Hogarth [antikvár]

Preface This book owes much of its content to courses on Hogarth and British art which I have given in recent years at Westfield and University Colleges. I can only express a general feehng of gratitude to my students past and present, but I can be more specific in my appreciation of two members of the Enghsh Department at Westfield, John Chalker and Peter Dixon, whose misfortune it has been to have offices near mine, and thus be at the mercy of my questions throughout the working day. I have over the years absorbed many ideas about Hogarth from Lawrence Gowing and Michael Kitson, and 1 must record my gratitude for recent conversations with Martin Butlin, David Freedberg, Andrew Harrison, Patrick Noon and John Sunderland. Without Frances Carey the book would probably not have been started, and without Maureen and Terry Page it certainly would not have been finished. It is to those two, Londoners like Hogarth, that the book is dedicated. D. B. London,June 1980 Unless otherwise stated, collections are in London. Introduction There has barely been a decade since Hogarth's death over two hundred years ago in which someone has not written a book on him or gathered together a volume of his prints. By no stretch ofthe imagination can he be considered an unjustly ncglected artist. Each generation has found its own Hogarth, and a number of recent studies, notably those by Professor Ronald Paulson, have made available an immense amount of information about his hfe and labours. Yet our estimate of him has undergone an organic change over the last two centuries. For his own century and the one which followed he was regarded principally as a great humorist, whose prints provided an anatomy of his own time which could be compared with Shakespeare's picture of Elizabethan England. He was almost universally judged by literary standards, and William Hazlitt's claim that as a comic author he was second only to Shakespeare was rarely challenged. One can cite innumerable examples of his influence upon writers from Fielding to Dickens, and he played an important posthumous role in the rise of literary painting in England in the nineteenth century. By contrast he was very little regarded as a painter, nor was his engraving technique normally regarded as more than serviceable. For most people the Hogarth they knew came from late and reworked impressions of his worn-out plates or bad steel-engraved copies. Even in his own lifetime, with a few notable exceptions, his paintings were very rarely collected, and he himself made the technique of his own prints seem unimportant by claiming that he was too idle to be a good engraver, bringing in French engravers to copy his designs when he could afford to. In the present century many of his paintings in pubhc collections, sucli as The Graham Children (Tate Gallery) and The Shrimp Girl (National 113, 120 Gallery), have been greatly admired, but it was only with Lawrence Gowing's great exhibition of his work at the Tate in 1971-72 that the full spectrum of his achievement could be gauged. He emerged from that exhibition as unquestionably one ofthe great eighteenth-century painters, a marvellous colourist and an innovator at all levels of artistic expression. In a way this revelation has not yet been fully assimilated, and it is the main aim of this book to reconcile his achievements as a satirist with his prowess as a painter. It was assumed by many writers on the arts after Hogarth's death