, she married, as his second wife, Charles Paulet, third Duke of Bolton: she died in 1760. The "Beggar's Opera" was produced at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1728.]

Whatever private admiration Sir Joshua may have had for Hogarth as a painter, there are few signs of it in his public utterances. Was it because "our late excellent Hogarth imprudently, or rather presumptuously, attempted the great historical style"? But Hogarth had some praise from the President in the Fourteenth Discourse, delivered on December 10, 1788, twenty-four years after Hogarth's death. He is accredited with "extraordinary talents," with "successful attention to the ridicule of life," with the "invention of a new species of dramatic painting." Lamb, dear Lamb, took up the cudgels for Hogarth even as a historical painter, arguing that "they have expression of _some sort or other_ in them. 'The Child Moses before Pharaoh's Daughter,' for instance, which is more than can be said of Sir Joshua Reynolds's 'Repose in Egypt.'" Well, it does not matter either way.

Neither Hogarth nor Sir Joshua live by their "excursions into the Holy Land."

The point I wish to labour is that the admiration of Hogarth's contemporaries was almost entirely for his "pictur'd morals," not for his paintings. It was his engravings that made him known; few saw the paintings, and it was only when the paintings began to be studied long after his death, that his greatness was revealed. Selections of his works were brought together in 1814, 1817, and 1862. By the latter date connoisseurs acknowledged that Hogarth "was really a splendid painter."

Who can be surprised that the "pictur'd moral" engravings were popular--"The Harlot's Progress," "The Rake's Progress," "Marriage a la Mode"? They were a new thing in British art. Here was the life of the day reproduced, accented stridently and humorously. The people were interested, bought the engravings, found their satire amusing, and remained unregenerate. The pirates copied them, Hogarth fought the pirates, and he found that the success of "these pictures on canvas similar to representations on the stage," enabled him to meet the expenses of his family, which portraits and "Conversation Pieces" had failed to do. It was the engravings that were popular, that sold. The pictures themselves brought him little fame and little money. It was six years before the "Marriage a la Mode" series found a purchaser. In 1751, Mr. Lane of Hillingdon bought the set for one hundred and twenty pounds at the queer sale devised by Hogarth, one of the stipulations being that no dealers in pictures were to be admitted as bidders.

There was no crush. Only three people were present at the sale--Hogarth, Dr. James Parsons, and Mr Lane, the buyer.

Connoisseurs.h.i.+p in painting was at a low ebb in the first half of the eighteenth century. The old masters, the "old dark masters," whom Hogarth attacked so vigorously, were supposed to have said the last word in painting. There was no national collection, and no display of pictures until Hogarth originated the exhibition at the Foundling Hospital in 1740 with the presentation to the inst.i.tution of his "Captain Coram." Between 1717 and 1735, when "The Rake's Progress"

appeared, Hogarth had issued a vast number of prints, and he continued to do so until the end of his life, closing the amazing series with "The Bathos," done with cynical humour just before his death.

Walpole a.s.serted that "as a painter Hogarth had but slender merit,"

Churchill called him a "dauber," and Wilkes spoke of his portraits as "almost beneath all criticism," but these gentlemen were prejudiced.

Lamb made the neat remark that we "read" his prints, and "look" at other pictures; Northcote said, "Hogarth has never been admitted to rank high as a painter;" but Walter Savage Landor atoned for these depreciations by proclaiming that "in his portraits he is as true as Gainsborough, as historical as t.i.tian," which is neither true nor good sense.

To-day, of course, everybody, with a few exceptions, extols Hogarth as a painter, and students of the manners of the eighteenth century continue to peer at his engravings.

Hogarth, of course, thought well of himself.

"That fellow Freke," he said once, "is always shooting his bolt absurdly one way or another."

"Ay," remarked his companion, "but at the same time Mr. Freke declared you were as good a portrait-painter as Van Dyck."

"_There_ he was in the right," quoth Hogarth.

And Mrs. Hogarth thought well too of the painter quality in her "st.u.r.dy, outspoken, honest, obstinate, pugnacious little man,"

who--one is glad to believe--once pummelled a fellow soundly for maltreating the beautiful drummeress who figures in "Southwark Fair."

In one of his "Eighteenth Century Vignettes," Mr. Austin Dobson tells us that Mrs. Hogarth, who survived her husband twenty-five years, thought that his pictures had beautiful colour, and that he was more than a painter of morals.

Mrs. Hogarth had insight, or perhaps she remembered what the little man of genius must often have told her. He knew what he was worth, he knew the illuminating power of his light, and it was not his way to hide it under a bushel.

III