I refused absolutely to consider Matisse. Let all thought of Matisse be banished. The subject of this little book is Hogarth, and in studying him or any other artist, I entirely disagree with my friend, the connoisseur, that one must disregard his period, ignore his birth-date, and consider only his achievement. Hogarth was born in 1697, and being an original he turned his back upon convention and faced realities. But although he reproduced, with consistent forcefulness, the life of his day, now and again he suffered himself to be influenced by convention. Did not he write: “I entertained some hopes of succeeding in what the puffers in books call the first style of history painting: so that without having a stroke of this grand business before, I quitted small portraits and familiar conversations, and with a smile at my own temerity commenced history painting, and on a great staircase at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital painted the Scripture stories, ‘The Pool of Bethesda’ and ‘The Good Samaritan,’ with figures seven feet high.” These are his failures, because he was looking not at life, but at picture-land. A failure, too, was the altar-piece for St. Mary Redcliffe at Bristol, painted as late as 1756, when he was fifty-nine. For this huge altar-piece, in three compartments, he received five hundred and twenty-five pounds. Removed in 1858 to the Bristol Fine Arts Academy, this immense triptych was last year sent to London for sale, which seems unkind, if not cruel, to the memory of Hogarth. He painted these “grand manner” canvases because, as he says, “I was unwilling to sink into a portrait manufacturer.” Had Hogarth succeeded in “the first style of history painting,” had he continued in that facile convention, he would never have been hailed as the Father of English Painting, and Sir Walter Armstrong would assuredly never have written in his survey of “Art in Great Britain and Ireland” these words: “At the end of the seventeenth century fortune sent a deliverer.”

A deliverer from what? From the thraldom of foreign artists, and artists of foreign extraction, and from the monotonous level of mediocrity into which British art had sunk after the “Kneller tyranny.” Perhaps two parallel lists of portrait painters will be the best exemplification, one beginning with Holbein, who was born just two hundred years before Hogarth, the other with Hogarth—the deliverer. Many minor names are, of course, omitted.

In pre-Hogarthian days first Holbein and later Van Dyck dominated British art, Van Dyck’s being by far the stronger influence. Indeed it has lasted until to-day. Dobson, a sterling painter, was a pupil of Van Dyck’s. Lely was born at Soest near Utrecht, Kneller at LÜbeck, and Vanloo at Aix. The residuum of native-born painters is not very important, and although one might add a score of names to those included in the pre-Hogarthian list, it is obvious that before the day of the “sturdy little satirist,” with his hatred of all things foreign, including the “black old masters,” and his love of all things English, except William Kent and his circle, and such folk as happened to annoy him, art in England had no independent growth. It certainly was not racial, and it was not characteristic in any way of the English temperament or the English vision. After Hogarth, excluding his minor contemporaries, Hudson, Ramsay, and Cotes, the art of Great Britain was illumined by the light of genius, native born, which began with Reynolds and Gainsborough, and spread out in varying and decreasing splendour down to the prettinesses of Lawrence.

Had Hogarth any influence? In one way he had. He was the founder of the anecdotic school. But, in the eighteenth century, he was regarded as a satirist, as a maker of “moral pieces,” and, with a few exceptions, he won small esteem as a painter. Sir Joshua hardly mentions him, although they both lived for years in Leicester Fields, and Sir Joshua must have known his portraits well, and must often have seen the little man, twenty-six years his senior, walking within the enclosure “in a scarlet roquelaure or ‘rockelo,’ with his hat cocked and stuck on one side, much in the manner of the Great Frederick of Prussia.”

Whatever private admiration Sir Joshua may have had for Hogarth as a painter, there are few signs of it in his public utterances. Was it because “our late excellent Hogarth imprudently, or rather presumptuously, attempted the great historical style”? But Hogarth had some praise from the President in the Fourteenth Discourse, delivered on December 10, 1788, twenty-four years after Hogarth’s death. He is accredited with “extraordinary talents,” with “successful attention to the ridicule of life,” with the “invention of a new species of dramatic painting.” Lamb, dear Lamb, took up the cudgels for Hogarth even as a historical painter, arguing that “they have expression of some sort or other in them. ‘The Child[Pg 25]
[Pg 26] Moses before Pharaoh’s Daughter,’ for instance, which is more than can be said of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Repose in Egypt.’” Well, it does not matter either way. Neither Hogarth nor Sir Joshua live by their “excursions into the Holy Land.”

The point I wish to labour is that the admiration of Hogarth’s contemporaries was almost entirely for his “pictur’d morals,” not for his paintings. It was his engravings that made him known; few saw the paintings, and it was only when the paintings began to be studied long after his death, that his greatness was revealed. Selections of his works were brought together in 1814, 1817, and 1862. By the latter date connoisseurs acknowledged that Hogarth “was really a splendid painter.”

Who can be surprised that the “pictur’d moral” engravings were popular—“The Harlot’s Progress,” “The Rake’s Progress,” “Marriage À la Mode”? They were a new thing in British art. Here was the life of the day reproduced, accented stridently and humorously. The people were interested, bought the engravings, found their satire amusing, and remained unregenerate. The pirates copied them, Hogarth fought the pirates, and he found that the success of “these pictures on canvas similar to representations on the stage,” enabled him to meet the expenses of his family, which portraits and “Conversation Pieces” had failed to do. It was the engravings that were popular, that sold. The pictures themselves brought him little fame and little money. It was six years before the “Marriage À la Mode” series found a purchaser. In 1751, Mr. Lane of Hillingdon bought the set for one hundred and twenty pounds at the queer sale devised by Hogarth, one of the stipulations being that no dealers in pictures were to be admitted as bidders. There was no crush. Only three people were present at the sale—Hogarth, Dr. James Parsons, and Mr Lane, the buyer.

Connoisseurship in painting was at a low ebb in the first half of the eighteenth century. The old masters, the “old dark masters,” whom Hogarth attacked so vigorously, were supposed to have said the last word in painting. There was no national collection, and no display of pictures until Hogarth originated the exhibition at the Foundling Hospital in 1740 with the presentation to the institution of his “Captain Coram.” Between 1717 and 1735, when “The Rake’s Progress” appeared, Hogarth had issued a vast number of prints, and he continued to do so until the end of his life, closing the amazing series with “The Bathos,” done with cynical humour just before his death.

Walpole asserted that “as a painter Hogarth had but slender merit,” Churchill called him a “dauber,” and Wilkes spoke of his portraits as “almost beneath all criticism,” but these gentlemen were prejudiced. Lamb made the neat remark that we “read” his prints, and “look” at other pictures; 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.

Hogarth, of course, thought well of himself.

“That fellow Freke,” he said once, “is always shooting his bolt absurdly one way or another.”

“Ay,” remarked his companion, “but at the same time Mr. Freke declared you were as good a portrait-painter as Van Dyck.”

“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. Hogarth, who survived her husband twenty-five years, thought that his pictures had beautiful colour, and that he was more than a painter of morals.

Mrs. Hogarth had insight, or perhaps she remembered what the little man of genius must often have told her. He knew what he was worth, he knew the illuminating power of his light, and it was not his way to hide it under a bushel.