Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/58

48 48 HOGARTH print of Burlington Gate, 1731, evoked by Pope s Epistle to Lord Burlington, and defending Lord Cliandos, who is therein satirized. This print gave great offence, and was, it is said, suppressed. To 1732 belongs that genial journey from London to Sheerness, of which the original record still survives at the British Museum in an oblong MS. volume, entitled An Account of u /iat seem d most Remarkable in the Five Days Peregrination of the Five Following Persons, Vizt., Messieurs Tolhall. Scott, Hogarth, Thornhill and Forrest. Begun on Saturday May 27th 1732 and Finished On the 31st of the Same Month. Abi tu et fac siiniliter. Inscription on Didivich Colledge Porch. The journal, which is written by Forrest, the father of Garrick s friend Theodosius Forrest, gives a good idea of what a &quot; frisk&quot; as Johnson called it was in those days, while the illustrations were by Hogarth and Samuel Scott the landscape painter. John Thornhill, Sir James s son, made the map. This version (in prose) was subsequently run into rhyme by one of Hogarth s friends, the Rev. Mr Gostling of Canterbury, and after the artist s death both versions were published. In the absence of other biographical detail, they are of considerable interest to the student of Hogarth. In 1733 Hogarth moved into the &quot;Golden Head &quot;in Leicester Fields, which, with occasional absences at Chiswick, he continued to occupy until his death. By this date he must have completed the earliest of those great series of moral paintings which first gave him his position as a great and original genius. This was A Harlot s Progress, the paintings for which, if we may trust the date in the last of the pictures, were finished in 1731. The engravings, by the artist himself, were published in 1734. We have no record of the particular train of thought which prompted these story-pictures ; but it may perhaps be fairly assumed that the necessity for creating some link of interest between the personages of the little &quot;conversation pieces &quot; above referred to led to the further idea of connect ing several groups or scenes so as to form a sequent narra tive. &quot;I wished,&quot; says Hogarth, &quot;to compose pictures on canvas, similar to representations on the stage.&quot; &quot;I have endeavoured,&quot; he says again, &quot; to treat my subject as a dramatic writer; my picture is my stage, and men and women my players, who by means of certain actions and gestures are to exhibit a dumb shoiv.&quot; There was never a mora eloquent dumb show than this of the Harlot s Progress. In six scenes the miserable career of a woman of the town is traced out remorselessly from its first facile beginning to its shameful and degraded end. Nothing of the detail is softened or abated ; the whole is acted out coram populo, with the hard, uncompassionate morality of the age the painter lived in, while the introduction here and there of one or two well-known characters like Colonel Charteris and Justice Gonson give a vivid reality to the satire. It had an im mediate success. To say nothing of the fact that the talent of the paintings completely reconciled Sir James Thornhill to the son-in-law he had hitherto refused to acknowledge, more than twelve hundred names of subscribers to the en gravings were entered in the artist s book. On the appear ance of plate iii. the lords of the treasury trooped to Leicester Fields for Sir John Gonson s portrait which it contained. Theophilus Gibber made the story into a panto mime, and some one else into a ballad opera ; and it gave rise to numerous pamphlets and poems. It was painted on fan-mounts and transferred to cups and saucers. Lastly, it was freely pirated. There could be no surer testimony to its popularity. The favourable reception given to A Harlot s Progress prompted A Rake s Progress, which speedily followed, although it had not a like success. It was in eight plates in lieu of six. The story is unequal ; but there is nothing finer than the figure of the desperate rake in the Covent Garden gaming-house, or the admirable scenes in the Fleet prison and Bedlam, where at last his headlong career comes to its tragic termination. The plates abound with allusive suggestion and covert humour; but it is impossible to attempt any detailed description of them here. A Rake s Progress was dated June 25, 1735, and the engravings bear the words &quot; according to Act of Parlia ment.&quot; This was an Act (8 Geo. II. cap. 13) which Hogarth had been instrumental in obtaining from the legislature, being stirred thereto by the shameless piracies of rival printsellers. Although loosely drawn, it served its purpose ; and the painter commemorated his success by a long inscription on the plate entitled Crowns, Mitres, &amp;lt;tc., afterwards used as a subscription ticket to the Election series. These subscription tickets to his engravings, let us add, are among the brightest and most vivacious of the artist s productions. That to the Harlot s Progress was entitled Boys peeping at Nature, while the Rake s Progress was heralded by the delighful etching known as A Pleased Audience at a Play, or The Laughing Audience. We must pass more briefly over the prints which followed the two Progresses, noting first A Midnight Modern Con versation, an admirable drinking scene which comes between them in 1734, and the bright little plate of Southwark Fair, which, though dated 1733, was published with A Rake s Progress in 1735. Between these and Marriage a la Mode, upon the pictures of which the painter must have been not long after at work, come the small prints of the Consultation of Physicians, Scholars at a Lecture, and Sleeping Congregation, 1736 ; the Four Times of the Day, 1738, a series of pictures of everyday 18th century life, the earlier designs for which have been already referred to ; the Strolling Actresses dressing in a Barn, 1738, which Walpole held to be, &quot; for wit and imagination, without any other end, the best of all the painter s works ;&quot; and finally the admirable plates of the Distrest Poet, painfully composing a poem on &quot; Riches &quot; in a garret, and the Enraged Musician fulminating from his parlour window upon a discordant orchestra of knife-grinders, milk-girls, ballad-singers, and the rest upon the pavement outside. These are dated respectively 1736 and 1741. To this period also (i.e., the period preceding the production of the plates of Marriage a la Mode) belong two of those history pictures to which, in emulation of the Haymans and Thornhills, the artist was continually attracted. The Pool of Bethesda and the Good Samaritan, &quot;with figures seven feet high,&quot; were painted circa 1736, and presented by the artist to St Bartholomew s Hospital, where they remain. They were not masterpieces ; and it is pleasanter to think of his con nexion with Captain Coram s recently established Foundling Hospital (1739), which he aided with his money, his graver, and his brash, and for which he painted that admirable portrait of the good old philanthropist which is still, and deservedly, one of its chief ornaments. In A Harlot s Progress Hogarth had not strayed much beyond the lower walks of society, and although, in A Rake s Progress, his hero was taken from the middle classes, he can scarcely be said to have quitted those fields of observa tion which are common to every spectator. It is therefore more remarkable, looking to his education and antecedents, that his masterpiece, Marriage a la Mode, should success fully depict, as the advertisement has it, &quot; a variety of modern occurrences in high life.&quot; Yet, as an accurate delineation of the surroundings of upper class 18th century society, his Marriage a la Mode has never, we believe, been seriously assailed. The countess s bedroom, the earl s apart ment with its lavish coronets and old masters, the grand saloon with its marble pillars and grotesque ornaments, are fully as true to nature as the frowsy chamber in the &quot; Turk s