Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 27.djvu/89

 Song,’ 1852.  ‘School Music arranged for three voices by G. Hogarth. Edited by J. Curwen,’ 1852. He also wrote ballads, songs, and duets. 

HOGARTH, WILLIAM (1697–1764), painter and engraver, was born, according to the register of births at Great St. Bartholomew, West Smithfield (Notes and Queries, 6 March 1880), ‘in Barthw Closte, next door to Mr. Downinge's the Printer's, November ye 10th 1697, and was baptized ye 28th Novr 1697.’ He had two sisters, of whom one, Mary, was born 23 Nov. 1699, and also baptised (10 Dec.) at St. Bartholomew, and Ann, born in October 1701, and baptised (6 Nov.) at St. Sepulchre. The family, known indifferently as Hogard, Hogart, or Hogarth, came originally from Kirkby Thore in Westmoreland; and William Hogarth's father, Richard Hogarth, was the third son of a yeoman farmer, who lived in the vale of Bampton, about fifteen miles north of Kendal. His mother's maiden name, as recorded in an old family bible, once in the possession of Mr. H. P. Standly, and sold with his collection in April 1845, was Gibbons. Of the rest of Hogarth's relatives little is known, but he had a literary uncle in Thomas Hogarth (‘Auld’ or ‘Ald Hogart’) of Troutbeck, a rustic dramatist and satirist, some of whose ‘Remnants of Rhyme’ were published at Kendal as late as 1853 from manuscripts ‘preserved by his descendants.’ Richard Hogarth himself was educated at St. Bees, and afterwards kept a school in his native county of Westmoreland. This proving unsuccessful, he came to London. He must have been living in Bartholomew Close in 1697–9 when his first two children were born, but in 1701, when Ann Hogarth was baptised, he was resident in St. John Street, Clerkenwell. Later on he was keeping another school in Ship Court, Old Bailey, which could scarcely have been more fortunate than its provincial predecessor, for he is said to have been also employed as a hack-writer and corrector of the press. It is as a literary man that his son first refers to him. ‘My father's pen,’ he says in the brief autobiographical sketch published by John Ireland in 1798, ‘like that of many other authors, did not enable him to do more than put me in a way of shifting for myself.’ Richard Hogarth was, however, a man of some acquirements. He compiled, but never printed, a Latin dictionary in extension of Littleton. His son possessed the manuscript (part of which afterwards passed into the hands of John Ireland), together with several laudatory letters from the learned, which, unhappily, failed to secure a publisher for the work. There are also some Latin epistles by him in the British Museum, and in 1712 he published a little book called ‘Disputationes Grammaticales.’ ‘As I had naturally a good eye,’ Hogarth's autobiography goes on, ‘and a fondness for drawing, shows of all sorts gave me uncommon pleasure when an infant; and mimickry, common to all children, was remarkable in me. An early access to a neighbouring painter drew my attention from play; and I was, at every possible opportunity, employed in making drawings. I picked up an acquaintance of the same turn, and soon learnt to draw the alphabet with great correctness. My exercises at school were more remarkable for the ornaments which adorned them, than for the exercise itself’ (, iii. 3–4).

Neither the ‘neighbouring painter’ nor the ‘acquaintance of the same turn’ has been identified. But by his own account, and ‘conformable to his own wishes,’ which his father's precarious circumstances had not disposed towards a liberal education, he was taken from school and apprenticed to a silver-plate engraver, Mr. Ellis Gamble, at the sign of the Golden Angel in Cranbourne Street or Alley, Leicester Fields. Here he learned to chase salvers and tankards, speedily becoming skilful in the craft. One of the earliest of his works was his master's shop-card, in which the angel of the sign flourishes a bulky palm branch above the announcement, in French and English, that Mr. Gamble ‘makes, buys, and sells all sorts of plate, rings, and jewels, &c.’ Many of Hogarth's designs for plate are highly prized by collectors, and John Ireland (iii. 25) prints a copy of a coat of arms in his possession, drawn for the Duchess of Kendal, which certainly gave promise of future excellence. During this period also, by a system which he has described in his autobiography, Mr. Gamble's apprentice was diligently training his perceptive faculty and fortifying his already exceptional eye-memory with a view to practising as a designer and line-engraver. ‘Engraving on copper,’ he says, ‘was at twenty years of age my utmost ambition.’

On 11 May 1718 Richard Hogarth, who had been living in Long Lane, West Smithfield, was buried (Notes and Queries, ut supra). About or shortly after this date his son's apprenticeship to Mr. Gamble must