Yet, as an accurate delineation of upper class 18th century
society, his “Marriage à la mode” has never, we believe, been
seriously assailed. The countess’s bedroom, the earl’s apartment
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 “Turk’s Head Bagnio,”
the quack-doctor’s museum in St Martin’s Lane, or the mean
opulence of the merchant’s house in the city. And what story
could be more vividly, more perspicuously, more powerfully told
than this godless alliance of sacs et parchemins—this miserable
tragedy of an ill-assorted marriage? There is no defect of invention,
no superfluity of detail, no purposeless stroke. It has
the merit of a work by a great master of fiction, with the additional
advantages which result from the pictorial fashion of the
narrative; and it is matter for congratulation that it is still to
be seen by all the world in the National Gallery in London,
where it can tell its own tale better than pages of commentary.
The engravings of “Marriage à la mode” were dated April 1745.
Although by this time the painter found a ready market for his
engravings, he does not appear to have been equally successful
in selling his pictures. The people bought his prints; but the
richer and not numerous connoisseurs who purchased pictures
were wholly in the hands of the importers and manufacturers
of “old masters.” In February 1745 the original oil paintings
of the two Progresses, the “Four Times of the Day” and the
“Strolling Actresses” were still unsold. On the last day of
that month Hogarth disposed of them by an ill-devised kind of
auction, the details of which may be read in Nichols’s Anecdotes,
for the paltry sum of £427, 7s. No better fate attended “Marriage
à la mode,” which six years later became the property of Mr Lane
of Hillingdon for 120 guineas, being then in Carlo Maratti frames
which had cost the artist four guineas a piece. Something of this
was no doubt due to Hogarth’s impracticable arrangements,
but the fact shows conclusively how completely blind his contemporaries
were to his merits as a painter, and how hopelessly
in bondage to the all-powerful picture-dealers. Of these latter
the painter himself gave a graphic picture in a letter addressed
by him under the pseudonym of “Britophil” to the St James’s
Evening Post, in June 1737.
But if Hogarth was not successful with his dramas on canvas, he occasionally shared with his contemporaries in the popularity of portrait painting. For a picture, executed in 1746, of Garrick as Richard III. he was paid £200, “which was more,” says he, “than any English artist ever received for a single portrait.” In the same year a sketch of Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, afterwards beheaded on Tower Hill, had an exceptional success.
We must content ourselves with a brief enumeration of the most important of his remaining works. These are “The Stage Coach or Country Inn Yard” (1747); the series of twelve plates entitled “Industry and Idleness” (1747), depicting the career of two London apprentices; the “Gate of Calais” (1749), which had its origin in a rather unfortunate visit paid to France by the painter after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle; the “March to Finchley” (1750); “Beer Street,” “Gin Lane” and the “Four Stages of Cruelty” (1751); the admirable representations of election humours in the days of Sir Robert Walpole, entitled “Four Prints of an Election” (1755–1758); and the plate of “Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism, a Medley” (1762), adapted from an earlier unpublished design called “Enthusiasm Delineated.” Besides these must be chronicled three more essays in the “great style of history painting,” viz. “Paul before Felix,” “Moses brought to Pharaoh’s Daughter” and the Altarpiece for St Mary Redcliffe at Bristol. The first two were engraved in 1751–1752, the last in 1794. A subscription ticket to the earlier pictures, entitled “Paul before Felix Burlesqued,” had a popularity far greater than that of the prints themselves.
In 1745 Hogarth painted that admirable portrait of himself with his dog Trump, which is now in the National Gallery. In a corner of this he had drawn on a palette a serpentine curve with the words “The Line of Beauty.” Much inquiry ensued as to the meaning of this hieroglyphic; and in an unpropitious hour the painter resolved to explain himself in writing. The result was the well-known Analysis of Beauty (1753), a treatise to fix “the fluctuating ideas of Taste,” otherwise a desultory essay having for pretext the precept attributed to Michelangelo that a figure should be always “Pyramidall, Serpent like and multiplied by one two and three.” The fate of the book was what might have been expected. By the painter’s adherents it was praised as a final deliverance upon aesthetics; by his enemies and professional rivals, its obscurities, and the minor errors which, notwithstanding the benevolent efforts of literary friends, the work had not escaped, were made the subject of endless ridicule and caricature. It added little to its author’s fame, and it is perhaps to be regretted that he ever undertook it. Moreover, there were further humiliations in store for him. In 1759 the success of a little picture called “The Lady’s Last Stake,” painted for Lord Charlemont, procured him a commission from Sir Richard Grosvenor to paint another picture “upon the same terms.” Unhappily on this occasion he deserted his own field of genre and social satire, to select the story from Boccaccio (or rather Dryden) of Sigismunda weeping over the heart of her murdered lover Guiscardo, being the subject of a picture in Sir Luke Schaub’s collection by Furini which had recently been sold for £400. The picture, over which he spent much time and patience, was not regarded as a success; and Sir Richard rather meanly shuffled out of his bargain upon the plea that “the constantly having it before one’s eyes, would be too often occasioning melancholy ideas to arise in one’s mind.” Sigismunda, therefore, much to the artist’s mortification, and the delight of the malicious, remained upon his hands. As, by her husband’s desire, his widow valued it at £500, it found no purchaser until after her death, when the Boydells bought it for 56 guineas. It was exhibited, with others of Hogarth’s pictures, at the Spring Gardens exhibition of 1761, for the catalogue of which Hogarth engraved a Head-piece and a Tail-piece which are still the delight of collectors; and finally, by the bequest of Mr J. H. Anderdon, it passed in 1879 to the National Gallery, where, in spite of theatrical treatment and a repulsive theme, it still commands admiration for its colour, drawing and expression.
In 1761 Hogarth was sixty-five years of age, and he had but three years more to live. These three years were embittered by an unhappy quarrel with his quondam friends, John Wilkes and Churchill the poet, over which most of his biographers are contented to pass rapidly. Having succeeded John Thornhill in 1757 as serjeant painter (to which post he was reappointed at the accession of George III.), an evil genius prompted him in 1762 to do some “timed” thing in the ministerial interest, and he accordingly published the indifferent satire of “The Times, plate i.” This at once brought him into collision with Wilkes and Churchill, and the immediate result was a violent attack upon him, both as a man and an artist, in the opposition North Briton, No. 17. The alleged decay of his powers, the miscarriage of Sigismunda, the cobbled composition of the Analysis, were all discussed with scurrilous malignity by those who had known his domestic life and learned his weaknesses. The old artist was deeply wounded, and his health was failing. Early in the next year, however, he replied by that portrait of Wilkes which will for ever carry his squinting features to posterity. Churchill retaliated in July by a savage Epistle to William Hogarth, to which the artist rejoined by a print of Churchill as a bear, in torn bands and ruffles, not the most successful of his works. “The pleasure, and pecuniary advantage,” writes Hogarth manfully, “which I derived from these two engravings” (of Wilkes and Churchill), “together with occasionally riding on horseback, restored me to as much health as can be expected at my time of life.” He produced but one more print, that of “Finis, or The Bathos,” March 1764, a strange jumble of “fag ends,” intended as a tail-piece to his collected prints; and on the 26th October of the same year he died of an aneurism at his house in Leicester Square. His wife, to whom he left his plates as a chief source of income, survived him until 1789. He was buried in Chiswick churchyard, where a tomb was erected to him by his friends in 1771, with an epitaph by Garrick. Not far off, on the road
