HOGARTH, William

The Scene from the Beggar’s Opera was among the first of Hogarth’s topical pictures in a career that had begun with portraits and conversation pieces. Later he moved from the contemporary theatrical life to complete series of pictures of his own devising in subject: The Rake’s Progress and Marriage à la Mode.

The painting belongs to the series entitled An Election.

Among the strong didactic pieces by Hogarth is Gin Lane, his graphic lecture on the evils of drinking gin. “Idleness, poverty, misery and distress, which drives even to madness and death” - this is the price one pays for indulgence in this poison. The companion print, Beer Street, encourages the use of this beverage, for, as Hogarth said, it is an “invigorating liquor” and on this street “all is joyous and thriving. Industry and jollity go hand in hand.” No modern copywriter could produce a more persuasive argument.

In most of Hogarth’s plates one does not look for expert handling, for he used his craft to tell a story rather than to demonstrate a technical skill - which he did not, in fact, possess. We “read” his pictures. We must examine every section of the plate, as we would read every page of a book to know everything that happens.

In the lower left-hand corner is the notorious gin cellar. Over the entrance is an inscription: Drunk for a Penny/Dead Drunk for Two Pence/Clean Straw for Nothing. On the lower right is a cadaverous itinerant ballad seller who also retails gin and obviously has imbibed more than he has sold. In the background, the buildings are empty or toppling - the area is rapidly becoming a slum. In one exposed room a man has hanged himself. In the right middle section there is some gaiety, some fighting, and much drinking.

In front of a pawnshop on the other side of the square, a carpenter is trying to pledge his tools, a housewife her pots. Their receipts will, of course, go for gin. The most horrible scene is in the foreground, where a woman, breasts exposed and a drunken grin on her face, reaches for a pinch of snuff. She has lost her grip on her child, who falls over the railing to the pavement below. Hogarth’s point is well made.

This is Scene 1 of the series of six, entitled The Marriage Settlement.

Controversial and quarrelsome, Hogarth is one of the most attractive and innovative British artists. Born in London, he trained as an engraver, later studying painting at a private academy, but was frustrated in his ambition to become an English ‘history painter’. He blamed this on the vogue for Old Masters and competition from Continental contemporaries. His vociferous patriotism, however, cannot disguise his own indebtedness to French art; nor did he hesitate to advertise his use of ‘the best Masters in Paris’ to engrave the series Marriage à la Mode, of which this picture is the first.

Since he could not earn a living as a portraitist or monumental painter, Hogarth conceived the notion of ‘modern moral subjects’ to be sold as engravings on subscription, as well as in their original painted state. In the spirit of the ‘comic epics’ of Henry Fielding, whom influenced and was later to influence him, these ‘comic history paintings’ are the works by which we best remember the artist and which most clearly express his own moral certitudes. They are related to sixteenth-century broadsheets, and to the ‘conversation pieces’ theatrical subjects which Hogarth himself helped to popularise.

Marriage à la Mode, ‘representing a Variety of Modern Occurrences in High-Life’, was advertised for subscription in April 1743. The theme, an unhappy marriage between the daughter of a rich, miserly alderman merchant and the son of an impoverished earl, was suggested by current events but also indebted to Dryden’s comedy of the same name, and by a recent play of Garricks. As the pictures were designed to be engraved - each print a mirror image of the composition incised on a copper plate - the sequence of events in every painting is reversed.

The series thus begins with the proud Earl pointing to his family tree rooted in William the Conqueror; he rests his gouty foot - a sign of degeneracy - on a footstool decorated with his coronet. Behind him is a lavish building in the new classical style, unfinished for lack of money; a creditor is thrusting bills at him. But on the table in front of him is a pile of gold - the bride’s dowry just handed him by the bespectacled alderman, who holds the marriage contract. Silvertongue, an ingratiating lawyer, whispers in the ear of the alderman’s daughter listlessly twirling her wedding ring on a handkerchief. Turning away from her to take snuff and admire himself in the glass - and, in the engraving, to lead our eye into the next tableau - is the foppish bridegroom. At his feet, symbolic of the couple’s plight, are a dog and a bitch chained to each other. From the walls horrid Italian Old Master martyrdoms presage tragedy, and a Gorgon’s head screams from an oval frame above the pair.

The rest of the series follows the pathetic adventures of the ill-assorted pair: he frequents a child prostitute and contracts venereal disease; she incurs debts in fashionable pursuits and takes Silvertongue as her lover. Discovered in a house of assignation, the lawyer kills the husband, is arrested and executed. The Countess, back in the alderman’ mean house (where the ‘low-life’ paintings on the walls are Dutch, and the dog is starving) swallows poison; her father strips her wedding ring from her hand and a servant takes her weeping child, whose crippled leg in a brace recalls his tainted inheritance.

This is Scene II of the series of six, entitled Shortly after the Marriage.

An indigenous ‘English School’ arose in 18th-century painting, driven to a significant extent by the many commissions emanating from the nobility. The social �lite had their portraits painted and were also fond of straightforward, unadorned paintings of their country houses and estates, or scenes from high society. The elegant Portrait of a Young Woman by William Hogarth is a representative example of the informal and detached portraiture practiced in England.

This is the second of a series of four paintings executed by Hogarth on the moral of elections between 1753 and 1758.

Hogarth, the son of a schoolmaster, was apprenticed to a silversmith and engraver in 1712, where his interest in copperplate engraving was aroused. He studied at Vanderbank’s Academy in St Martin’s Lane and at the art school of the court painter Thornhill, whose daughter he married in 1 729, and whose work left him with a life-long ambition to become an historical painter. While he was never to be successful in this field, he soon became well-known as an engraver and painter of pictures, such as the series A Harlot’s Progress (1732), A Rake’s Progress (1735) and Marriage à la Mode (1742-1744). These became so popular that he had to to take precautions against plagiarism.

This is scene III from the series of eight entitled A Rake’s Progress. It represents a night at the Rose Tavern, Covent Garden, where an orgy is in preparation under the direction of Leathercoat, standing in the doorway. Tom Rakewell, incapably drunk, is robbed by the women of the establishment.

Hogarth originally wanted to become a history painter, but this ambition seems to have been thwarted by a singular lack of interest on the part of his contemporaries. Posterity, too, has chosen to remember a very different Hogarth. He characterized the individual personalities of his sitters, revealed the unique within the typical, and in his tongue-in-cheek portrayals of human nature he documented the social mores of the age in areas beyond the sphere of the “historic” event. Then, as now, he was regarded as the painter of the private, the forgotten and the overlooked.

In the improvised composition of this oil sketch of The Shrimp Girl, we see Hogarth’s painterly talent at its very finest. Here, he succeeds in creating a spontaneous reiteration of his observations with all the impact of a first impression. The freshness of the moment is not transposed here into a smooth painterly technique, but is echoed in the vigorous and fleeting brushwork.

This spontaneous and fresh study recalls the style of Frans Hals and it can be considered a precursor of Impressionism.

This is a fine example of the conversation pieces which Hogarth executed at the beginning of his career.