Hogarth Part 2

V

HOGARTH AS PAINTER

The versatility of Hogarth's genius is a recurring surprise. His satires and moralities seem natural, the unforced expression of his vigorous, observant nature. Natural, too, seem the less inspired of his portraits, and the Conversation Pieces which employed the early years of his life; but the technical qualities of the best of his portraits and groups, and pa.s.sages in the Progresses, are a recurring surprise. "The Harlot's Progress" was finished in his thirty-fourth year. The paintings of this series "were consumed in the fire which burnt down Mr. Beckford's house at Fonthill in 1755," although there seems to be some doubt if all six pictures were destroyed.

The Progresses were a development of the Conversation Pieces, of which "The Wanstead a.s.sembly" was probably the first. This, which is now in the South London Art Gallery, proves to be "The Dance," one of the ill.u.s.trations to the "a.n.a.lysis of Beauty." I confess to finding the stiff and elegant breeding of these Conversation Pieces more attractive and certainly more amusing than many of his livelier scenes. Almost any of the Conversation Pieces could appositely ill.u.s.trate a novel by Miss Ferrier. There was one at the Old Masters'

Exhibition of 1910, "The Misses Cotton and their Niece," quite accurately described as "four ladies seated near a tea-table, with their backs to the fireplace; a fifth is standing, and a servant on the left is bringing a chair for her." Equally "nice," I am sure, were "The Rich Family," "The Wood Family," "The c.o.c.k Family," and "The Jones Family," and at the opposite pole to the bad Hogarth that was exhibited in the same room at Burlington House, supposed to be a memory of his five days' trip down the river to Sheppey. But it is unfair to judge Hogarth by "The Disembarkation": that was a _jeu d'esprit_, composed of "amusing incidents."

The Conversation Pieces having novelty, succeeded for a few years. We esteem them as the 'prentice work of a man of abounding energy and versatility, who was as conspicuous for his taste as for his lack of it. Hogarth seems to have had no particular prepossession towards beauty, but beauty occurs again and again in his paintings.

The face of the little wanton lady in the second scene of "Marriage a la Mode" is a delight; some of the heads of his servants are haunting.

Leslie has drawn attention to the exquisite prettiness of Juno in "Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn," and Mr. Dion Calthorp has written a whole charming article on the handsome drummeress of "Southwark Fair." Every student of Hogarth must have been struck by his sudden statements of beauty in ugly places, and of atrocities of bad taste anywhere. There is an episode in the "Night Scene, Charing Cross," that is disgusting, and I confess that the gobbling alderman in one of the "Industrious Apprentice" series gives me nausea. But he is never commonplace or feeble. This astonis.h.i.+ng man will paint a head here with the finish of a Terburg, there with the gusto of a Raeburn.

I never seem to get used to his incursions into beauty. The surprise recurred in Paris at the exhibition of the "Cent Portraits de Femmes."

I walked round the galleries playing the game of suggesting the names of the painters without referring to the catalogue. Among the portraits was one quite small, the head of a girl, fresh as a lark's song, an impromptu, a _premier coup_, colour simple, drawing gay. I ascribed it to Raeburn. It was Hogarth's "Miss Rich," owned by M. Max Michaelis. Then I paused and looked at the other Hogarths. Ah! there was that rendering, one of the most delightful of his portraits, of "Peg Woffington," lent by Sir Edward Tennant, not "dallying and dangerous" on a couch as in the version at the Garrick Club, but very charming, with a touch of primness that suits her. Here is Hogarth as true artist, the vision clear, the treatment direct. Note the daintiness of the flower in her bosom, the delicious colour of the dress, and the importance of the accent of the knot of black ribbon against the gleaming pearls. Oh yes! Hogarth knew his business!

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VI.--SARAH MALCOLM

(In the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

A portrait of the notorious Sarah Malcolm, charwoman and murderess, who was hanged near Mitre Court, Fleet Street, in 1733, for a triple murder. She was painted by Hogarth, in the condemned cell, two days before her execution. Mrs. Malcolm looks rather an attractive if a somewhat cunning matron, and her dress is certainly becoming. The painting, in tone and characterisation, is very pleasant, and we can forgive her the ostentatious display of the rosary.]

He painted Mrs. Woffington eight times. This one, pretty, plain Peg, with the rose in her corset, is my choice. The other two Hogarths at the "Cent Portraits de Femmes" exhibition were "Miss Arnold" from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, a robust work, forceful and somewhat heavy, and lacking the navete and charm of "Peg Woffington," and the notorious "Sarah Malcolm," charwoman and murderess, who was hanged near Mitre Court, Fleet Street, on the 7th of March 1733, for a triple murder. Says Dr. Trusler: "The portrait of this murderess was painted by Hogarth, to whom she sat for her picture two days before execution." Mrs. Malcolm is rather an attractive if a somewhat cunning matron, and her dress is certainly becoming. The painting, in tone and quiet characterisation, is very pleasant, and we can forgive her the ostentatious display of the rosary.

If only it had been possible to send "The Shrimp Girl" to Paris. That brilliant impressionist sketch, done long before the era of impressionism, would have astonished the French critics who are not already acquainted with it. Indeed, "The Shrimp Girl" is something of a miracle. She cries out from Hogarth's works, a _tour de force_, done without premeditation, in some happy hour when the unerring hand unerringly followed the quick eye. It is an inspiration. One may say of it as Northcote said of Frans Hals: "He was able to shoot the bird flying--so to speak--with all its freshness about it, which even t.i.tian does not seem to have done...." "The Shrimp Girl" was sold at Mrs. Hogarth's sale in April 1790 for four pounds ten s.h.i.+llings, and was purchased for the National Gallery in 1884 for two hundred and sixty-two pounds ten s.h.i.+llings. After Mr. Sidney Colvin's eulogy in _The Portfolio_, one may go to almost any extreme in expressing admiration for "The Shrimp Girl" and other of Hogarth's paintings.

Said Mr. Colvin: "Even Reynolds and Gainsborough, colourists often of an inexpressible loveliness, tenderness, and charm, were fumblers in their method compared with Hogarth.... Without a school, and without a precedent (for he is no imitator of the Dutchman), he has found a way of expressing what he sees with the clearest simplicity, richness, and directness."

Simple, rich, and direct is his portrait of "Garrick and his Wife" at Windsor Castle, a finished epic, quite unlike that lyrical sketch of "The Shrimp Girl." "Garrick and his Wife" was painted in 1757, when Hogarth was sixty. It is a flamboyant, decorative picture. Garrick, in blue and gold, is seen seated at a table in a moment of inspiration, pen in hand, cogitating the prologue to Foote's "Comedy of Taste." His wife, in a pink dress and white fichu, stands behind him, preparing to take the pen from his hand. She is alert and gay, he is invoking the muse; a charming picture, but if you look closely you will observe that Garrick's eyes are coa.r.s.ely painted, "evidently by another hand."

Thereby hangs a tale, a typical Hogarthian tale of wars in words, and in this case in deed too. Hogarth painted Garrick many times, receiving as much as two hundred pounds for his fine portrait of the "English Roscius" as Richard III.; but they quarrelled over the "Garrick and his Wife," and Hogarth in a fit of irritation drew his brush across the face, disfiguring the eyes. The picture was never delivered, never paid for, and on Hogarth's death his widow generously gave it to Garrick. It pa.s.sed into the possession of Mr. Locker of Greenwich Hospital, who sold it to George IV. In the memoirs of Mr.

Locker's son is the following pa.s.sage: "This picture is so lifelike that as little children we were afraid of it; so much so that my mother persuaded my father to sell it to George IV." That is a strange way for a picture to arrive in a royal collection. The King also owns the quaint, merry, crowded, landscape conversation-picture called "A View of the Mall, St. James's Park," but this evocation of the _beau monde_ of the day promenading in cinnamon coats and peach-bloom breeches, and the ladies in every Chanticler colour and vagary, has been attributed by some authorities to Samuel Wale, R.A.

Mr. Fairfax Murray is the fortunate owner of "A Fis.h.i.+ng Party," a small picture, nineteen by twenty-one and a half inches, which shows that Hogarth, besides his other gifts, was a master in romantic composition. On the border of a lake sit the fis.h.i.+ng party--a charming lady, a nurse, and a child in the full light, and a reflective gentleman in the shade. The baby holds the rod, the pretty mother guides it, and the float toys with the water. I protest that you rarely if ever see in these days so charming a portrait group composition as this designed by the Father of English Painting, who virtually had no forebears, and who turned from one branch of art to another with something of the ease of myriad-minded Leonardo. I suspect he studied the grace of Van Dyck's compositions.

Some of the early Victorian members of the New English Art Club would find it disadvantageous to pit themselves against the technical accomplishment of his tight, highly-finished "Lady's Last Stake." The subject is ba.n.a.l, and half-a-dozen Dutchmen could have painted this interior with more quality of surface and closer observance of light, but it is "done," and the paint has not faded and cracked as have so many works painted two hundred years later.

"The Lady's Last Stake" was a commission from Lord Charlemont. In 1757, in one of his periodical fits of vexation, Hogarth said he would "employ the rest of his time in portrait painting," but three years afterwards we find him, in weatherc.o.c.k mood, "determined to quit the pencil for the graver." Lord Charlemont begged him, before he "bade a final adieu to the pencil," to paint him one picture. The result was this morality of the handsome, wicked officer, and the young and virtuous married lady. Mrs. Thrale was wont to allege that she sat for the fair gambler.

"The Stay Maker" should hang beside Watteau's "Gersaint's Sign," each a representation of a costumier's shop, each a masterpiece, but as it is impossible to bring together these two works by these two geniuses who were contemporaries, and who brought about the rebirth of art in France and England, I am quite content that "The Stay Maker" should remain where it is, helping to decorate an exquisite room in Mr.

Edmund Davis's house. There is only one other picture on the wall--a Gainsborough portrait. "The Stay Maker" is a sketch, almost in monochrome, showing a man-milliner measuring a lady, while another mondaine kisses a baby fondly, but not on its chubby face. This little picture (thirty-five by twenty-seven inches) is full of life and gaiety, and is as delicate in its humour as "The Enraged Musician" at Oxford is forcible.

When I first saw the "George II. and his Family" at the Dublin National Gallery, I had a thrill similar to that I experienced when I first saw "Miss Rich." It is an unfinished sketch, made when Hogarth was Sergeant Painter. Looking at it, again we wonder what heights this man might have reached had he received the encouragement that is given to eminent painters of our day. But, as it was, in spite of everything, Hogarth boxed the compa.s.s, and when he wrote "genius is nothing but labour and diligence," the "ingenious Mr. Hogarth," as Fielding called him, did not take into account that something else (which is genius) that was born in him, and that he struggled to express, and succeeded in expressing so triumphantly. And the end of all was "The Bathos," his last design, humorous, cynical, his finis, inscribed to his old enemies, "the dealers in dark pictures." Game to the end was William Hogarth!

VI

SOME PICTURES IN NATIONAL COLLECTIONS

If it interests you to study the variety of Hogarth's achievement in paint, his ladder-like progress, now up, now down, visit the Hogarth Room at the National Gallery and turn from the prim and meticulous handling of "A Family Group" (No. 1153) to the dash and brilliancy of his "Sister" (No. 1663); from "Sigismonda Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo," painted late in life, in one of his reactionary, "grand manner" moods, a commission that the patron, Sir Richard Grosvenor, refused to take; turn from academic, tear-sprinkled Sigismonda to the sparkle and impulse of "The Shrimp Girl." I have already expressed my admiration for this amazing sketch, and Sir Walter Armstrong, in his technical a.n.a.lysis of the painting of "Hogarth's Sister," has said all there is to say on the vivacious and original way in which Hogarth handled this sympathetic subject, and the skill with which he has, as it were, subst.i.tuted light and colour for paint. Sir Walter notes that the system of colour is that followed by Eugene Delacroix a century later, who was under the impression that he was the innovator; that "the high lights and the deep shadows are in each case two primaries, which unite to form a half tone. The dress which produces the effect of yellow is yellow in the high lights, red in the deepest shadows, and orange in the transitions; so with the scarf, the three tints of which are yellow, green, and blue."

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VII.--SIMON FRASER, LORD LOVAT, 1666-1747

(In the National Portrait Gallery, London)

Here is the chief of the Fraser clan (patriot or traitor, which you like), a study in reds, browns, corpulency and craftiness, in the act of narrating some of his adventures, or perhaps detailing the various Highland clans on his fingers. Lord Lovat was executed for high treason. Hogarth journeyed to St. Albans to get "a fair view of his Lords.h.i.+p before he was locked up."]

In no other painting of Hogarth's that I have seen does he make this striking use of primaries and complementaries. He adopted a different technique for the robust and cheerful portrait of "Miss Lavinia Fenton" (who became d.u.c.h.ess of Bolton) as "Polly Peachum" in the "Beggar's Opera," and also for the lively representation of a scene from the opera which he saw at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1723. This vivacious development of the Conversation Piece genre hangs close to "Hogarth's Sister," and to the right is the group of his "Servants"--six heads rather less than life size, one of the most quietly beautiful renderings of character, seen with the eyes of affection, with which master has ever immortalised his dependents.

After this, the "Calais Gate," or "The Roast Beef of Old England," a record of his collision with the Calais authorities, seems grotesque and gratuitously ugly in spite of its Hogarthian _brio_ and beautiful colour. The carrion crow on the top of the gate is an example of his ingenuity in extricating himself from a difficulty. The picture, when finished, fell down, and a nail ran through the cross above the gate.

Failing to conceal the rent, Hogarth subst.i.tuted for the cross a crow, and was quite pleased. In the engraving the cross appears in its rightful place. Carrion crow or cross! It was all one to this capable, confident, eighteenth-century Britisher, who would as lief paint a murderess in the condemned cell as a miss in yellow and laces, a Teniers-like "Distressed Poet" in a garret as a Velazquez-like "Scene from The Indian Emperor," a "Right Reverend Father in G.o.d" as the portrait of Quin the actor, Garrick's portly rival, in full-bottomed grey wig, lace ruffle, and brown coat richly frogged with gold. There can be no mistake as to the ident.i.ty. The portrait is inscribed "Mr.

Quin." Note the eloquent eye and the voluble mouth of this hearty eighteenth-century mummer.

I have kept the most popular of the Hogarth National Gallery pictures to the last--the famous "Marriage a la Mode" series. The detail of this "pictur'd moral" is a source of unending interest and pleasure to an endless procession of visitors. The eighteenth century may have found in the series a "horrible warning" of the consequences that follow profligacy in high life, but I am perfectly sure that no one in the twentieth century deduces any moral from this melodrama in paint.

It is more than that, it is a minute and craftsmanlike record of the rooms and decorative adjuncts of a wealthy and fas.h.i.+onable man's house in Hogarth's day, with his manner of living pushed almost to caricature, which was Hogarth's method of satire and fierce moral rebuke.

The engravings tell the fatal, foolish story; but to connoisseurs the quality and clarity of the paint is the thing. What could be more exquisite than the characterisation of the lady in Scene II., "Shortly after Marriage," her pretty, dissolute, provocative face, the abandon of her figure, and the haplessness of the peer, too bored and tired after his night's debauch even to think of remorse. The clock marks twenty minutes after twelve in the morning, the candles beneath the portraits of the four saints on the wall of the inner room are guttering, a dog sniffs at a lady's cap peeping from the husband's pocket, and the book protruding from the coat of the old steward is t.i.tled "Regeneration." Hogarth never stayed his hand. The details are innumerable, amusing, italicised. I look and smile quietly, returning always to the characterisation of those two figures, the husband and wife, so delicately observed, so exquisitely painted.

In the middle of the wall at the National Gallery, facing the "Marriage a la Mode" series, painted in the same year when he was forty-eight, is Hogarth's own portrait with his dog Trump. Blue-eyed, watchful, st.u.r.dy, wearing a fur cap, with a scar over his left eye, he has, indeed, "a sort of knowing, jockey look." He was not a modest man. Why should he have been? In this portrait he allows himself great company. The oval rests on three volumes labelled "Shakespeare,"

"Milton," and "Swift," and in the lower left corner, drawn on a palette in the corner, is a serpentine curve with these lines under it, "The Line of Beauty," the flaunting inscription which gave rise to his book, "The a.n.a.lysis of Beauty." "No Egyptian hieroglyphic ever amused more than it [the serpentine curve] did for a time," he tells us. The requests for a solution of the enigma were so numerous that he wrote "The a.n.a.lysis of Beauty" to explain the symbol. The book, although shrewd in parts, was a dire failure. "The world of professional scoffers and virtuosi fell joyously upon its obscurities and incoherencies." The obscurities may be divined from the text of the book, which contains "the not very definite axiom," as Mr. Dobson calls it, attributed to Michael Angelo--"that a figure should be always Pyramidal, Serpentine, and multiplied by one, two, and three."

I pause to take breath, and refresh myself with an epigram that Hogarth wrote _apropos_ this ill-starred "solution of the enigma."

"What!--a book, and by Hogarth! then twenty to ten, All he gain'd by the _pencil_, he'll _lose_ by the pen."

"Perhaps it may be so--howe'er, miss or hit, He will publish--_here goes_--_it's double or quit_."

It was an old plate of his Portrait with dog Trump, on which the "Line of Beauty" appears, that he converted into "The Bruiser Charles Churchill" design, his answer to Churchill's "most virulent and vindictive satire," called "An Epistle to William Hogarth."

There are three works by him at the National Portrait Gallery--the early, unimportant "Committee of the House of Commons examining Bambridge"; the strong self-portrait, "Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse"; and that specimen of relentless and amusing characterisation, "Simon, Lord Lovat, painted by Hogarth before his Execution for High Treason." Hogarth journeyed to St. Albans to get "a fair view of his Lords.h.i.+p before he was locked up." Here is the chief of the Fraser clan to the life (patriot or traitor, which you like!), a study in reds, browns, corpulency, and craftiness, in the act of narrating some of his adventures, or perhaps detailing the various Highland clans on his fingers. This masterful, pawky Jacobite was tried before his peers in 1747, found guilty, and beheaded on Tower Hill. We know more of him from Hogarth's picture than from a whole book of doc.u.ments and descriptions.

And of all self-portraits is there one more self-revealing than "Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse"? He was then sixty-one. With his short-cropped grey hair he looks like a pugilist, and a pugilist he might have been had not Nature, so casual, so inexplicable in her gifts, chosen to plant the seeds of real artistic genius in the soul of belligerent, brave, preposterously British William Hogarth.

VII

THE SOANE MUSEUM AND FOUNDLING HOSPITAL

The "Picture Room" of the Soane Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, that hushed, dim, small apartment, lighted by a lantern light, approached by a glazed door from the crowded corridor of this dignified house, crowded to excess with works of art collected by Sir John Soane (1753-1837), is virtually a Hogarth Room. You enter, and facing you, hung frame to frame, are the eight paintings ill.u.s.trating "The Rake's Progress," purchased by Sir John Soane in 1802 for five hundred and seventy guineas. You turn to the left and your eyes alight upon Nos. 1 and 2 of the "Four Prints of an Election," called "The Entertainment,"

and "The Canva.s.sing for Votes"; you turn to the right and there are the second pair, "The Polling," and "The Chairing of the Member."

Reams have been written about these pictures. I will be reticent--s.p.a.ce compels it--and content myself with quoting one word, the word "matchless," used by Charles Lamb to describe the first of the Election series. There are pa.s.sages of beauty in all the scenes, as in "The Rake's Progress," but I find so large a meal as twelve "pictur'd morals," hustling each other, a little difficult to digest.