Henry Austin Dobson

“ It is now admitted that his merits as a painter are unquestionable, that his tints are pure and harmonious, his composition perspicuous, and his manner, without being minute or finely finished, singularly dexterous and direct. Even the much-abused ‘Sigismunda’ is now held at present to be a far better work than would ever be suspected from the gross obloquy to which, owing to the circumstances of its production, it was exposed during the artist's lifetime. ”

“ As Cruikshank refines upon Gillray and Rowlandson, so Leech refines upon Cruikshank, but to a much greater extent. His humour is to the full as keen, his sense of fun as marked ; but it is less grotesque, less boisterous, less exaggerated, nearer to truth and to ordinary experience. It is thoroughly manly, hearty, and generous. It delights in domestic respectabilities; in handsome, healthy womankind ”

“ Keene was never married. A modest, retiring, unobtrusive man, he passed his long life in the placid practice of his art, neither solicitous of applause, nor courting the rewards of popularity. Simple in his tastes and habits, he had but slender sympathy with the ambitions and ostentations of society, confining his chosen associates to a few old and tried friends. ”

“ Being honest and manly, it is also exceptionally pure in tone, and never depends for its laugh upon dubious equivocations. Its pictures of social dilemmas, of popular humours, of national antipathies, are of the most graphic and mirth-provoking kind, and yet the raillery is invariably good-humoured. ”

“ Another critic who has been unduly harsh to certain aspects of Hogarth's character is Horace Walpole. From a clever letter to George Montagu, dated 5 May 1761, it is clear that, however he may have appreciated his powers as a pictorial satirist, Walpole ranked him as a man with the rest of those outsiders of fashion, the Fieldings, Goldsmiths, Johnsons, &c., whose misfortune it was to be born beyond the pale of his own patrician circle, and that, even in the domain of art, he resented his claim to be a colourist, a portrait-painter, or a critic. ”

“ As an engraver Bewick has been justly styled the restorer of wood engraving in England. It is to the impulse which it received from his individual genius that its revival as an art must be ascribed. To give an account of the special features of his technique here would, however, be impossible. ”

“ Walpole enthusiastically describes it thus: 'It is a set of letters in verse, in all kind of verses, describing the life at Bath, and incidentally everything else; but so much wit, so much humour, fun, and poetry, so much originality, never met together before. Then the man has a better ear than Dryden or Handel. ”

“ On a far lower level than Hogarth, who was a moralist like himself, he sometimes comes near to him in tragic intensity. Many of his etchings are masterpieces of grouping (he managed crowds as well as Rowlandson, or the painter of the ‘March to Finchley’) , and of skilful light and shade. His illustrations for books have always this advantage, that they are honest and generally effective attempts to elucidate the text, not nowadays an ever-present ambition to the popular artist; but, like many other original designers, he is at his best when he freely follows his own conceptions. ”

“ In 1767, when Bewick went to Newcastle as an apprentice, the art of wood engraving had fallen into comparative disuse. For a long time previously, in truth, it can scarcely be said to have existed, except in its ruder forms. Tasteless emblematical ornaments and tail-pieces, diagrams and rough designs for magazines, illustrations of an elementary character for a few books like Croxall's 'Fables of Æsop,' together with the coarse knife-cut prints and broadsides already referred to, made up the chief examples. ”

“ He there appears as a fairly mischievous but not vicious lad, delighting in all sorts of youthful escapades. Already, however, he gave evidence of two tastes which strongly coloured his after life, a love of drawing, and a love of nature. ”

“ Bartholomew's Hospital, a few evenings before, at Dick's Coffee-house, had asserted that Greene was as eminent in composition as Handel. “That fellow Freke,” replied Hogarth, “is always shooting his bolt absurdly one way or another! Handel is a giant in music; Greene only a light Florimel kind of a composer.” “Ay,” says our artist's informant, “but at the same time Mr. Freke declared you were as good a portrait-painter as Vandyck.” ”

“ Gray, too, writes to Wharton (26 Aug. 1766) : 'Have you read the "New Bath Guide"? It is the only thing in fashion, and is a new and original kind of humour.' The 'new and original kind of humour' has by this time grown somewhat ancient in the metres of Barham and Moore and a hundred others, and the nineteenth century reader would scarcely endorse Walpole's view of the 'Methodist ditty,' which even in Anstey's day was sometimes pasted down by the scrupulous; but there can be no doubt of the contemporary popularity of the book, or its clever ridicule of fashion and her freaks. ”

“ Hence, to repeat some words we have used elsewhere, his birds, and especially those which he had seen and studied in their sylvan homes, are alive. 'They swing on boughs, they light on wayside stones; they flit rapidly through the air; they seem almost to utter their continuous or intermittent cries; they are glossy with health and freedom; they are alert, bright-eyed, watchful of the unfamiliar spectator, and ready to dart off if he so much as stir a finger. ”

“ Here, while the artist was working above in his eager, feverish way, often wounding his fingers by the ‘burr’ thrown up in the rapid progress of his needle over the copper, his brightly coloured works were dispensed in the shop beneath by Miss Humphrey or her giggling assistant, Betty Marshall. One of his prints, ‘Very Slippy-Weather’ (10 Feb. 1808) , represents the famous old shop, with its accustomed crowd outside (a crowd often so great that the passer-by had to quit the footway in order to get by) , and decorated by many well-known designs. ”

“ But his absolute command of the medium by which his work was to be presented to the public; his rigid suppression of the superfluous; his unfaltering instinct where to stay his stroke; these things, taken in connection with his fidelity to nature, his skill in composition, and his power of suggesting colour and seizing fugitive expression, made him an almost unique personality in humorous art. ”

“ Between the ‘Analysis’ and Hogarth's next unfortunate experiment comes the whimsical frontispiece to Kirby's ‘Perspective’ (1753) , cleverly embodying all the errors in that science of which ignorance could possibly be guilty, and even including a few that it could scarcely have committed. To this, heralded by the already-mentioned ticket entitled ‘Crowns, Mitres,’ &c., followed in 1755–8 the admirable ‘Election Series,’ four large plates engraved by Hogarth, C. Grignion, Morellon Le Cave, and F. Aviline. ”

“ But he seems to have had one quality not possessed by Thomas Bewick, a certain gift of grace, especially in his pictures of children. Whether he caught this from the novel illustration of the period is matter for speculation; but examples of it might easily be pointed out in the 'Looking Glass,' the 'Progress of Man,' and elsewhere. As an engraver he falls far below his brother. His style is flatter, more conventional, less happy in black and white. But he improved greatly in his latest work.
Only one portrait of John Bewick is known to exist— a crayon by George Gray in the Newcastle Museum. ”

“ But Haydon soon found that Wilkie, who, as he told a friend, was convinced that ‘no picture could possess real merit unless it was a just representation of nature,’ would not interfere with his own ambitions as a history painter, and the pair speedily became fast friends. Meanwhile Wilkie passed from the condition of probationer to that of student, attended Bell's lectures on anatomy, and got to work upon a new picture, of which he had already made a preliminary study at Edinburgh. ”

“ Shortly after Hogarth's marriage he must have set to work upon the paintings for the first of those ‘modern moral subjects,’ in which he aimed at ‘composing pictures on canvas, similar to representations on the stage’—in other words, at connecting a sequence of imaginary ‘conversation-pieces’ by a progressive story—‘a field,’ he further says, ‘not broken up in any country or any age.’ Borrowing a hint from Bunyan, he christened his first effort ‘A Harlot's Progress,’ and traced the career of his heroine from her first false step to her tragic end. ”

“ The circle at the palace, where Gillray's latest efforts were always regularly supplied wet from the press, are said to have been delighted with this production. They were even pleased with ‘Anti-Saccharites,’ which is by no means complimentary to Queen Charlotte, but it is scarcely to be wondered at that they were highly offended by ‘Sin, Death, and the Devil’ (9 June 1792) , in which the queen, as a loathsome hag, is shown interposing between Pitt and the black-browed Chancellor Thurlow. It may be doubted whether a more outrageous political attack has ever been made upon royalty. ”

“ BEWICK, ROBERT ELLIOT (1788–1849) , wood engraver, was the only son of Thomas Bewick [q. v.] . He was born on 26 April 1788, and was brought up to his father's business. In 1812 he became Thomas Bewick's partner. He designed with great care, and, as an engraver, was laboriously minute and accurate, but seems never to have developed the latent talent which his father believed him to possess (Memoir, p. 250) . He assisted Thomas Bewick in the 'Fables of Æsop,' 1818, and in the illustrations and vignettes for the projected 'History of British Fishes,' which occupied his latter days. ”

“ Life is a jest, and all things show it.
I thought so once, and now I know it.
It is but just, however, to say that he wished the words to be put on his tombstone, explaining them to signify ‘his present sentiment in life’ (ib. ii. 436) . Pope also wrote an epitaph for his monument, which, though it contains some happily characteristic lines, e.g. ‘In Wit a Man, Simplicity a Child,’ has never quite recovered the terrible mangling it received at the hands of Johnson (Epitaphs of Pope, 1756) . Gay's fortune, husbanded by the Queensberrys, amounted to about 6,000l. ”

“ Among the works of 1842 was a set of four etchings to ‘The Drunkard,’ a poem by John O'Neill; and other examples of his bias in this direction might be cited. But he capped them all in the eight plates of ‘The Bottle,’ which depict with a terrible downward march of degradation the tragedy of an entire family, from the first easy temptation of ‘a little drop’ to the final murder of the wife with the very instrument of their ruin. In ‘The Drunkard's Children,’ eight more plates, the remorseless moral is continued; the son becomes a thief, and dies in the hulks ”

“ Gamble ‘makes, buys, and sells all sorts of plate, rings, and jewels, &c.’ Many of Hogarth's designs for plate are highly prized by collectors, and John Ireland (iii. 25) prints a copy of a coat of arms in his possession, drawn for the Duchess of Kendal, which certainly gave promise of future excellence. During this period also, by a system which he has described in his autobiography, Mr. Gamble's apprentice was diligently training his perceptive faculty and fortifying his already exceptional eye-memory with a view to practising as a designer and line-engraver. ”

“ In Arbuthnot's letter above quoted he writes that Gay owes his life under God ‘to the unwearied endeavours and care of your humble servant; for a physician who had not been passionately his friend could not have saved him.’ Gay himself, writing to Swift on the previous day, had told the same tale. With the Queensberrys he seems to have continued for the rest of his life either in their town house or in their country seat of Amesbury in Wiltshire. They assumed, indeed, formal charge of him, the duke taking care of his money and the duchess watching over the poet himself. ”

“ Gay had never rendered any services to entitle him to those court favours which he wasted his life in expecting, and on more than one occasion must have made himself a persona ingrata to those in power. Beginning as a mere mercer's apprentice, from such slender poetical credentials as ‘Wine’ and ‘Rural Sports,’ he became the friend of all the best-known writers of his age, from Bolingbroke to Broome, and the companion of dukes and earls. ”

“ It was claimed for Hogarth, in Johnson's variation upon Garrick, that he saw the manners in the face, and his own portrait is the index of his character. The brisk, blue-eyed, manly, intelligent, and somewhat combative head with the scar over the right eye, which looks out from the canvas in the National Gallery, seems to accord completely with his verbal likeness as it has been handed down to us. ”

“ His tenderness and devotion to his family were remarkable even in a naturally amiable man. He is said to have been a good singer of a melancholy song, and affected much the 'King Death' of Procter ; and he occasionally figured, though without enthusiasm, in the amateur theatricals of Dickens, playing Master Matthew in 'Every Man in his Humour* at Miss Kelly's Theatre, Dean Street, Soho (now the Royalty) , in 1845. His chief amusement, however, was the hunting-field, and to his runs with the Puckeridge or the Pytchley we owe many of the subjects of his sporting sketches. ”

“ Canning, her mother, and a group of friends, went with an officer to Wells's house. Canning, who was still very weak, was taken from room to room. She identified (with certain discrepancies) a loft as the one in which she had been placed, and passing by Mrs. Wells, she selected one Mary Squires, an old gipsy of surpassing ugliness (there is a portrait of her in the ‘Newgate Calendar’) as the person who had cut off her stays and thrust her upstairs. ”

“ It had long been his practice to sketch from nature such picturesque details or animals as struck his fancy, and about 1871 he appears to have visited London with a view to begin life as an artist. Mr. Armstrong, the art-director of the science and art department at South Kensington, was one of his earliest advisers, and he recommended him to continue to study, but not to relinquish his occupation. A year later Caldecott came to London, and shortly afterwards began drawing for ‘London Society’ and other periodicals. ”

“ Internally safe, he seeks no sanctuary from himself, no intoxication for his mind. His penetration makes him discover and divert himself with the follies of mankind, which his wit enables him to expose with the truest ridicule, though always without personal offence. ”

“ The artist's ambition, bounded at first by engraving on copper, was growing wider. He had begun to attend the private art school on the east side of James Street, Covent Garden, established as far back as 1724 by Sir James Thornhill, a fact with which Hogarth's detestation of Sir James's rival, Kent, may perhaps be connected, and he was beginning to dream of success as a painter. ”

“ It is clear that in this Gay was merely the stalking-horse of political antagonism, but for the moment he was a popular martyr. ‘The inoffensive John Gay,’ wrote Arbuthnot to Swift, 19 March 1729, ‘is now become one of the obstructions to the peace of Europe, the terror of the ministers, the chief author of the “Craftsman,” and all the seditious pamphlets which have been published against the government. He has got several turned out their places; the greatest ornament of the court [i.e. Lady Queensberry] banished from it for his sake ”