English Masters Of The Eighteenth Century

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

The Art Of Hogarth, Richard Wilson, And Sir Joshua Reynolds

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In all the annals of British Art there is no more illustrious name than that of William Hogarth. Not only was he, as Mr E V Lucas has pointed out, ‘the first great national British painter, the first man to look at the English life around him like an Englishman and paint it without affectation or foreign influence, but he was the first to make pictures popular. Hogarth’s engravings from his own works produced a love of art that has steadily increased ever since. During Hogarth’s day thousands of houses that had had no pictures before acquired that picture habit which many years later Alderman Boydell and his team of engravers were to do so much to foster and establish.’

That is where Hogarth differs from the French democratic painters, from Chardin and Greuze, mentioned in the last chapter; he was an engraver as well as a painter, and so was one of the first artists in Europe to devote talent of the highest order to providing art for the masses as well as the classes. People who could not afford to buy oil paintings could buy engravings, and it was by his engravings that Hogarth first acquired fame.

William Hogarth was born in Bartholomew Close, Smithfield, on November 10, 1697. He was the son of a school master and printer’s reader, who was apparently a man of some education and had the intelligence to recognize his son’s talent for drawing, and to place no obstacle in his path. At an early age young Hogarth was apprenticed to a silversmith near Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square), for whom he chased tankards and salvers, and two years after his father’s death in 1718 he felt sufficiently confident in his powers to set up as an engraver on his own account. Meanwhile he had taken every opportunity of improving his drawing, and had attended classes at the art academy of Sir James Thornhill (1676-1734), a portrait painter and decorative artist much in favor with Queen Anne. He was especially renowned for his ceilings, and the Painted Hall at Greenwich is a famous example of Thornhill’s art.

Hogarth did not get on very well with Thornhill and his method of tuition, which consisted principally of giving his pupils pictures to copy. This did not suit a youth so enamoured of life as Hogarth, who had a habit of making notes on his thumbnail of faces and expressions and enlarging them afterwards on paper. In this way he trained his memory to carry the exact proportions and characteristics of what he had seen, so that his drawings, even done from memory, were extraordinarily vivacious and full of life. ‘Coping,’ Hogarth once said, ‘is like pouring water out of one vessel into another.’ He preferred to draw his own water, and this sturdy determination to see life for himself set him on the road to greatness. Previous English artists had not done this: they had looked at life through another man’s spectacles, and their pictures were more or less good imitations of the manner of Van Dyck, Lely, and Kneller.

Nevertheless he continued for a long time to frequent Thornhill’s academy, the real attraction being not the master’s tuition but his pretty daughter Jane. In the end Hogarth eloped with Miss Thornhill, whom he married without her father’s consent and very much against his will. At the time the match was considered a mésalliance, for Thornhill was a Member of Parliament and a knight, whereas Hogarth has as yet acquired little fame and had rather scandalized society by bringing out in 1724 a set of engravings, ‘The Talk of the Town,’ in which he satirized the tendency of fashionable London to lionise foreign singers.

Four years later, however, the tide was turned in Hogarth’s favor when Mr Gay lashed the same fashionable folly in The Beggar’s Opera, which, produced at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre in January 1728, proved to be as great a popular success then as it has been in our own day. Hogarth was naturally attracted to a piece that revealed a spirit so akin to his own, and he painted several pictures of its scenes, one of which is now in the Tate Gallery. His genial, bohemian temperament delighted in the society of actors and writers, and Hogarth’s association with the company of The Beggar’s Opera indirectly led him to take up portrait painting. One of his earliest portraits is ‘Lavinia Fenton as Polly Peachum,’ the gay young actress who created the part and became Duchess of Bolton.

This portrait—as indeed are all of Hogarth’s—is a wonderful achievement. It has nothing of the manner of Lely or Kneller or any of his predecessors; it is fresh, original, unmannered, and sets life itself before us. To some extent, perhaps he was influenced by Dutch painting, which has the same quality of honesty, but in the main he was ‘without a school, and without a precedent.’ Unlike the portrait painters who preceded and those who immediately succeeded him, Hogarth does not show us people or rank and fashion. His portraits are usually of people in his own class or lower, his relatives, actors and actresses, his servants. Hogarth was too truthful in his painting and not obsequious enough in his manner to be a favorite with society, and it was only occasionally that a member of the aristocracy had the courage to sit to him. Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, did, and the magnificent little full length in the National Portrait Gallery shows how vividly Hogarth grasped and expressed his character.

English Masters Of The Eighteenth Century (continued)