Granted that for the later plates assistants were called in. Still, the vast mass of the stupendous work is by one man's hand. It was his province alone to conceive, to determine, to plan the picture, to discover and to arrange the models. No falling off, no weakness, is apparent from the Rake's Progress to the very end of his own honest career. He died in harness; and the strength, the wit, the humour, and the philosophy of the Bathos thunder forth a lie to Wilkes and Churchill, in their sneers at his dotage and his infirmity. When an artist is in the full tide and swing of his productive power,— when his early struggles for bread are over, and he is married and pays rent and taxes, and being known, can command an adequate, if not a generous remuneration for his daily labour,-his life, if his lot fortunately be cast in a peaceful and civilized country, must necessarily be uneventful. Young Robert Strange, roaming about the Highlands in '45, with his "craig in peril," engraving banknotes for the Pretender, and sheltering himself beneath ladies' hoops, from the hot pursuit of Duke William's soldiers, was a very wild and picturesque Bohemian. So was Callot scampering from fair to fair in Italy, with Egyptians, vagabonds, and mountebanks. So was David, screeching applause at the Serment du Jeu de Paume, and rushing home to transfer the oath to canvas, or, as some of the libellers assert, sitting at his easel at the scaffold's foct, and copying with red fidelity the facial contortions of those who died by the guillotine. But Strange becomes grave and portly Sir Robert, engraver to his Majesty, a worthy knight-bachelor, with a grand collection of antique prints and drawings, dwelling in his own house in King Street, Covent Garden. And you shall hardly recognize the erratic young companion of the Romany Rye, in the handsome, thoughtful cavalier in his point-lace, velvet justaucorps, and swaling plume to his beaver-the noble Jacques Callot, who lives near the Luxembourg, and draws martyrologies to the great delight of the Petits Pères, and employs "M. Israel son amy" to grave his etchings more forcibly. And who shall not marvel at the transformation of the ranting-club man of '93, long-haired, tri-colour-sashed, nine-tenths sansculotte, into M. le Baron Louis David, Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, who calls in his chariot to beg sittings from his Eminence the Cardinal, and his Grandeur the Arch-Chancellor, and Monseigneur the Archbishop, and messieurs the marshals, the senators, and the councillors of State, for the portraits that are to be introduced into the colossal picture of the coronation of his Majesty the Emperor and King, destined for the Salle du Sacre of Versailles? William Hogarth's earliest life had not been, as you have seen, very fruitful in incident. No desperate adventures had chequered his path. No doubt but that in his case, as in that of every child of humanity, "the days passed and did not resemble each other;" but still the days glided by without duels in Hyde Park or the fields behind Montagu House, without gallantries with my Lady Bellaston or Madame la Comtesse des Quatres Vents, without committals to the Tower for participation in Jacobite WILLIAM HOGARTH. plots. I daresay there were days when the crust to the goose-pie was somewhat hard and flaky and the Derby ale was sour; when Mistress Hogarth's temper was none of the sweetest, when a slight commotion in the painting-room was created by the outrageous behavour of Mr. Shard;* when my lord would not pay for his picture, or when William's own temper was ruffled at the sight of some vile wood piracy of the Rake's ProIt sometimes have happened, also, that William took t'other gress. may bottle, had a curtain lecture at night, and a headache the next morning. There may have been wintry days, when it was too dark to paint, and sunshiny days, when palette and maulstick were flung by with a jolly laugh; and the painter with his wife, or with some of the wags from the may have "Bedford," were off to take the air and their pleasure. There been days when a shortness of ready money reigned in the house in Leicester Fields. Such domestic incidents may have ruffled from time to time the Even courtly placid stream of the honest life of an English working man. Sir Joshua, in his painting room on the other side of Leicester Fields, may not have been exempt from such transient puffs of adverse winds: but in the main, I think the tenor of William Hogarth's life from 1735 to 1745-when the Jacobite rebellion left, in some degree, its mark upon his life and work Nor can I imagine any condition of -was eminently smooth and even. existence much happier than this tranquil work-a-day life of an English painter. Ah! it is very fine to be Sir Thomas scampering off to congresses to limn popes and emperors and plenipotentiaries, to stand in one's grand saloon in tights and opera hat, receiving the flower of the peerage-but * Hogarth, save in the portraits of Wilkes and Churchill-in the which, if Lord Ellenborough's dictum is to be accepted, the magnitude of the libel must be estimated in proportion to its truth-was seldom malevolently personal. Still, his pictures must be as full of faces, as true to their prototypes in life as Mrs. Salmon's waxen effigy of "" was "Ann Sigg on Crutches," which stood at the door of the Salmonian museum by the "Ann Sigg on Crutches Inner Temple Gate, near Gosling's banking-house. as well known to London loiterers as Charles at Charing or the bell-strikers at St. Dunstan's; and Ann Sigg, a noted beggar, used to hobble past the wax-work show every day; but she never turned on her crutches to inspect her counterfeit presentment, either ignorant of or disdaining to acknowledge its existence. Not so philosophically sensible was one Mr. Shard, son of Sir Isaac Shard, a rare money spinner and money clutcher. In Hogarth's picture of the Miser's Feast (?) he is said to have introduced a portrait of this Sir Isaac, which made much mirth. Comes fresh from the university and the grand tour, Mr. Shard, junior, a young gentleman of fine parts, but a hot temper. Hogarth, as was common with painters then (and is still with the Roman and Florentine artists), had a sort of show-room in which his finished pictures were exhibited. The young university blood asks the person who shows the pictures for whom such and such a lean, pinched face is intended, and on being told that it is thought to be uncommonly like one Sir Isaac Shard, he "straightway draws his It does not appear that Hogarth took any steps to sword and slashes the canvas. resent this outrage; and one malignant biographer chuckles with much glee over his forbearance. I have queried the Miser's Feast, in relating this anecdote, because I am unaware of the existence of such a picture. Some critics are of opinion that the steward or pettifogger who guards the money-bag in Act I. of the Rake's Progress, was the obnoxious portrait slashed by young Mr. Shard. with that dreadful man in possession sitting in the parlour all the while. It is very dignified, no doubt, to be Barry fiercely warring the academy, entertaining Senator Burke with Spartan banquets of beefsteaks and porter, and dying at last in a dingy back parlour, just too late to enjoy a meagre annuity. It is wilder and more picturesque to be a jovial Bohemian, and paint pigs in a spunging house like George Morland, or to be stark mad and a believer in the "ghosts of fleas" and the connection of "William Pitt and the New Jerusalem," like Blake; but I think the balance of happiness is in favour of such quiet, unostentatious working lives as those led by William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds; by the equable Westall, and that stainless soul, Flaxman; by honest David Wilkie, and our good painter LESLIE, just taken from us. Surely it is reckoned in their favour: the blameless, spotless life, without turbulence, without intrigue, without place-seeking: the life devoted from its dawn to its close, to the worship of nature in her most beautiful forms. And, O ye precisians! who are apt to desery a positive naughtiness in the somewhat lavishly developed carnations and luscious morbidezza of William Etty, do you know that the squanderer of gorgeous hues lived the life of a hermit in his bachelor chambers in Buckingham Street, Strand? and that the dignified spinster, his lady-sister, found pleasure in seeking out the fairest models that money would persuade to sit, for her William to paint? I have called this section of my attempt, a history of hard work; and although I must defer a long meditated dissertation on Hogarth's oil pictures* which would open a widely different field of contemplation-the pages that follow will not be unprofitably devoted to a careful consideration of the works engraved by W.H. between the stand-points of the Rake's Progress and the Marriage à la Mode. Gentlemen collectors, therefore, will you be so good as to open your portfolios and adjust your glasses while your humble cicerone tries to tell you what he has been able to find out respecting a few more of the dramatis personæ in the Human Comedy of the comic Dante? A few words may be spared for that capital free-handed etching * Walpole and Allan Cunningham have said nearly all of Hogarth's merits in oilpainting that can be said; and the latest edition of the Anecdotes of Painting gives a commendably liberal list of the pedigree and present locality of the principal oil pictures and sketches by Hogarth extant. This list, however, is susceptible of many additions. It is quite as easy to fix upon an authentic W. H., as upon a veracious Gerard Douw. His touch was almost unique-a broad, firm, predetermined mark of the brush-and to imitate it without the possibility of detection, even in these halcyon days of picture forgery, would argue the possession of artistic qualities on the part of the forger well nigh equal to those of Hogarth himself. But I reserve bibliographical, genealogical, chalcographic, and auctioneer's lore about Hogarth's pictures for a more convenient occasion, staying now only to acknowledge the kindness of half a dozen courteous correspondents from Bristol, who tell me that the Hogarthian picture which formerly adorned the chancel of St. Mary Redcliffe's fine old church, were purchased by Mr. Thomas Proctor, of Wall's Court, near Bristol, and by him presented to the Fine Arts Academy at Clifton (Bristol). I am glad to hear that the pictures have suffered nothing in the way of "restoration." of the Laughing Audience which I have already mentioned as delivered with the subscription-ticket to the life drama of Thomas Rakewell, Esq. It is a suitably humorous prologue to that tragi-comedy. Taken as an etching it is executed entirely con brio, and without-save in the background of the box-any symptom of the employment of mechanical line or rule. All is round, rich, and flexible; and the easier is the artist's hand, the more lucid, I think, is the exposition of his thought. It is, pray observe, the audience in the pit, not those in the boxes of the theatre, who are laughing. They, good people, have paid their money to be amused, and are * Their business cares determined to have their three shillings' worth.* Three shillings would appear to have been the statutory price of entrance to the pit of Covent Garden, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and Drury Lane Theatres. I find "3s." marked in pen and ink on a medallion in the benefit-ticket engraved by Hogarth for Milward, the comedian. Those executed for Jemmy Spiller (the original Filch), "Macheath," Walker, Fielding, and Joe Miller, have merely "Pitt " written in, but no are over for the day; and they will laugh, and laugh heartily, or know the reason why. There are just eleven of these merry groundlings, and they exhibit almost every phase of the risible faculty. There is the old lady's sly chuckle-you know what I mean: the "Ah! he's a wicked one," and "Go along with you!" chuckle, accompanied by a wag of the good old soul's head; the laugh of the man who is obliged to put his hand to his forehead and screw his eyelids tight-the laugh of him who fairly cries for mirth; the grateful grin of the deaf man who sees the joke, albeit he hears it not; the jolly "Boo-hoo!" of the fat matron, whose sides, I am sure, must be aching; the gruff "Ha-ha!" of the big man, who doesn't laugh often, but when he does, laughs with goodwill; the charming, good-natured, "all-overish" smile of the fresh and comely young lass; the broad bursting laugh of the stout old gentleman, who has been laughing any time these sixty years; and the silly "Hee-hee!" of the fool, who is wise enough, however, to know that it is better to laugh than cry all these are deliciously portrayed. After blue pill, or a bill that has been presented, always look at the Laughing Audience. In the background even you shall see a man with a peaked nose, and a normally dissatisfied countenance. I am afraid that he has the toothache by twinges, or that his affairs are not going prosperously. Yet even he laughs, sous cape, under his bent brows and his wig. I only wonder that William Hogarth did not introduce a laughing child to crown the gaiety of the scene. Laugh on, ye honest folks, and clap Milward or Jemmy Spiller to the echo! I never hear a sour phiz groan out that this world is a vale of tears, but I think upon the Laughing Audience; and often, as I sit in the fourth row of the Haymarket pit, I hear the loud cachinnations of the comfortable old ladies-substantial dividend-drawers and tradesmen's wives, who always pay, and would despise a "horder" as much as they do half-price, and who have come all the way from Camberwell or Dalston to laugh at Mr. Buckstone. And then more reverently do I recall the eloquent words of the great author of the Golden Grove, who in a sermon bids us rejoice and be merry at due times and seasons, and tells us that we have a Creator so kind and good, "that we cannot please Him unless we be infinitely pleased ourselves." If we are never to be joyful, O Sourphiz! why, if you please, do the lambs skip and the price. The beneficiaries probably asked what they liked-having previously purchased the tickets from the management-and took what they could get. In respect to the Georgian theatres, I should be glad to be enlightened on the point as to whether the footmen of the nobility and gentry, for whose use the gallery was reserved, and against whose fighting and gambling there, managers Rich, Highmore, and Cibber used so piteously to protest-paid for their admission. I don't think they did, seeing that the footmen's turbulence led to a managerial enactment that they should only be admitted “after the fourth act." Again, as to paying at the doors. In a stray paper of Fielding's, I find the shabby conduct of a Temple Buck censured, who takes advantage of the fourth act to go away without paying. Could there have been anything like theatrical credit in those unsophisticated days? or did the first crude scheme of "half price" give the spectator a right of election as to which half of the performance he should witness? |