Bridgewater Review

Volume 1 | Issue 3 Article 5

Apr-1983

Hogarth and his Unholy AgeThomas M. CurleyBridgewater State College, tcurley@bridgew.edu

This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts.

Recommended CitationCurley, Thomas M. (1983). Hogarth and his Unholy Age. Bridgewater Review, 1(3), 4-8.Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/br_rev/vol1/iss3/5

Courtesy National Gallery 0/ Art, Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection

By Thomas M. Curley

and his

UnholyAge&3

~amuel Johnson, that eighteenth-centuryEnglish authority on human learning and life,had a surprisingly low regard for painting. Buthe knew the first great British artist, William

Hogarth, and publicly applauded the first art exhibitionsin England. Johnson would have found an equally goodreason to applaud Bridgewater State College's HogarthFestival in October of 1982. This exhibition of twenty­five, beautifully preserved prints was a splendidsampling of Hogarth's artistic legacy selected from thecollection owned by the Judd Family of New Jersey andon loan from Monmouth College, New Jersey throughProfessor Vincent DiMattio. All in all, the HogarthFestival afforded spectators a rare opportunity toglimpse the energies and excesses of Henry Fielding'sEngland and Johnson's London.

To grasp the uniqueness of Hogarth's artistry is totake into account the more conventional aestheticstandards of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the century's mostfamous portrait painter. Reynolds hungered after theepic dignity of the grand style in painting and foundnothing of it in Hogarth's works. Reynolds' laterDiscourses held up Michelangelo and the spectacularSistine Chapel for veneration and imitation: "The styleof Michael Angelo, which I have compared to ... thelanguage of the gods, now no longer exists, as it did inthe fifteenth century." No doubt, the differencesbetween Michelangelo of the Sistine Chapel andHogarth of Leicester Fields, London could not be moredramatic. Whereas the Italian master executed his epicsubject of the biblical history of humankind, theengraver captured extraordinary moral insights in theordinary middle-class culture of England. Hogarth'scontemporaries still respected classical-Renaissancegrandeur, but a secular, fact-minded modern sensibilitynow flourished.

a middle course between the unrealisticextremes 0/ heroic moral seriousness and viciousburlesque absurdity . ..

manner: "I therefore turned my thoughts toa still more new way of proceeding, vizpainting and engraving modern moralsubjects, a field unbroke up in any countryor any age. I have endeavoured to treat mysubjects as a dramatick writer, my picture ismy stage, and men and women my players,who by means of certain actions andgestures, are to exhibit a dumb show." Hisinstinctive use of a literary analogydemonstrates that he realized the tiesbetween his pictures and the comicliterature of his day. In fact, in artistic aimand technique, he had affinities to Augustansatirists and even turned episodes ofSamuel Butler's Hudibras and JonathanSwift's Gulliver's Travels into exquisiteprints. But unlike these earlier satirists,Hogarth resisted aristocratic idealization,seemed more comfortable with middle-classvalues and realities, cultivated at least aslight strain of sentimentality, and, ratherthan indulge in single-minded satire againsthumankind, retained a comic opennessverging on a moral ambiguity about humanlife. Even in his angriest protests against thestatus quo, his obvious relish for the vitalityof a mundane, sometimes immoralhumanity softens his visual satire and blursits moral meaning.

qf is distinctive accomplishmentsbear close comparison with thenewly emerging English novel. In

inventing the pictorial "progress," Hogarthsynthesized the essential elements of thepopular novel: the dynamic evolution ofscenes, the procession of characters, andan unfolding plot and theme unified arounda central protagonist possessing freedom ofthe will and an often unreasonable percep­tion of self and society in his passagethrough a world that shapes his destiny forgood or for ill. It is not surprising that hedrew on novelistic scenes for artisticinspiration and fashioned prints fromepisodes of Don Quixote, probably the firstgenuine novel. Nor is it surprising thatThackeray perceived a connection betweenthe artist and novelists and discussed"Hogarth, Smollett, and Fielding" in a singlelecture of The English Humourists. Perhapsleast surprising of all is that Hogarth's majortwentieth-century biographer and editor,Professor Ronald Paulson of YaleUniversity, is also a scholar of satire and theeighteenth-century novel.

Reynolds was right. In aspiring for the grandstyle, Hogarth was striving for the legitimacyand glory of the old Renaissance masters, anambition suited neither to his real gifts nor tohis unheroic milieu. His true Sistine Chapelwas the bourgeois English marketplace; histale of God's creation centered on the moralchaos of the English capital; and his epicseriousness took the form of a laughing lastjudgement on the contemporary humancomedy.

Hogarth wisely avoided straying far fromhis unique talent for comic realism. Nor didhe really emphaSIze topical political satireuntil the end of his career. As he recognizedin his later Autobiographical Notes, hisforte' lay in a clear-sighted expose' ofhumankind's universal follies and vicespresented in eighteenth-century middle­class dress and in an ever darkening comic

la Mode in 1743 traced the tragic outcome ofan unromantic alliance between a borednobleman and an ambitious alderman'sdaughter; and Industry and Idleness in 1747contrasted Francis Goodchild's industriousrise to prosperity and Thomas Idle'sreckless fall into a life of crime and capitalpunishment at the Tyburn gibbet.

Only for a relatively brief period after themid-1730s did Hogarth desert his satiricrealism and try his hand at portraiture andhistorical painting. His skill in portraiturewas distinguished and possibly influencedyoung Reynolds. But Reynolds laterlamented Hogarth's abortive flirtation withhistorical themes. In one of the finalDiscourses, Reynolds in 1788 paid longoverdue homage to Hogarth before theRoyal Academy and yet made a point ofcriticizing him for emulating the very grandstyle that Reynolds practised andpromulgated throughout his career:

After this admirable artist had spent thegreatest part of his life in active, busy, andwe may add, successful attention to theridicule of life; after he had invented a newspecies of dramatick painting, in whichprobably he will never be equaled, and hadstored his mind with infinite materials toexplain and illustrate the domestick andfamiliar scenes of common life, which weregenerally, and ought to have been always,the subject of his pencil; he veryimprudently, or rather presumptuously,attempted the great historical style, forwhich his previous habits had by no meansprepared him.

~ ot until the eighteenth century did aj.~uly native English tradition of

paintmg commence. This was the era thatwitnessed the birth of the British empire, theemergence of a better educated populace,and the rise of the English novel -- the oneliterary form most directly relevant toHogarth's artistic achievement. For, like thenovel, Hogarth's art represented a tentativebreak with the past and a troubledacceptance of the present. Like the novel,his works inclined toward a democraticrealism rather than toward an aristocraticidealization in style and content. AsEngland's earliest native artist ofinternational stature, he excelled as amoralist of the common man within thecrowded cityscape of Protestant capitalists,each sharply defined by a specializedoccupation and all of them driven byhumankind's perennial hopes and fears. Inhis precisely detailed presentation ofeveryday heroes, fools, and villains, hecreated an allegory of middle-classindividualism, the emblems and symbols ofits limitations and aspirations, and theunfolding plot of the secular pilgrim'sprogress to earthly perdition or paradise.

The dates of Hogarth's life, 1697 to 1764,embrace the literary eras of Swift, Pope,Fielding, and Johnson, and, therefore, spanthe great periods of Augustan satire andmoral realism in English arts and letters.Born in London, the son of a classicalpedagogue-turned-businessman, Hogarthinherited from his father a humanistic, moralsensibility tempered by a city dweller'stough-minded outlook on human life. Unlikehis father and unlike most of his colleagues,he enjoyed considerable financial success inhis calling. Aided by a parliamentary act of1735 strengthening copyright privileges, hecurtailed the expensive interference ofprintsellers and counterfeiters of his worksand sold directly to the public. And his printsbecame extremely popular. There was anespecially strong demand for his narrativesequences, better known as Hogarthian"progresses" which remain among- hisacknowledged masterpieces: A Harlot'sProgress in 1732 displayed the prostitutionand death of a country girl, MaryHackabout, in the big city; A Rake'sProgress in 1735 chronicled Tom Rakewell'sgradual corruption in London; Marriage a

~ (is Sistine Chapel~tt was the bourgeois

English marketplace.

~

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/"7 {ogarth proved to be an inspiration to\It authors. The plots of Samuel Richard·

son's Clarissa (1748) and John Cleland'sMemoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749)resemble the action of A Harlot's Progress.John Shebbeare's novel, The Marriage Act(1754), and George Colman's play, TheClandestine Marriage (1766), capitalized onthe theme of Marriage a la Mode. TobiasSmollett shared Hogarth's contradictorycombination of moral wrath and comicrelish for the seamier aspects of human life.He caricatured the artist as "Pallet" inPeregrine Pickle (1751) but made amendsfor the snub in The Present State of AllNations (1768): "In the comic scenes ofpainting, Hogarth is an inimitable originalwith respect to invention, humour, andexpression." Above all, Henry Fieldingespoused a theory of the novel that readslike Hogarth's own artistic manifesto.

A friend ofHogarth, Fielding,in his preface toJoseph Andrews(1742) announceda new literarygenre and desig­nated it a "comicromance" or,more precisely, a"comic epic-poemin prose." Thisnew form of prosefiction, like drama­tic comedy andHogarth's prints,was to steer amiddle coursebetween the un­realistic extremesof heroic moralseriousness andvicious burlesqueabsurdity thatrendered humanbeings exaggera­ted caricatures ofevil rather thancredible charac­ters with everydayfollies. Fielding then listed other staples ofhis novel bearing directly on Hogarth'sartistic achievement:

1. A humorous plot to dramatize moralthemes aimed at correcting humanextravagance and at exposing humanaffectation, which is the comic fruitof two human failings obstructive toa proper sense of reality u vanity andhypocrisy;

2. A preoccupation with personages ofinferior rank and manners;

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3. An emphasis upon realism madefamous by Hogarth himself: "let usexamine the works of a comic-historypainter, ... where we shall find the trueexcellence ... to consist in the exactestcopying of nature;"

4. An occasional reliance on mock-heroicparody of the grand style. The satiricthrust of the parody can have thetriple-edged effect of debunking theideal as unreal, of chastening the real bycomparison with the ideal, and ofennobling the real by equating it withthe ideal.

Compared to Fielding's humor, Hogarth'scomic realism is more unsparing, moreseductively receptive to the raw facts ofhuman existence, more appreciative of lowlife, less sympathetic to aristocratic values,and less optimistic about the dangerous

Plate 3 of A Rake's Progress (1735)

human condition. Barring these differences,the intellectual kinship between Fielding andHogarth was substantial enough to permiteach man to influence the comic creationsof the other.

t::r the most part, what Fielding at·tempted in the novel, Hogarth came

c ose to drawing in a work like A Rake'sProgress, which may well have provoked lit·erary imitation in both Joseph Andrews andTom Jones (1749). There is inA Rake's Pro­gress the striking example of Plate 3, thedebauchery scene of Tom Rakewell, who

presides morally and geographically off­center at a degenerate round table oftreacherous prostitutes. Here one canobserve the comic action and moral themeswhich emanate from the vanity andaffectation of Tom Rakewell as a would-begentleman destroyed by extravagance.Here are the low characters and meanmanners held up for moral ridicule. Here toois the dynamic depiction of mundanerealities, so intensely vivid as to shade intosymbols of Tom's progressive corruptionand so shockingly vital as to arouse inspectators both a dangerous fascinationwith the bawdy scene and a contrary moralindignation at its sordidness. Here finally is aparodic allusion to the grand style in the wallportraits of the ancient emperors, mockingreminders of a departed Roman glory andan enduring imperial depravity. Thanks tothe prostitute's phallic candle in the

background, theworld is going toblazes, fueled bylust and unre­deemed by love.This is Hogarth'sLast Supper; TomRakewell's apos­tles are decadentdisciples of thepunchbowl, all ofthem Judases, allagents of hopelessdisorder, and allparticipants in anunholy commun­ion of midnightrevelry. Amidstthe disarray anddishabille' of theharlots, Tomalmost supine inhis vulnerability--stands littlechance of slowinghis fated progresstoward debt, des­pair, and death.

tT""he pictorial"L elements of

Rakewell's corruption surfaced inFielding's tale of Mr. Wilson's loss ofinnocence in Book III, Chapter 3 of JosephAndrews. The long lost father of JosephAndrews, Mr. Wilson functions as thenovel's moral norm, epitomizing in hisyouthful rake's progress through Londoneveryman's passage into adulthood throughthe acquisition of prudence to protectvirtue. What Wilson has learned about life,Joseph Andrews still has to discover.Although neither father nor son suffers TomRakewell's tragic end, Wilson's account ofsexual misadventures in London

The Industrious 'Prentice Lord Mayor of London (1747)

and may be seen walking (for walk she doth in the print) toCovent-Garden Church, with a starved foot-boy behindcarrying her prayer-book."

Yust as early English novelists ex~erimented ~ith focus­ing on more than one protagonIst, so too dId Hogarthstrive for increased narrative complexity in his

progresses. Both A Harlot's Progress and A Rake's Progressconcentrate on one person's follies. But later on, Marriage QlaMode probes a single domestic tragedy involving two weddedprotagonists, and, finally, Industry and Idleness depicts twointerrelated stories of two contrasting characters. The longestof Hogarth's progresses, Industry and Idleness praises intwelve prints the Protestant middle-class ideals of prudententerprise and social mobility. The contrary destinies of FrancisGoodchild and Tom Idle teach that hard work and wholesomeambition succeed in a cruel world where laziness and a careerof crime do not. Whereas Idle ends his life as a thief betrayed tothe gibbet by a prostitute, Goodchild follows the high road ofvirtuous prosperity, leading through marriage with his master'sdaughter to the offices of sheriff and mayor of London. The finalprint, The Industrious 'Prentice Lord Mayor of London, is amagnificent expose' of a class-structured British society.Alleviating the otherwise heavy didacticism of the series are nu­merous ambiguities casting doubt on the good man's rewardsin this concluding scene, for the picture reduces Goodchild inthe right carriage seat to visual insignificance and accentuatesthe potentially anarchic populace. There is above the church aportrait of George II, eyed enviously by his son, the Prince ofWales. The Prince presides over the scene above an unrulymilitia that seems careless of the king's peace and inclined tofire in the direction of the upper classes watching theprocession from windows. Amidst this threatening chaos, is thenew lord mayor lamenting the bitter fruit of virtue? Is heregretting the splendid misery of political office and publicacclaim? Hogarth never tells.

Nowhere is there a more startling example of Hogarth'sincreasingly gloomy outlook on life than in Gin Lane, the bittercounterpart of his cheerful Beer Street of 1751. Intended aspropaganda against the excessive lower-class consumption ofgin, Gin Lane presents an urban wasteland with similarities toDante's Inferno. Here demon drink reigns supreme, subvertsnormal parental and marital obligations, and destroys law,order, and civilization. The spectator's eye wanders

7Wm. Hogarth March 25, 1738 accarding to Act of Parliament

(ovent Garden was now the farthest stretch of myambition; where I shone forth in the balconies of the

playhouses, visited whores, made love to orange-wenches,and damned plays. _.. I looked on all the town harlots with adetestation not easy to be conceived; their personsappeared to me as painted palaces, inhabited by Disease andDeath.... In short, I had sufficiently seen that the pleasuresof the world are chiefly folly, and the business of it mostlyknavery, and both nothing better than vanity.

~ ~ r. Wilson's escapades in Covent Garden recallNt another famous print, Morning (1738), the first of

Hogarth's Four Times of Day. Morning displays the coldwinter amusements of Covent Garden at daybreak. Itmakes an effective social statement by contrasting thearistocratic aloofness of the lofty red-brick buildings andchurch portal with the warm vitality of the commoners inthe lower foreground. Church and state stand apart andyet provide a protective enclosure for the bustlingcommon life in the marketplace below. Buildings huddle inthe background as throngs of people and affectionatecouples form islands of human warmth against the cold.In sharp contrast to the crowds that work, make love, beg, or brawl inthe coffeehouses is the shriveled high-born lad",. She is the humanfocus of the print. On her way to the chilly church, this cold womansets herself apart from the earthy bourgeoisie in her disdain for herpage, the poor, and the profligate. She certainly influenced Fielding'sportrait of Bridget Allworthy, an affected gentlewoman with neitherthe wholesome charity nor the plebeian charm of her illegitimate son,Tom Jones: "I would attempt to draw her picture; but that is donealready by a more able master, Mr. Hogarth himself, to whom she satmany years ago, and hath been lately exhibited by that gentleman inhis print of a winter's morning, of which she is no improper emblem,

Published according to Act 0/ Parliament, Sept. 3D, 1747

Painted by Wm. Hogarth

approximates Rakewell's encounter with prostitutes inPlate 3:

Designed by Wm. HogarthPublished according ta Act 01 Parliament Feb. I, 1751.

----'.....~_._---

If genius warm thee, reader, stay,If merit touch thee, shed a tear,

Be vice and dulness far awayGreat Hogarth's honour'd dust is here.

The hand of art here torpid liesThat traced th'essential form of grace,

Here death has clos'd the curious eyes

That saw the manners in the face.

Reynolds in 1770 still excluded Hogarthfrom the ranks of the greatest artists.Fortunately, what Reynolds refused toconcede until years later, Johnsonacknowledged by 1771 in a lovely epitaph onHogarth. Doubtless, the best tribute togreat Hogarth is the legacy of his novelisticprints. They remain the fullest statement ofhis life's work and worth and a brilliantpictorial mirror of eighteenth-centuryBritish civilization. But Johnson's littleepitaph nicely sums up the high moralseriousness behind Hogarth's incomparablecomic creations:

Thomas M. Curley, Professor of Englishat Bridgewater State College, delivered anabbreviated version of this article at theHogarth Festival in the Wallace L.Anderson Gallery of the Art Building. A fanof Hogarth and of all eighteenth-centuryarts and sciences, Curley is the author ofnumerous articles and a book, SamuelJohnson and the Age of Travel (Universityof Georgia Press, 1976). With the support ofseveral grants and a fellowship from theNational Endowment for the Humanities,Curley will publish a two-volume edition ofSir Robert Chambers' A Course of Lectureson the English Law written in secretcollaboration with Samuel Johnson from1766 to 1770. To complement the edition,Curley is completing an authoritativebiography, Sir Robert Chambers: Law andEmpire in the Age of Johnson.

ment and actuallyimagined that thisideot had been atthe moment in­spired.

In time Hogarth cameto admire Johnson,"whose conversa­tion," the artist laternoted, "was to thetalk of other men, likeTitian's paintingcompared to [Thom­as] Hudson's" medi­ocre art work.Johnson did not earn

. this fine complimentby eloquent conver­sation about paintingor about Hogarth.For Johnson knewand cared little aboutpainting and be­friended JoshuaReynolds, the rIsmgyoung star whoundervalued Ho­garth's contributionsto English art.

. . .the best tribute to greatHogarth is the legacy of hisnovelistic prints.

".., ( ogarth in his final years saw his repu­"It tation eclipsed by new luminaries,like Reynolds who championed a grand styleof painting so foreign to Hogarth's comicrealism. Johnson became one of Reynold'sprincipal intellectual mentors and went sofar as to puff the portraitist by name in amoral essay of 1759, Idler 45: "Genius ischiefly exerted in historical pictures, and theart of the painter of portraits is often lost inthe obscurity of his subject. But it is inpainting as in life; what is greatest is notalways best. I should grieve to see Reynoldstransfer to heroes and. to goddesses, toempty splendor and to empty fiction, thatart which is now employed in diffusingfriendship, in reviving tenderness, inquickening the affections of the absent, andcontinuing the presence of the dead." Inthree subsequent Idler essays Reynoldshimself would make public his artistic idealsfor the first time and ridicule Hogarth. Evenas president of the new Royal Academy,

Gin Lane (1751)

downward from the distant church steeplethrough the ever-darkening levels of humandamnation, exploitation, and starvation tothe heavily shadowed gin-cellar below.Dominating the pandemonium is Hogarth'sshocking Pieta, with a drunken madonna,who is oblivious to her son's fall into thenether pit or to the drunkard lying dead onthe steps. The scene, Hogarth wrote,evokes "Distress even to madness anddeath, and not a house in tolerable conditionbut the pawnbroker's and the gin shop."London has become hell.

9 t was fitting that England's firstimportant artist should have metEngland's foremost literary personality,

Samuel Johnson, at the home of England'sfirst true psychological novelist, SamuelRichardson, in June of 1752. At the timeJohnson had little notoriety or money andstill considered himself an outsider in thecultural establishment. He had little likingfor the reigning King George II whomHogarth made the mistake of praisingbefore Richardson's guests. As Hogarthtalked, he noticed a strange fellow -­Johnson -- at the window,

shaking his head, and rolling himself aboutin a strange ridiculous manner. Heconcluded he was an ideot, whom hisrelations had put under the care of Mr.Richardson, as a very good man. To hisgreat surprize, however, this figure stalkedforwards ... and burst into an invectiveagainst George the Second.... In short,he displayed such a power of eloquence,that Hogarth looked at him with astonish-

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