In return, the grateful Tyers presented him with a gold pass ticket “In perpetuam Beneficii Memoriam.” It was long thought that Hogarth designed this himself. Mr Warwick Wroth (Numismatic Chronicle, vol. xviii.) doubts this, although he thinks it probable that Hogarth designed some of the silver Vauxhall passes which are figured in Wilkinson’s Londina illustrata. The only engravings between 1726 and 1732 which need be referred to are the “Large Masquerade Ticket” (1727), another satire on masquerades, and the print of “Burlington Gate” (1731), evoked by Pope’s Epistle to Lord Burlington, and defending Lord Chandos, who is therein satirized. This print gave great offence, and was, it is said, suppressed.
By 1731 Hogarth must have completed the earliest of the series of moral works 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 that year. Almost immediately afterwards he must have begun to engrave them—a task he had at first intended to leave to others. From an advertisement in the Country Journal; or, the Craftsman, 29th of January 1732, the pictures were then being engraved, and from later announcements it seems clear that they were delivered to the subscribers early in the following April, on the 21st of which month an unauthorized prose description of them was published. 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 “conversation pieces” above referred to, led to the further idea of connecting several groups or scenes so as to form a sequent narrative. “I wished,” says Hogarth, “to compose pictures on canvas, similar to representations on the stage.” “I have endeavoured,” he says again, “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 show.” There was never a more 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 such as Colonel Charteris and Justice Gonson give a vivid reality to the satire. It had an immediate 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 engravings were entered in the artist’s book. On the appearance of plate iii. the lords of the treasury trooped to the print shop for Sir John Gonson’s portrait which it contained. The story was made into a pantomime by Theophilus Cibber, and by 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.
From the MSS. of George Vertue in the British Museum (Add. MSS. 23069-98) it seems that during the progress of the plates, Hogarth was domiciled with his father-in-law, Sir James Thornhill, in the Middle Piazza, Covent Garden (the “second house eastward from James Street”), and it must have been thence that set out the historical expedition from London to Sheerness of which the original record still exists at the British Museum. This is an oblong MS. volume entitled An Account of what seem’d most Remarkable in the Five Days’ Peregrination of the Five Following Persons, vizt., Messieurs Tothall, Scott, Hogarth, Thornhill and Forrest. Begun on Saturday May 27th 1732 and Finish’d On the 31st of the Same Month. Abi tu et fac similiter. Inscription on Dulwich College Porch. The journal, which is written by Ebenezer, the father of Garrick’s friend Theodosius Forrest, gives a good idea of what a “frisk”—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. Wm. 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 “Golden Head” in Leicester Fields, which, with occasional absences at Chiswick, he continued to occupy until his death. By December of this year he was already engaged upon the engravings of a second Progress, that of a Rake. It was not as successful as its predecessor. It was in eight plates in lieu of six. The story is unequal; but there is nothing finer than the figure of the desperate hero 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 “according to Act of Parliament.” 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, &c.,” 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 delightful 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 Modern Midnight Conversation,” an admirable drinking scene which comes between them in 1733, and the bright little plate of “Southwark Fair,” which, although dated 1733, was published with “A Rake’s Progress” in 1735. Between these and “Marriage à 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” and “Sleeping Congregation” (1736), the “Scholars at a Lecture” (1737); the “Four Times of the Day” (1738), a series of pictures of 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, “for wit and imagination, without any other end, the best of all the painter’s works”; and finally the admirable plates of the Distrest Poet painfully composing a poem on “Riches” 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 à 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,” “with figures seven feet high,” 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 connexion with Captain Coram’s recently established Foundling Hospital (1739), which he aided with his money, his graver and his brush, 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 observation which are common to every spectator. It is therefore more remarkable, looking to his education and antecedents, that his masterpiece, “Marriage à la mode,” should successfully depict, as the advertisement has it, “a variety of modern occurrences in high life.”
