If it interests you to study the variety of Hogarth’s achievement in paint, his ladder-like progress, now up, now down, visit the Hogarth Room at the National Gallery and turn from the prim and meticulous handling of “A Family Group” (No. 1153) to the dash and brilliancy of his “Sister” (No. 1663); from “Sigismonda Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo,” painted late in life, in one of his reactionary, “grand manner” moods, a commission that the patron, Sir Richard Grosvenor, refused to take; turn from academic, tear-sprinkled Sigismonda to the sparkle and impulse of “The Shrimp Girl.” I have already expressed my admiration for this amazing sketch, and Sir Walter Armstrong, in his technical analysis of the painting of “Hogarth’s Sister,” has said all there is to say on the vivacious and original way in which Hogarth handled this sympathetic subject, and the skill with which he has, as it were, substituted light and colour for paint. Sir Walter notes that the system of colour is that followed by Eugene Delacroix a century later, who was under the impression that he was the innovator; that “the high lights and the deep shadows are in each case two primaries, which unite to form a half tone. The dress which produces the effect of yellow is yellow in the high lights, red in the deepest shadows, and orange in the transitions; so with the scarf, the three tints of which are yellow, green, and blue.”

In no other painting of Hogarth’s that I have seen does he make this striking use of primaries and complementaries. He adopted a different technique for the robust and cheerful portrait of “Miss Lavinia Fenton” (who became Duchess of Bolton) as “Polly Peachum” in the “Beggar’s Opera,” and also for the lively representation of a scene from the opera which he saw at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1723. This vivacious development of the Conversation Piece genre hangs close to “Hogarth’s Sister,” and to the right is the group of his “Servants”—six heads rather less than life size, one of the most quietly beautiful renderings of character, seen with the eyes of affection, with which master has ever immortalised his dependents. After this, the “Calais Gate,” or “The Roast Beef of Old England,” a record of his collision with the Calais authorities, seems grotesque and gratuitously ugly in spite of its Hogarthian brio and beautiful colour. The carrion crow on the top of the gate is an example of his ingenuity in extricating himself from a difficulty. The picture, when finished, fell down, and a nail ran through the cross above the gate. Failing to conceal[Pg 61]
[Pg 62] the rent, Hogarth substituted for the cross a crow, and was quite pleased. In the engraving the cross appears in its rightful place. Carrion crow or cross! It was all one to this capable, confident, eighteenth-century Britisher, who would as lief paint a murderess in the condemned cell as a miss in yellow and laces, a Teniers-like “Distressed Poet” in a garret as a Velazquez-like “Scene from The Indian Emperor,” a “Right Reverend Father in God” as the portrait of Quin the actor, Garrick’s portly rival, in full-bottomed grey wig, lace ruffle, and brown coat richly frogged with gold. There can be no mistake as to the identity. The portrait is inscribed “Mr. Quin.” Note the eloquent eye and the voluble mouth of this hearty eighteenth-century mummer.

I have kept the most popular of the Hogarth National Gallery pictures to the last—the famous “Marriage À la Mode” series. The detail of this “pictur’d moral” is a source of unending interest and pleasure to an endless procession of visitors. The eighteenth century may have found in the series a “horrible warning” of the consequences that follow profligacy in high life, but I am perfectly sure that no one in the twentieth century deduces any moral from this melodrama in paint. It is more than that, it is a minute and craftsmanlike record of the rooms and decorative adjuncts of a wealthy and fashionable man’s house in Hogarth’s day, with his manner of living pushed almost to caricature, which was Hogarth’s method of satire and fierce moral rebuke.

The engravings tell the fatal, foolish story; but to connoisseurs the quality and clarity of the paint is the thing. What could be more exquisite than the characterisation of the lady in Scene II., “Shortly after Marriage,” her pretty, dissolute, provocative face, the abandon of her figure, and the haplessness of the peer, too bored and tired after his night’s debauch even to think of remorse. The clock marks twenty minutes after twelve in the morning, the candles beneath the portraits of the four saints on the wall of the inner room are guttering, a dog sniffs at a lady’s cap peeping from the husband’s pocket, and the book protruding from the coat of the old steward is titled “Regeneration.” Hogarth never stayed his hand. The details are innumerable, amusing, italicised. I look and smile quietly, returning always to the characterisation of those two figures, the husband and wife, so delicately observed, so exquisitely painted.

In the middle of the wall at the National Gallery, facing the “Marriage À la Mode” series, painted in the same year when he was forty-eight, is Hogarth’s own portrait with his dog Trump. Blue-eyed, watchful, sturdy, wearing a fur cap, with a scar over his left eye, he has, indeed, “a sort of knowing, jockey look.” He was not a modest man. Why should he have been? In this portrait he allows himself great company. The oval rests on three volumes labelled “Shakespeare,” “Milton,” and “Swift,” and in the lower left corner, drawn on a palette in the corner, is a serpentine curve with these lines under it, “The Line of Beauty,” the flaunting inscription which gave rise to his book, “The Analysis of Beauty.” “No Egyptian hieroglyphic ever amused more than it [the serpentine curve] did for a time,” he tells us. The requests for a solution of the enigma were so numerous that he wrote “The Analysis of Beauty” to explain the symbol. The book, although shrewd in parts, was a dire failure. “The world of professional scoffers and virtuosi fell joyously upon its obscurities and incoherencies.” The obscurities may be divined from the text of the book, which contains “the not very definite axiom,” as Mr. Dobson calls it, attributed to Michael Angelo—“that a figure should be always Pyramidal, Serpentine, and multiplied by one, two, and three.”

I pause to take breath, and refresh myself with an epigram that Hogarth wrote apropos this ill-starred “solution of the enigma.”

It was an old plate of his Portrait with dog Trump, on which the “Line of Beauty” appears, that he converted into “The Bruiser Charles Churchill” design, his answer to Churchill’s “most virulent and vindictive satire,” called “An Epistle to William Hogarth.”

There are three works by him at the National Portrait Gallery—the early, unimportant “Committee of the House of Commons examining Bambridge”; the strong self-portrait, “Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse”; and that specimen of relentless and amusing characterisation, “Simon, Lord Lovat, painted by Hogarth before his Execution for High Treason.” Hogarth journeyed to St. Albans to get “a fair view of his Lordship before he was locked up.” Here is the chief of the Fraser clan to the life (patriot or traitor, which you like!), a study in reds, browns, corpulency, and craftiness, in the act of narrating some of his adventures, or perhaps detailing the various Highland clans on his fingers. This masterful, pawky Jacobite was tried before his peers in 1747, found guilty, and beheaded on Tower Hill. We know more of him from Hogarth’s picture than from a whole book of documents and descriptions.

And of all self-portraits is there one more self-revealing than “Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse”? He was then sixty-one. With his short-cropped grey hair he looks like a pugilist, and a pugilist he might have been had not Nature, so casual, so inexplicable in her gifts, chosen to plant the seeds of real artistic genius in the soul of belligerent, brave, preposterously British William Hogarth.