The “Picture Room” of the Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, that hushed, dim, small apartment, lighted by a lantern light, approached by a glazed door from the crowded corridor of this dignified house, crowded to excess with works of art collected by Sir John Soane (1753-1837), is virtually a Hogarth Room. You enter, and facing you, hung frame to frame, are the eight paintings illustrating “The Rake’s Progress,” purchased by Sir John Soane in 1802 for five hundred and seventy guineas. You turn to the left and your eyes alight upon Nos. 1 and 2 of the “Four Prints of an Election,” called “The Entertainment,” and “The Canvassing for Votes”; you turn to the right and there are the second pair, “The Polling,” and “The Chairing of the Member.”

Reams have been written about these pictures. I will be reticent—space compels it—and content myself with quoting one word, the word “matchless,” used by Charles Lamb to describe the first of the Election series. There are passages of beauty in all the scenes, as in “The Rake’s Progress,” but I find so large a meal as twelve “pictur’d morals,” hustling each other, a little difficult to digest. The Hogarth surfeit, a well-known ailment, always assails me in this lantern-lighted room of the Soane Museum. Perhaps it is the obsession of the “movable planes.” Opening at a touch, the walls slide away and disclose more, more, and more works of art. But I do not suffer from Hogarth surfeit at the Foundling Hospital, over which his fatherly spirit ever seems to brood.

The eighteenth century and the twentieth meet at the Foundling Hospital; the art of Hogarth, the art of his contemporaries, of young Mr. Joshua Reynolds, and the artless lives of the foundlings who patter the note of a past day in revivified Bloomsbury.

You will seek in vain for modernity at the Foundling Hospital. A reproduction of a popular picture of our day called “For Ever and Ever, Amen,” was the only example of a modern work of art in the playroom of the little girl foundlings at the Foundling Hospital where I found myself one Sunday.

Of course the little girls understood the picture. Their dawning minds can grasp a simple representation of the human gamut of love, loyalty, and grief from childhood to age. Not for them is Hogarth’s forcible, chaotic, amazingly clever “March to Finchley,” that hangs in one of the rooms.

But the little girls understand Hogarth’s bold and picturesque “Captain Coram” displayed in the place of honour, even though the gallant and charitable seaman may frighten them on darkening evenings by his very life-likeness, Hogarth’s great gift.

Captain Coram is very much alive, “all there.” Another moment and he will start from his chair. But this founder of the hospital will not shout at the children. This big man had a big, kind heart. His life was a long whisper of love to the fatherless.

It was here, at the Foundling Hospital, that Hogarth was instrumental in forming the first public collection of pictures in this country. Long before the National Gallery was thought of, before the Royal Academy was born, this Foundling Hospital collection was one of the sights of London. It was the fashionable lounge in the reign of George II.; here was held the first exhibition of contemporary portraits. And Hogarth, a governor and guardian of the Foundling Hospital, originated it.

He started the collection by presenting this portrait of Captain Coram in 1740, and he wrote, some years later, that it is “the best portrait in the place, notwithstanding the first painters in the kingdom exerted all their talents to vie with it.” But “the first painters”[Pg 71]
[Pg 72] were not a very mighty lot; they were Allan Ramsay, Cotes, Hudson, Shackleton, Wilson, Highmore, and a young man called Reynolds, who twenty years after Hogarth had given his “Captain Coram” presented his “Lord Dartmouth.” It is a pretty piece of delicate work, but Reynolds was not then in his prime, and I have a shrewd suspicion that when, in 1787, he produced his magnificent “Lord Heathfield,” great Sir Joshua had cast many a glance at Hogarth’s “Captain Coram,” painted forty-seven years before.

This is a problem for the elder foundlings. The mites are content with “For Ever and Ever, Amen.”

I watched them, after the long service in the chapel, silently and somewhat timorously enjoying their cold mutton and hot potatoes. Sullen rows and rows of them, all stamped by that sad something that characterises the homeless waif, something of degradation and the menace of the fight to come all uphill.

But as I mused sadly on this spectacle my eyes caught sight of a tablet on the wall, a list of many names of foundlings who had died for their country in the Boer War.

Well, the tears do start still sometimes. Think of that leap! Here a foundling by chance, later a hero by choice, one of that great brotherhood, equal in death, equally adored, of the privileged and the brave. “Dulce et decorum est——”

I am sure that Hogarth, of whom Dr Trusler wrote, “Extreme partiality for his native country was the leading trait of his character,” would approve that tablet, and so would Captain Coram.