C. Lewis Hind

“ He looks pompous; Hogarth looks pugnacious; so they remain in death as in life; but their rivalry is over. Everybody recognises Hogarth as the “father of English painting”; let us be kind to Kent, and cherish him as the “father of modern gardening.” Walpole called him that. The ascription will offend nobody, not even Hogarth. To that magnificent Londoner gardens were nought except perhaps the garden of his villa at Chiswick.
V
HOGARTH AS PAINTER
The versatility of Hogarth’s genius is a recurring surprise. ”

“ 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! ”

“ The eighteenth century and the twentieth meet at the Foundling Hospital; the art of Hogarth, the art of his contemporaries, of young Mr. Joshua Reynolds, and the artless lives of the foundlings who patter the note of a past day in revivified Bloomsbury.
You will seek in vain for modernity at the Foundling Hospital. A reproduction of a popular picture of our day called “For Ever and Ever, Amen,” was the only example of a modern work of art in the playroom of the little girl foundlings at the Foundling Hospital where I found myself one Sunday. ”

“ Plays or books may make us cry, but pictures never. Alfred Stevens remarked that. The serious spectator, if he has been well brought up, certainly holds his peace before Hogarth’s pictures, that is his paintings, but if he be a connoisseur his peace passes into joy at the pure colour, the fresh technique, the impulse and the vision of this great painter, whose fate it was to be regarded for so long as a mere moralist, and to be refused “the highest heaven of art,” where Raphael and Correggio—yes! ”

“ Hogarth never stayed his hand. The details are innumerable, amusing, italicised. What could be more exquisite than the characterisation of the lady, her pretty, dissolute, provocative face, and the abandon of the peer, too bored and tired, after his night’s debauch, even to think of remorse. ”

“ 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 compass, 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. ”

“ Our taste in satire has changed since Hogarth’s time. This same Burlington Gate or colonnade, which once stood outside Burlington House in Piccadilly, may now, I believe, be found somewhere in the wilds of Battersea Park.
Let us try to draw a little nearer to Kent. The queer thing is that this man who dominated his world does not seem to have been great in any of his activities.
As a painter, Hogarth said of him: “Neither England nor Italy ever produced a more contemptible dauber.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 Titian,” 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. ”

“ We know what has followed in this world—acknowledgment, admiration, the title of the Father of British Painting, and the example of a man who endured to the end, which is the most difficult of all the enterprises of life. For the end approaches to most of us when we are weakest. Hogarth broke the bell-rope. ”

“ To those who know Hogarth only through the piracies of his engravings and the worn impressions that have been scattered through the land, these brilliant proofs are a revelation. Rich, velvety, direct and accomplished in technique, the subjects have little of the amenities that moderns have been trained to expect in art-productions of a popular kind. ”

“ The blocks are worn, travesties of the original prints; the letterpress is no doubt just what Mrs. Hogarth desired when she “engaged a Gentleman to explain each Print and moralise upon it.”
The book is a monument to Hogarth’s fecundity as draughtsman, observer, and satirist, but it gives no hint of his capacity as painter. [Pg 37] Here is the dainty “Marriage à la Mode” pageant in a series of battered cliches; here is “The Shrimp Girl,” a mere dull illustration of a type in the same genre as “The Milk Maid” and “The Pie Man.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Dobson is as indispensable as a Blue Book to a politician. But unlike Blue Books, his writings are delightful. He is the eighteenth century, and his volume on William Hogarth is definitive. Originally published, I believe, in 1879, it has passed through several editions, being continuously improved and enlarged. One of its avatars was the stately and sumptuous art monograph of 1902, with some prefatory pages by Sir Walter Armstrong on the painter’s technique. ”

“ Dr. Trusler; knew them without love, without emotion. Then one day at the National Gallery I saw the paintings of the “Marriage,” “The Shrimp Girl,” and his “Sister,” saw “Polly Peachum” and “Peg Woffington,” and himself painting the Comic Muse, and lo! I discovered that Hogarth was a painter, here bold, there exquisite, according to the demands of the subject.
Something perilous was it for an imaginative boy to pore over the plates in the Trusler-Nichols-Ireland book, in the propriety of a well-ordered home. Had life ever been so odd, so ugly, so crowded, so forced? ”

“ The requests for a solution of the enigma were so numerous that he wrote “The Analysis 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 [Pg 65] 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.” ”

“ 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 [Pg 19] putting on the colour clean, swift, and straight, but don’t magnify his gifts. Hogarth was a fighting preacher, an eighteenth-century Dr. ”

“ The face of the little wanton lady in the second scene of “Marriage à 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 [Pg 48] in ugly places, and of atrocities of bad taste anywhere. ”

“ In writing of him it would be agreeable to confine one’s remarks entirely to his paintings, but that must not be. And why should it be? The more one peers into that busy, brutal, bewildering eighteenth century, the more interesting it becomes. Names start out. You dip here and there, and the names become clothed with personality. Mr. Dandridge, for example, who painted William Kent. Of them more anon. The first entry in Mr. Dobson’s Bibliography contains a mention of Dandridge, under the date 1731, when Hogarth was thirty-four. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Freke declared you were as good a portrait-painter as Van Dyck.”
[Pg 29]
“There he was in the right,” quoth Hogarth.
And Mrs. Hogarth thought well too of the painter quality in her “sturdy, 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. ”

“ Dobson; just to say that suffices. And at the end are thirty-five pages of a Bibliography of Books, &c., relating to Hogarth; thirty pages of a Catalogue of Paintings by or attributed to Hogarth; and sixty-three pages of a Catalogue of the Principal Prints by or after Hogarth. As a postscript to the Catalogue of Prints is this note: “It has also been thought unnecessary to include several designs, the grossness of which neither the ingenuity of [Pg 31] the artist nor the coarse taste of his time can now reasonably be held to excuse.” ”

“ 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 naïveté 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. ”