HOGARTH, William, an artist, a truly great and original genius, was born in 1697 or 1698, in the parish of St Martin, Ludgate. The outset of his life, however, was unpromising. “He was bound,” says Lord Orford, “to a mean engraver of arms on plate.” Hogarth probably chose this occupation as it required some skill in drawing, to which his genius was particularly turned, and which he contrived assiduously to cultivate. His master was Mr Ellis Gamble, a silversmith of eminence, who resided in Cranburn Street, Leicester Fields. In this profession it is not unusual to bind apprentices to the single branch of engraving arms and ciphers on every species of metal; and in that particular department of the business young Hogarth was placed; but, before his time had expired, he felt the impulse of genius, and it directed him to painting. During his apprenticeship, he set out one Sunday, with two or three companions, on an excursion to Highgate. The weather being hot, they went into a public house, where they had not been long before a quarrel arose between some persons in the same room, and one of the disputants having struck the other on the head with a quart pot, cut him very much. The blood running down the man’s face, together with the agony of the wound, which distorted his features into a most hideous grin, presented Hogarth, who showed himself thus early sensible of the course which Nature had intended he should pursue, with too laughable a subject to be overlooked. He drew out his pencil, and produced on the spot one of the most ludicrous figures that ever was seen. What rendered this piece the more valuable was, that it exhibited an exact likeness of the man, with the portrait of his antagonist, and the figures in caricature of the principal persons collected around him.

How long he continued in obscurity has not been ascertained; but the first piece in which he distinguished himself as a painter is supposed to have been a representation of Wanstead Assembly. The figures contained in it were, it seems, drawn from the life, and without any circumstances of burlesque. The faces were said to be extremely like, and the colouring rather better than in some of his later and more highly finished performances. From the date of the earliest plate that can be ascertained as his work, it may be presumed that he began business on his own account at least as early as 1720.

His first employment seems to have been the engraving of arms and shop-bills; his next, to design and furnish plates for booksellers. Mr Bowles, at the Black Horse in Cornhill, was one of his earliest patrons, but the prices paid by that person were very low. His next friend in this line was Mr Philip Overton, who paid him somewhat better for his labour and ingenuity.

There are still existing many family pictures by Hogarth, in the style of serious conversation-pieces. What the prices of his portraits were, Mr Nichols tried in vain to discover; but he suspects that they were originally very low, as the people who are best acquainted with them choose to be silent on that subject.
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Lord Orford has remarked, that if óur artist indulged his spirit of ridicule in personalities, it seldom proceeded beyond sketches and drawings; and wonders that he never, without intention, delivered the very features of any identical person. But Mr Nichols assures us, from unquestionable authority, that almost all the personages who attended the levee of the Rake were undoubted portraits; and that in Southwark Fair, and the Modern Midnight Conversation, as many more were discoverable. Whilst Hogarth was painting the Rake’s Progress, he had a summer residence at Isleworth; and he never failed to question the company who came to see these pictures, if they knew for whom one or another figure was designed. When they guessed wrong, he set them right.

The Duke of Leeds possessed an original scene in the Beggar’s Opera, painted by Hogarth. It is that in which Lucy and Polly are on their knees before their respective fathers, to intercede for the life of the hero of the piece. All the figures are either known or supposed to be portraits. Lord Orford had a picture of a scene in the same piece, where Macheath is going to execution. In this also the likenesses of Walker, and Miss Fenton, afterwards Duchess of Bolton, the first and original Macheath and Polly, were preserved.

In 1730 Mr Hogarth married the only daughter of Sir James Thornhill, by whom, however, he had no children. This union, indeed, was a stolen one, and consequently without the approbation of Sir James, who, considering the youth of his daughter, then scarcely eighteen, and the slender finances of her husband, as yet an obscure artist, was not easily reconciled to the match. Soon after this period, however, he began his Harlot’s Progress; and was advised by Lady Thornhill to have some of the scenes of it placed in the way of his father-in-law. Accordingly, one morning early, Mrs Hogarth undertook to convey several of them into her father’s dining-room. When he arose, he inquired whence they had come; and being told by whom they were introduced, he cried out, “Very well; the man who can furnish representations like these can also maintain a wife without a portion.” He designed this remark as an excuse for keeping his purse-strings close; but soon afterwards he became both reconciled and generous to the young people.

In 1732 Hogarth ventured to attack Mr Pope, in a plate called the Man of Taste, containing a view of the Gate of Burlington House, with Pope whitewashing it, and bespattering the Duke of Chandos’s coach. This plate was intended as a satire on the translator of Homer, Mr Kent the architect, and the Earl of Burlington. It was fortunate for Hogarth that he escaped the sting of the “wasp of Twickenham.” Either Hogarth’s obscurity at that time was his protection, or the poet was too prudent to exasperate a painter who had already given such proof of his abilities for satire.

In 1733 his genius became conspicuously known. The third scene of his Harlot’s Progress introduced him to the notice of the great. At a meeting of the treasury board, which was held a day or two after the appearance of that print, a copy of it was shown by one of the lords, as containing, amongst other excellencies, a striking likeness of Sir John Gonson. It gave universal satisfaction, brom the treasury each lord repaired to the print-shop for a copy of it, and Hogarth immediately rose into fame.

The Abbé Dubos has complained that no historical painter of his time went through a series of actions, and thus, like an historian, painted the successive fortunes of a hero from the cradle to the grave. What Dubos wished to see done, Hogarth performed. He launched out his young adventurer a simple girl upon the town, and conducted her through all the vicissitudes of wretchedness to a premature death. This was painting to the understanding and to the heart; none had ever before made the pencil subservient to the purposes of morality and instruction. A book like this is fitted to every soil and to every observer; he that runs may read it. Nor was the success of Hogarth confined to his persons. One of his excellencies consisted in what may be termed the furniture of his pieces. As, in sublime and historical representations, the fewer trivial circumstances are permitted to divide the spectator’s attention from the principal figures, the greater is their force, so, in scenes copied from familiar life, a proper variety of little domestic images contributes to throw an air of verisimilitude over the whole. “The Rake’s levee-room,” says Lord Orford, “the nobleman’s dining-room, the apartments of the husband and wife in Marriage-à-la-Mode, the aiderman’s parlour, the bedchamber, and many others, are the history of the manners of the age.”

In 1745 Hogarth sold about twenty of his capital pictures by auction; and in the same year he acquired additional reputation by the six prints of Marriage-à-la-Mode, which may be regarded as the groundwork of a novel called the Marriage Act, by Dr Shebbeare, and also of the Clandestine Marriage. The prints, however, possess far more of the true spirit of comedy than either the novel or the play; they are amongst the most masterly productions of this great dramatic painter of life and manners.

Soon after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle he went over to France, and was taken into custody at Calais whilst he was drawing the gate of that town; a circumstance which he has recorded in his picture entitled 0 the Roast Beef of Old England, published in 1749.

In 1753 he appeared to the world in the character of an author, and published a quarto volume, entitled Analysis of Beauty, written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas of taste. In this performance he shows, by a variety of examples, that a curve is the line of beauty, and that round swelling figures are most pleasing to the eye; and the truth of his opinion has been countenanced by subsequent writers on the subject. In this work he acknowledges himself indebted for assistance to his friends, particularly to one gentleman for his corrections and amendments of at least a third part of the wording. This friend was Dr Benjamin Hoadly, the physician, who carried on the work to about the third part, and then, through indisnosition, declined with regret the friendly office. The kind office of finishing the work, and superintending the publication, was assumed by Dr Morell, who superintended the remainder of the book. The preface was in like manner corrected by the Reverend Mr Townley. The family of Hogarth rejoiced when the last sheet of the Analysis was printed off, as the frequent disputes he had with his coadjutors, in the progress of the work, did not much harmonize his disposition. This work was translated into German by Mr Mylius, under the author’s inspection; and the translation was printed in London. A new and correct edition was in 1754 proposed for publication at Berlin by Vok, with an explanation of Mr Hogarth’s satirical prints, translated from the French; and an Italian translation was published at Leghorn in the year 1761.

This work may be considered as in many respects remarkable, emanating as it did from one who was totally illiterate, and who, in all probability, had never before attempted to throw together his ideas upon any subject of importance. But although his general principle is right, considered merely as expressing a fact, and al though the feeling or sentiment which we call beauty is generally excited in the mind by objects bounded by curve lines, yet neither Hogarth himself, nor any of those persons who assisted him in the composition of his work, ever perceived that external objects are beautiful or the reverse, [7:11:505]not because they possess this or that form, but in proportion as they are associated with, or regarded as the natural signs and emblems of, ideas or emotions which we denominate beautiful or otherwise; that the curve, considered per set is not more beautiful than the angular line; that, in applying this epithet to the former, we do so, not because it is a curve, but because it suggests to the percipient mind the idea of easy, gentle, flowing motion, or some other that is calculated to excite in it the feeling which we denominate beauty; that the sentiment of beauty is a reflected image of some pleasing emotion, softened and subdued by the awakened reminiscence; that the whole, therefore, resolves into the great law of association, by means of which one thing becomes the occasion of resuscitating another in the mind; and that external objects or external forms are not of themselves beautiful or deformed, but are so called only in proportion as they are the natural signs of, and serve to recall, emotions of a pleasing character, or the contrary. But this was a discovery reserved for other and more philosophical inquirers.

Hogarth affected to despise every kind of knowledge which he did not possess. Having established his fame with little or no obligation to literature, he either conceived it to be useless, or decried it because it lay altogether out of his reach. Till he commenced author, and was obliged to employ the friends already mentioned to correct his Analysis of Beauty, he did not seem to have discovered that even spelling was a necessary qualification in a writer. Previously to the time of which we are now speaking, one of his common topics of declamation was the uselessness of books to a man of his profession. In Beer Street, amongst other volumes consigned by him to the pastry-cook, we find Turnbull on Ancient Painting; a treatise which Hogarth should have been able to understand before he ventured to condemn it.

About 1757, his brother-in-law, Mr Thornhill, resigned the place of king’s ser; cant-pain ter in his favour.

The last remarkable circumstance of his life was his contest with Churchill. It is said that both met at Westminster Hall; Hogarth to take by his eye a ridiculous likeness of the poet, and Churchill to furnish a description of the painter. But Hogarth’s print of the poet was not much esteemed, and the poet’s letter to him was but little admired. When genius is forced to minister to the gratification of the baser passions, its efforts are seldom successful.

It may be truly observed of Hogarth, that all his powers of delighting were limited to his pencil. Having rarely been admitted into polite circles, none of his sharp corners had been rubbed off, and he continued to the last a rough, uncultivated man. The slightest contradiction transported him into rage. To some confidence in himself he was certainly entitled, for, as a comic painter, he could have claimed no honour that would not most readily have been allowed him; but he was at once unprincipled and variable in his political conduct and private attachments. He is also said to have beheld the rising eminence and popularity of Sir Joshua Reynolds with envy, and he frequently spoke with asperity both of the painter and his performances. Justice, however, obliges us to add, that he was liberal and hospitable; and that, in spite of the emoluments which his works had procured to him, he left but an inconsiderable fortune.

Of Hogarth’s lesser plates many were destroyed. When he wanted, on a sudden, a piece of copper, he would take any from which he had already worked off such a number of impressions as he supposed he would sell. He then sent it to be effaced, beaten out, or otherwise altered to his present purpose. The plates which remained in his possession were secured to his widow by 7 his will, dated the 12th of August 1764, chargeable with an annuity of eighty pounds to his sister. He died in the month of October of that year.

The character of Hogarth as an artist is delineated by Mr Gilpin in his Essay on Prints. “The works of this master,” says Mr Gilpin, “abound in true humour, and satire which is generally well directed; they are admirable moral lessons, and a fund of entertainment suited to every taste; a circumstance which shows them to be just copies of nature. We may consider them too as valuable repositories of the manners, customs, and dresses of his age.

“In design Hogarth was seldom at a loss. His invention was fertile, and his judgment accurate. An improper accident is rarely introduced, a proper one rarely omitted. No one could tell a story better, or make it, in all its circumstances, more intelligible. His genius, however, it must be owned, was suited only to low or familiar subjects; it never soared above common life; to subjects naturally sublime, or which from antiquity or other accidents borrowed dignity, he could not rise. In composition we see little in him to admire. In many of his prints the deficiency is so great as plainly to imply a want of all principle, which makes us ready to believe, that when we do meet with a beautiful group, it is the effect of chance. In one of his minor works, the Idle Prentice, we seldom see a crowd more beautifully managed than in the last print. If the sheriff-officers had not been placed in a line, and had been brought a little lower in the picture, so as to have formed a pyramid with the cart, the composition had been unexceptionable; and yet the first print of this work is such a striking instance of disagreeable composition, that it is amazing how an artist who had any idea of beautiful forms could suffer so unmasterly a performance to leave his hands. Of the distribution of light Hogarth had as little knowledge as of composition. In some of his pieces we see a good effect, as in the Execution just mentioned; in which, if the figures at the right and left corners had been kept down a little, the light would have been beautifully distributed on the fore-ground, and a fine secondary light spread over part of the crowd. But at the same time there is so obvious a deficiency in point of effect in most of his prints, that it is very evident he had no principles. Neither was Hogarth a master in drawing. Of the muscles and anatomy of the head and hands he had perfect knowledge, but his trunks are often badly moulded, and his limbs ill set on; yet his figures, upon the whole, are inspired with so much life and meaning, that the eye is kept in good humour in spite of its inclination to find fault. The author of the Analysis of Beauty, it might be supposed, would have given us more instances of grace than we find in the works of Hogarth; which shows strongly that theory and practice are not always united. Many opportunities his subjects naturally afford of introducing graceful attitudes, and yet we have very few examples of them. With instances of picturesque grace his works abound. Of this expression, in which the force of his genius lay, we cannot speak in terms too high. In every mode of it he was truly excellent. The passions he thoroughly understood, and all the effects which they produce in every part of the human frame. He had the happy art also of conveying his ideas with the same precision with which he conceived them. He was excellent too in expressing any humorous oddity which we often see stamped upon the human face. All his heads are cast in the very mould of nature. Hence that endless variety which is displayed throughout his works; and hence it is that the difference arises between his heads and the affected caricatures of those masters who have sometimes amused themselves with patching together an assemblage of features from their own ideas. Such are Spaniolet’s, which, though admirably executed, appear plainly to have [7:11:506] no archetypes in nature. Hogarth’s, on the other hand, are collections of natural curiosities. The Oxford Heads, the Physicians’ Arms, and some of his other pieces, are expressly of this humorous kind. They are truly comic, though ill-natured effusions of mirth; more entertaining than Spaniolet’s, as they are pure nature, but less innocent, as they contain ill-directed ridicule. But the species of expression in which this master perhaps most excels, is that happy art of catching those peculiarities of art and gesture which the ridiculous part of every profession contract, and which for that reason become characteristic of the whole. His counsellors, his undertakers, his lawyers, his usurers, are all conspicuous at sight. In a word, almost every profession may see in his works that particular species of affectation which they should most endeavour to avoid. The execution of this master is well suited to his subjects and manner of treating them. He etches with great spirit, and never gives one unnecessary stroke.”

In Mr Ireland’s Hogarth Illustrated, there is an account of all his prints; but the best and fullest description of them is to be found in Mr Nichols’s Memoirs of his Life and Works, in which there are copies of all his prints, accurately reduced.