C. Lewis Hind

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!

PLATE VI.—SARAH MALCOLM
(In the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

A portrait of the notorious Sarah Malcolm, charwoman and murderess, who was hanged near Mitre Court, Fleet Street, in 1733, for a triple murder. She was painted by Hogarth, in the condemned cell, two days before her execution. Mrs. Malcolm looks rather an attractive if a somewhat cunning matron, and her dress is certainly becoming. The painting, in tone and characterisation, is very pleasant, and we can forgive her the ostentatious display of the rosary.

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.

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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.

When I first saw the “George II. and his Family” at the Dublin National Gallery, I had a thrill similar to that I experienced when I first saw “Miss Rich.” 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. And the end of all was “The Bathos,” his last design, humorous, cynical, his finis, inscribed to his old enemies, “the dealers in dark pictures.” Game to the end was William Hogarth!