Part 2

‘Nor wou’d I, partial or audacious, strive To show what artists most excel alive: ... How Thornhill, Jervas, Richardson and Kent, Lambert and Hogarth, Zinks (Zincke) and Aikman paint; What Semblance in the Vanderbanks I see, And wherein Dall (Dahl) and Highmore disagree; How Wooten, Harvey, Tilliman and Wright, To one great End, in diff’rent Roads delight,’ &c.”

The verse is sorry stuff, is it not? One might go on for pages quoting from this bovrilised Bibliography. Under the date 1753 is the announcement of Hogarth’s unfortunate experiment in æsthetics--“The Analysis of Beauty. Written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas of Taste.” It would be pleasant to contrast Lamb’s eulogy from the famous essay in “The Reflector” with Mrs. Oliphant’s sorrowful comments. Space permits a few words only. “I contend,” says Lamb, “that there is in most of his subjects that sprinkling of the better nature, which, like holy-water, chases away and disperses the contagion of the bad.” Says Mrs. Oliphant: “Before his pictures the vulgar laugh, and the serious spectator holds his peace, gazing, often with eyes awestricken, at the wonderful unimpassioned tragedy. But never a tear comes at Hogarth’s call. It is his sentence of everlasting expulsion from the highest heaven of art.”

The serious spectator may hold his peace before Hogarth’s pictures, and I am quite prepared to admit that never a tear comes at Hogarth’s call, or, for the matter of that, at the call of any other artist, great or small. 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! and the eclectics of Bologna--reigned. But the world has grown older and taste has improved, has changed very much since the day of the “notorious Mr. Trusler,” whose name appears, with two other eighteenth-century authors, on the title-page of another book on Hogarth that I possess.

I bought it years ago for a few pence at a second-hand book shop. It is a “popular” edition, undated, written and compiled by John Trusler, John Nichols, and John Ireland, and is no doubt based upon “The Works of Mr. Hogarth Moralised (1768), with Dedication by John Trusler.” It was Mrs. Hogarth herself who, after her husband’s death, “engaged a Gentleman to explain each Print and moralise on it in such a Manner as to make them as well instructive as entertaining.”

Many in their youth must have gained their knowledge of Hogarth from this curious, informing volume, or from one of the many other compilations based upon the 1768 edition. The title of my volume precisely describes it--“The Works of William Hogarth: One hundred and fifty plates with Explanations.” On each left-hand page is the picture, filling the page; on each right-hand page is the description and explanation, usually filling the page. 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. 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.” I knew them well as a youth under the moral guidance of the Rev. 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? Did that terrible madhouse scene in “The Rake’s Progress” ever really happen? Did God permit such a travesty of love and life as the “Gin Lane” episode, or such ghastly horrors as “The Four Stages of Cruelty”? But there were some engravings that the boy thought infinitely amusing. One was “Time Smoking a Picture,” and another was the delightful “False Perspective.” The twelve plates of “Industry and Idleness” fascinated him (he was too young to understand the moral of “The Harlot’s Progress”), but “A Woman Swearing her Child to a Rich Citizen” seemed so enigmatically stupid that he never looked at it again. “The Altar-piece of St. Clement Danes Church” puzzled him. He knew enough of art to be aware that Hogarth was a strong and powerful draughtsman. Why, then, had he made and published this silly, weak illustration of angels and harps? The boy addressed the question to his uncle, and that gentleman, having perused the accompanying text, answered, “It was a burlesque of William Kent’s altar-piece.”

Whereupon the boy put the obvious question: “Who was William Kent?”

Uncle was silent, because, like the Master of Balliol on a certain occasion, he had nothing to say.

IV

WHO WAS WILLIAM KENT?

Who was William Kent? What is the record of the plump, self-satisfied dandy whose likeness may be seen at the National Portrait Gallery?

Do you like this ruddy round-faced man with the eloquent eye, the double chin, and the thick lips? His clothes are certainly attractive--the red velvet turban and the fawn-coloured jacket open at the front showing the frilled shirt. Bartholomew Dandridge, that “eminent face painter,” painted this portrait.

Yes; this is a striking presentment of William Kent, 1684-1748, who had many friends and many enemies. Among the enemies was William Hogarth, who hated Kent.

When you visit the National Portrait Gallery, turn your gaze slightly to the left, and you will see the representation of Hogarth at his easel, painted by himself. What would Hogarth say if he could know that the portrait of his old enemy now hangs near his? Perhaps he would smile a welcome, for anger is subdued by Death the Reconciler.

I return to the question: “Who was William Kent?” The legend beneath his portrait says: “Painter, sculptor, architect, and landscape gardener.” He was all these and much more--decorator, designer of furniture, man milliner, arbiter of taste, and general adviser on art and decoration to the fashionable world. Indeed, the name of William Kent flings wide the doors of the eighteenth century, which lives in all its crowded unattractiveness in Hogarth’s unapproachable pictur’d morals.

Kent lives also in one of Hogarth’s satirical prints, that called “The Man of Taste, Burlington Gate,” which does not strike me as either very funny or very cruel. 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.” Horace Walpole remarked that his painted ceilings were as “void of merit as his portraits.” Walpole also said that “Kent was not only consulted for furniture, frames of pictures, glass, tables, chairs, &c., but for plate, for a barge, and for a cradle, and so impetuous was fashion that two great ladies prevailed on him to make designs for their birthday gowns.”

Did the ladies like their birthday gowns? The petticoat of one was decorated with the columns of the five orders, the other was copper-coloured satin with ornaments of gold. I have never seen the altar-piece Kent painted for the Church of St. Clement Danes in the Strand, but I seldom pass St. Clement’s without thinking of that “contemptible performance,” as Hogarth called it.

It seems to have offended many others besides Hogarth, who satirised the altar-piece in the engraving that puzzled the boy mentioned in the preceding chapter. Walpole called it a parody, a burlesque on Kent’s altar-piece. Hogarth maintained that it was neither; that it was but a “fair and honest representation of a contemptible performance.” Terrible man, Hogarth, when he was on the war-path!

Where is that altar-piece now? Mr. Wheatly says in his “Hogarth’s London” that it was “occasionally taken to the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand for exhibition at the music meetings of the churchwardens of the parish.”

They had strange enjoyments in the worst-mannered period in our history.

Poor Kent! I try to plead for him. But it is difficult to be enthusiastic.

He was chosen to supply (delightful word that, supply!) the statue of Shakespeare for the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. There it remains. It is no better than the marble effigies in the mason’s gardens in the Euston Road.

Kent as an architect! There, surely, we have something sure and admirable. Holkam in Norfolk, Devonshire House in Piccadilly, and the Horse Guards are stated to be his work. That the Horse Guards from the park is a noble pile nobody can doubt, but is it all Kent’s? His hand also may be traced inside Devonshire House. Mr. Francis Lenygon, Kent’s modern champion, says that the two state apartments in Devonshire House are “certainly the finest in London, even if they can be surpassed in any palace in Europe.”

Lord Burlington was Kent’s champion during his lifetime. He met him when the “arbiter of taste” was thirty-two, and gave him apartments in his town house, now the Royal Academy, for the remainder of his life. Kent came through. Hogarth, try as he would, could not wreck him.

He died Master Carpenter to the King and Keeper of Pictures, and he left a fortune. Kent came through. The man must have had extraordinary gifts of persuasion and power, hinted at by his biographers when they speak of his winning manners and gracious ways.

I see nothing of charm in his portrait by Dandridge; but Dandridge was no psychologist. 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. 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 passages 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 Assembly” was probably the first. This, which is now in the South London Art Gallery, proves to be “The Dance,” one of the illustrations to the “Analysis 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 illustrate 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 Cock 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 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 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 astonishing 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!

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. 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 Titian does not seem to have done....” “The Shrimp Girl” was sold at Mrs. Hogarth’s sale in April 1790 for four pounds ten shillings, and was purchased for the National Gallery in 1884 for two hundred and sixty-two pounds ten shillings. 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 coarsely 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 passed 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 passage: “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 Fishing 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 fishing 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 banal, 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 weathercock 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.