Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/57

Rh   HOGARTH, (1697–1764). Apart from the story of his works, the life of the greatest English pictorial satirist, when divested of doubtful tradition, is singularly devoid of incident. It is mainly to be found in the auto biographical Memoranda published by John Ireland in 179S, and the successive Anecdotes of the antiquary, John Nichols. Hogarth was born in London on the 10th day of November 1697, and baptized on the 28th in the church of St Bartholomew the Great. His father was a school master and literary hack, who had come to the metropolis to seek that fortune which had been denied to him in his native Westmoreland. His son seems to have been early distinguished rather by a talent for drawing and an active perceptive faculty than by any close attention to the learn ing which he was soon shrewd enough to see had not male his parent prosper. &quot; Shows of all sorts gave me uu- ccnnmoii pleasure when an infant,&quot; lie says, &quot;and mimicry, common to all children, was remarkable in me. . . . My exercises when at school were more remarkable for the ornaments which adorned them than for the exercise itself.&quot; This being the case, it is no wonder that, by his own desire, he was apprenticed to a silver-plate engraver, Mr Ellis Gamble, at the sign of the &quot; Golden Angel&quot; in Cranbourne Street or Alley, Leicester Fields. For this master he engraved a shop-card which is still extant. When his apprenticeship began is not recorded ; bat it must have been concluded before the beginning of 1720, for in April of that year he appears to luve set up as engraver on his own account. His desires, however, were not limited to silver-plate engraving. &quot; Engraving on copper was, at twenty years of age, my utmost ambition.&quot; For this he lacked the needful skill as a draughtsman ; and his account of the means which he took to supply this want, without too much interfering with his pleasute, is thoroughly characteristic, though it can scarcely be recommended as an example. &quot;Laying it down,&quot; he says, &quot;first as aa axiom, that he who could by any means acquire and retain in his memory perfect ideas of the subjects he meant to draw would have as clear a knowledge of the figure as a man who can write freely hath of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet and their infinite combinations (each of these being composed of lines), and would consequently be an accurate designer, ... I therefore endeavoured to habituate myself to the exercise of a sort of technical memory, and by repeating in my own mind the parts of which objects were composed I could by degrees combine and put them down with my pencil.&quot; This account, it is possible, has something of the complacency of the old age in which it was written ; but there is little doubt that his marvellous power of seizing expression owed less to patient academical study than to his unexampled eye-memory and tenacity of minor detail. But he was not entirely without technical training, as, by his own showing, he occasionally &quot; took the life &quot; to correct his memories, and is known to have studied at Sir James Thornh ill s then recently opened art school. &quot; His first employment &quot; (i.e., after he set up for himself) &quot;seems,&quot; says Nichols, &quot;to have been the engraving of arms and shop bills.&quot; After this he was employed in design ing &quot;plates for booksellers.&quot; Of these early and mostly insignificant works we may pass over The Lottery, an Em blematic Print on the South Sea, and some book illustra tions, to pause at Masquerades and Operas, 1724, the first plate he published on his own account. This is a clever little satire on contemporary follies, such as the masque rades of the Swiss adventurer Heidegger, the popular Italian opera singers, Rich s pantomimes at Lincoln s Inn Fields, and last, but by no means least, the exaggerated popularity of Lord Burlington s protege, the architect painter William Kent, who is here represented on the summit of Burlington Gate, with Raphael and Michelangelo for sup porters. This worthy Hogarth had doubtless not learned to despise less in the school of his rival Sir James Thorn- hill. Indeed almost the next of Hogarth s important prints was aimed at Kent alone, being that memorable burlesque of the unfortunate altarpiece designed by the latter for St Clement s Danes, and which, in deference to the ridicule of the parishioners, Bishop Gibson took down in 1725. Hogarth s squib, which appeared subsequently, exhibits it as a very masterpiece of confusion and bad drawing. In 1726 he prepared twelve large engravings for Butler s Hudibras. These he himself valued highly, and they are the best of his book illustrations. But he was far too individual to be the patient interpreter of other men s thoughts, and it is not in this direction that his successes are to be sought. To 1727-28 belongs one of those rare occurrences which have survived as contributions to his biography. He was engaged by a certain Morris, a tapestry worker, to prepare a design for the Element of Earth. Morris, however, having heard that he was &quot;an engraver and no painter,&quot; declined the work when completed, and Hogarth accordingly sued him for the money in the Westminster Court, where, on the 28th of May 1728, the case was decided in his (Hogarth s) favour. It may have been the aspersion thus early cast on his skill as a painter (coupled perhaps with the unsatisfactory state of print-selling, owing to the uncon trolled circulation of piratical copies) that induced him about this time to turn his attention to the production of &quot; small conversation pieces &quot; (i.e., groups in oil of full-length portraits from 12 to 15 inches high), many of which are still preserved in different collections. &quot; This,&quot; he says, &quot; having novelty, succeeded for a few years.&quot; Among his other efforts in oil between 1728 and 1732 were The Wan- stead Assembly, The House of Commons examining Barn- bridge, an infamous warden of the Fleet, and numerous pictuie; of the chief actors in Gay s popular Beggar s Opera. On the 23d of March 1729 he was married at old Padding- ton church to Jane Thornhill, the only daughter of Kent s rival above-mentioned. The match was a clandestine one, although Lady Thornhill appears to have favoured it. Wo next hear of him in &quot; lodgings at South Lambeth,&quot; where he rendered some assistance to the then well-known Jonathan Tyer.s, who opened Yauxhall in 1732 with an entertainment styled a ridotto alfresco. For these garden.-, Hogarth painted a poor picture of Henry VIII. and Anna Bullen, and for them he also made some designs of the Four Times of the Day, which he afterwards elaborated into a finished series. The only engravings between 1726 and 1732 which need be referred to are the Large Masquerade Ticket (1727), another satire on masquerades, and the 