Engraver's progress

John Kenyon

Hogarth: His Life, Art and Times Ronald Paulson (Yale 2 volumes E17.50)

In the eightenth century even art was a subdivision of politics. The abrupt dismissal of the great Surveyor-General Sir Christopher Wren in 1718, was not the result of a bureaucratic reshuffle, nor did it imply a lack of confidence in Wren's technical powers, though he was now an old man. It was a victory for a new Whig aesthetic, its bible Lord Shaftesbury's

Characteristicks, its prophet RiChard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, architect, connoisseur, statesman and millionaire,

whose insistence on order, harmony and proportion in the arts complemented the balance now theoretically achieved in the

British Constitution; as opposed to the Tory baroque aesthetic of the old Board of Works, sensuous, ill-proportioned and consecrated to the uses of absolute monarchy.

That English drawing and painting remained insular, self-sufficient, and blandly indifferent to Whig aesthetics was due largely to one man, William Hogarth. Working almost single-handed from the beginning, he achieved a position of dominance in the flourishing printing trade, elbowed aside the powerfullY entrenched printsellers, who had hitherto

pocketed most of the profits and used the artiet as a mere handyman, and pushed 0 general Act through Parliament in 1735

which safeguarded the copyright position of engravers. His own skill and vital imagination, expressed in moralities like

The Harlot's Progress, had given him a firm grip on the urban middle-class market for 'fine prints; complex and sophisticated

in form, they bore a message as subtle Rs an axe-stroke. His singular eminence survived his death, and when his Engravers' Act was revised in 1767 a special clause was inserted safeguarding

his widow's copyright in his plates for

another twenty years. Meanwhile he had gone far beyond the confines of the black

and white, for in the spring of 1728 he tool( up palette and brush; with astonishing results, for in little more than a year he Viaa, turning out work which was " unexcelleti

in pure technique by any other English painter of the eighteenth century." His skill in catching facial likenesses, and his abilitY

to'place the body in convincing attitudes, made him the acknowledged master of the conversation piece, and though he never achieved his ambition of becoming a great, ' history ' painter, in poignant anecdota' studies like The Distressed Poet he, looks forward to the Victorian school (11, genre painting. Typically, he also fountleu a Society of Artists, to give his profession cohesion and an improved social statuS, and his practice lof• auctioning his, individual paintings ,brought him fee' which were the envy of his colleagues. Paulson's new biogrc;tphy is vast, learneu ,and comprehensive. It, is difficult to see how it could be superseded, or eve,ri, significantly bettered, Mid scholarly as it it never sinks under Ithes weight of its oval

learning. It is an agreeable, civilised and highly intelligent book, and considering its size and its multitudinous illustrations, it is not expensive.

But Hogarth the man remains elusive. Though he does not stress the fact, naturally, Paulson has unearthed little information about his private life or his character. Faced by the brutal horror of prints like Gin Lane, or Four Stages of Cruelty, it is easy to diagnose a streak of pathological morbidity; but remember, this was an age which decorated the gates of its chief insane asylum with revolting life-size statues of Dementia and Melancholia. What Paulson does suggest is that Hogarth's spell in the Fleet prison as a boy (with his father, who had been arrested for debt) scarred him for life: The emphasis throughout his work is on Prisons, real and metaphorical, on the relationship between the individual and institutions, on punishment hardly warranted by the crime, and on the image of the deluded and isolated individual. Even when he is not dealing with People who are in a prison of one sort or another, he portrays rooms which are more like Prison cells than boudoirs or parlours.'

A Puritan upbringing intensified his concern for the moral degradation he saw around him, and his themes struck to the heart of his middle-class clientage; but it was a case of the market coming to the Man, rather than the man pandering to the market. His real concern for the poor and lonely is evident in his generous patronage of the Coram Hospital for Foundling Children, which as a result still houses two of his finest paintings.

What an American like Paulson does not sense is the plebeian streak in Hogarth, Which he was not afraid to indulge, even display. A small but suggestive indication is his violent 'prejudice against the Church of Rome, rarely in the forefront of his Pictures, but rarely absent. More significant, indeed basic to his whole oeuvre, was his plebeian suspicion of the foreigner, and his almost neurotic rejection of foreign influences. One brief holiday in France confirmed his worst fears, and the Picture he painted on his return, The Roast Beef of Old England (or Calais Gate), is a caricature of chauvinist Prejudice. On the other hand, The Rake's Progress and many lesser-known works, express in their every line a deep contempt for — almost a hatred of — the fashionable ruling class. Paulson even argues that in the last searing scene of The Rake's Progress Bedlam is intended as "metaphor for society," while in his famous Election series the basic theme is the cynical manipulation of the lower classes by their social superiors. It was not merely his aesthetic rejection of the ideas of the Burlingtonians that caused him to shun aristocratic patronage, nor is it an accident that his finest portrait is of Thomas Coram, another self-made man, He Was the first, and for a long time the last, English working-class artist.

Due to a transposition of lines in a review by Isabel Quigly last week, K. M. Peyton was inadvertently credited with having won the Carnegie Medal five times. In fact she Won it in 1969 with The Edge of the Cloud.