some minor folk, as for example the aged housemaid Bridget Holmes. He was
described by Horace Walpole as "one of the best native painters who have
flourished in England".
4) Painting In The 18th Century.
The eighteenth century was the great age of British painting. It was
in this period that British art attained a distinct national character.
In the seventeenth century, art in Britain had been dominated largely by
the Flemish artist, Anthony van Dyck. In the early eighteenth century,
although influenced by Continental movements, particularly by French
rococo, British art began to develop nindependently. William Hogarth, born
just before the turn of the century, was the first major aritst to reject
foreign influence and establish a kind of art whose themes and subjects
were thoroughly British. His penetrating, witty portrayal of the
contemporary scene, his protest against social injustice and his attack on
the vulgtarities of fashianable society make him one of the most original
and significant of British artists.
Hogarth was followed by a row of illustrious painters: Thomas
Cainsborough, with his lyrical landscapes, "fancy pictures" and portraits;
the intellectual Sir Joshua Reynolds, who painted charming society
portraits and became the first president of the Royal Academy; and George
Stubbs, who is only now being recognized as an artist of the greatest
visual perception and sensitivity. There are many others, including Wright
of Derby, Wilson, Lawrence, Ramsay, Raeburn, Romney, Wheatley, and the
young Turner.
5) Satirical Genre Painting
5.1) William Hogarth(1697--1764)
William Hogarth was unquestionably one of the greatest of English
artists and a man of remarkably individual character and thought. It was
his achievement to give a comprehensive view of social life within the
framework of moralistic and dramatic narrative. He produced portraits
which brought a fresh vitality and truth into the jaded profession of what
he called "phizmongering". He observed both high life and low with a keen
and critical eye and his range of observation was accompanied by an
exceptional capacity for dramatic composition, and in painting by a
technical quality which adds beauty to pictures containing an element of
satire of caricature.
A small stocky man with blunt pugnacious features and alert blue
eyes, he had all the sharp-wittedness of the born Cockney and an insular
pride which led to his vigorous attacks on the exaggerated respect for
fereign artists and the taste of would-be connoisseurs who brought over (as
he said) "shiploads of dead Christs, Madonnas and Holy Families" by
inferior hands. Thereis no reason to suppose he had anything but respect
for the great Italian masters, though he deliberately took a provocative
attitude. What he objected to as much as anything was the absurd
veneration of the darkness produced by time and varnish as well as the
assumption that English painters were necessarily inferior to others. A
forthrightness of statement may perhaps be related to hes North-country
inheritance, for his father came to London from West-morland, but was in
any case the expression of a democratic outlook and unswervingly honest
intelligence.
The fact that he was apprenticed as a boy to a silver-plate engraver
has a considerable bearing on Hogarth's development. It instilled a
decorative sense which is never absent from his most realistic productions.
It introduced him to the world of prints, after famous masters or by the
satirical commentators of an earlier day. It is the engraver's sense of
line coupled with a regard for the value of Rococo curvature which governs
his essay on aesthetics, The Analysis of Beauty.
As a painter Hogarth may be assumed to have learned the craft in
Thornhill's "academy", though his freshness of colour and feeling for the
creamy substance of oil paint suggest more acquaintance than he admitted to
with the technique of his French contemporaries. His first success as a
painter was in the "conversation pieces" in which his bent as an artist
found a logical beginning. These informal groups of family and friends
surrounded by the customary necessariesof their day-to-day life were
congenial in permitting him to treat a pictureas astage. He was not the
inventor of the genre, which can be traced back to Dutch and Flemish art of
the seventeenth century and in which he had contemporary rivals. Many were
produced when he was about thirty and soon after he made his clandestine
match with Thornhill's daughter in 1729, when extraefforts to gain a
livelihood became necessary. With many felicities of detail and
arrangement they show Hogarth still in a restrained and decorous mood. A
step nearer to the comprehensive view of life was the picture of an actual
stage, the scene from The Beggar's Opera with which he scored a great
success about 1730, making sveral versions of the painting. Two prospects
must have been revealed to him as a result, the idea of constructing his
own pictorial drama comprising various scenes of social life, and that of
reaching a wider public through the means of engraving. The first
successful siries: "The Harlot's Progress, " of which only the engraving
now exist, was immediately followed by the tremendous verve and riot of
"The Rake's Progress", c. 1732; the masterpiece of the story series the
"Marriage а la Mode" followed after an interval of twelve years.
As a painter of social life, Hogarth shows the benefit of the system
of memory training which he made a self-discipine. London was his universe
and he displayed his mastery in painting every aspect of its people and
architecture, from the mansion in Arlington Street, the interior of which
provided the setting for the disillusioned couple in the second scene of
the "Marriage а la Mode", to the dreadful aspect of Bedlam. Yet he was not
content with one line of development only and the work of his mature years
takes a varied course. He could not resist the temptation to attempt a
revalry with the history painters, though with little successs. The
Biblical compositions for St. Bartholomew's Hospital on which he embarked
after "The Rake's Progress" were not of a kind to convey his real genius.
He is sometimes satirical as in "The March of the Guards towards Scotland",
and the "Oh the Roast Beef of Old England!(Calais Gate)", which was a
product of his single expeditionabroad with its John Bull comment on the
condition of France, and also the "Election"series of 1755 with its
richness of comedy. In portraiture he displays a great variety. The charm
of childhood, the ability to compose a vivid group, a delightful delicacy
of colour appear in the "Graham Children" of 1742. The portrait heads of
his servants are penetrating studies of character. The painting of Captain
Coram, the philanthropic sea captain who took a leading part in the
foundation of the Foundling Hospital, adapts the formality of the
ceremonial portrait to a democratic level with a singularlyengaging
effects. The quality of Hogarth as an artist is seen to advantage in his
sketches and one sketch in particular, the famous "Shrimp Girl" quickly
executed with a limited range of colour, stands alone in his work, taking
its place among the masterpieces of the world in its harmonyof form and
content, its freshness and vitality.
The genius of Hogarth is such that he is often regarded as a solitary
rebel against a decaying artificiality, and yet though he had no pupils, he
had contemporaries who, while of lesser stature in one way and another,
tended in the same direction.
William Hogarth expressed in his art the new mood of national
elation, the critical spirit of the self-confident bourgeoisie and the
liberal humanitarianism of his age. He was the first native-born English
painter to become a hero of the Enlightenment. One reason for his
popularity was that the genius of the age found its highest expression in
wit. From Moliиre to Votaire, from Congreve through Swift and Pope to
Fielding, the literature of wit was enriched on a scale unprecedent since
antiquity. The great comic writers of the century exposed folly, scarified
pretension and lashed hypocrisy and cruelty.
It was the great and single-handed achievement of Hogarth to
establish comedy as a category in art to be rated as highly as comedy in
literature. According to the hierarchy of artistic categories that was
inherited from the Renaissance, istoria, --the narrative description of
elevated themes, especially from the Bible and antiquity --was the highest
branch of art measured by a scale which placed low-life genre at the
bottom.
Hogarth was actually sensitive to the categorical deprecation of
comic art, and with his friend Henry Fielding set about a campaign to raise
its standing.
In a number of works and statements Hogarth identified his cause with
comic literature. In his self -portrait of 1745 the oval canvas rests on
the works of Shakespeare, Milton and Swift. Because his reasons for
invoking literature were misunderstood, Hogarth exposed himself to the
charge of being a "literary" artist. The legend of the literary painter
can be traced back to his own age. "Other pictures we look at, "wrote
Charles Lamb, "his prints we read." Some of the blame for aesthetic
deprecation must be placed on the shoulders of Hogarth himself. He seems
to have even encouraged an image which mystified his critics. He remarked
of the connoisseurs "Because I hate them, they think I hate Titian and let
them!" He outraged Horace Walpole by saying that he could paint a portrait
as well as Van Dyck. He compared nature with art, to the desadvantage of
the latter.
If his statements are examined carefully, it becomes apparent that he
