BOOKS
The human comedy
Philip Hensher
HOGARTH: A LIFE AND A WORLD by Jenny Uglow Faber, £25.00, pp.794 ogarthian' is standard reviewers' slang for a particular tiresome 18th-century rumbustiousness; but I wish it were possi- ble to rescue the word, make it mean something closer to Hogarth's own allur- ing, veiled, postponing genius. If Hogarth was just a hearty, rude fellow, painting pic- tures of drunks in taverns, I doubt we would think any more of him than we do of his contemporary Francis Hayman. It's the rapturous response to the worl, the sense that there is nothing that cannot be put down in paint, nothing that cannot be achieved with a truly sophisticated sense of what things mean, and a sense of what light is like when it falls on a silver bowl; there is the true heart of Hogarth, the heart, one is tempted to say, of painting itself.
The quintessential Hogarth painting is not a particularly famous one, but one of perfect idiosyncrasy, which still pulls up its observers with its peculiar accomplishment. Francis Matthew Schutz was an acquain- tance of Hogarth's, an agreeable drinking companion of excessive habits. On marry- ing in 1755, his wife commissioned a por- trait of him from Hogarth, with the intention of filling him with distaste for his bachelor habits and encouraging him into a more respectable frame of mind. The result, Francis Matthew Schutz in Bed, shows him after a particularly heavy night being sick into a chamber pot. It is at once extremely funny, very distasteful and full of an amused intent to improve the worst of human behaviour. Exactly what we usually mean by `Hogarthian'.
But the Schutz portrait is not just a vul- gar funny joke; it is an extraordinarily fine bit of painting. The hangings of the bed are done with those crisps strokes of the brush Hogarth made his own, solid and tactile; the voluptuous spillings of cloth as fine as Fragonard. The handling of the paint, the perfect careful structure are entirely French in manner; the meaning and appeal of the painting entirely Anglo-Saxon. Needless to say, the inheritors of the Schutz found the portrait of their ancestor too much, and one wonders where on earth the subject and his wife hung it in their house. Until recently, Schutz was portrayed read- ing a book, still at a most peculiar angle and with rather a green face; the chamber pot and stream of vomit has only in the last few years been restored.
Hogarth was always one to deny any kind of foreign influence, and there is a certain amount of tedious roast-beefery in his paintings and his writings which has to be got through. But his whole practice contra- dicts his official line. Art historians are always digging up moderately interesting English painters like Bartholomew Dan- dridge to display a bit of French influence at the time. In fact, Hogarth was the painter of the time who absorbed most from the sophisticated subtleties of the French Protestant émigrés. Even Watteau finds his way into The Rake's Progress, though it must be said that sometimes, as in Marriage a-la-Mode, he used a French rococo style to attack Frenchified manners. And it wasn't just the French; though he was always already to have a go at filthy Dutch painters, in a burlesque of his own Paul before Felix, his contemporaries, like Paul Sandby, easily thought of Dutch paint- ing as a major influence on his practice.
Often presenting himself as a broad sim- A Painter and His Pug ple fellow, with no time for mucking about, he can, in fact, only be regarded as one of the most profoundly learned and sophisti- cated painters of his time. A flying goose, in the Election prints, is found to allude to Pietro da Cortona; a sordid scene of mur- der packs motifs from one Deposition after another into its composition. It shouldn't be forgotten that he did not come from a simple background; his father went bankrupt through the bizarre idea of estab- lishing a coffee-house where all the cus- tomers would be obliged to speak Latin.
His paintings, which seem so addicted to telling stories, are, in the end, only addict- ed to seeing how much meaning can be loaded onto an object, how much signifi- cance. Frequently, in his narrative series Marriage a-la-Mode and the Rake's and the Harlot's Progress, the easiest way to do this was through telling a story; in the pictures most packed with fantasy, like the wonder- ful Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn, which Horace Walpole thought his best painting, or his last print, The Bathos, the heavy burden of significant objects is there not to explain, but just in riotous irrational abundance.
And he was a marvellous painter, who, in his career, rose from a stiff, dry handling of forms and colours to an incomparable free- dom. I can never understand why people sometimes claim that Hogarth was an awk- ward and unadroit sort of painter; the fab- ulously fresh Graham Children in the National Gallery is full of passages, from the murderous cat to the flashes of light on the silver bowl, which are minor miracles of observed life. And, though it's difficult not to come to the conclusion that he wasted a lot of his talent on the false goals of epic history painting, it's just as difficult, coming across even a painting as generally reviled as the Sigismunda Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo — a painting even Hogarth could never get anyone to buy — not to admire the splendid gloom, the monumen- tal simplicity of the appalled head of Sigis- munda.
This is a superb biography, and its limita- tions are the limitations of the sources; the fact, for instance, that though so much of Hogarth's art is about ordinary people, the writer has to approach him through the tes- timony of extreme sophisticates like Horace Walpole. I thought Uglow held the balance perfectly between the exquisite refinement of 18th-century taste and the vulgar enchantment of the streets; it's always tempting, writing about the 18th century, to overdo one or the other. Uglow seems to know both what it was like inside Burlington House sipping coffee, and dodging the link-boys outside.
There are a couple of small slips. Crebil- lon fils' pornographic work about the sofa is a poem, not a novel; she has miscon- strued the Boys Peeping at Nature subscrip- tion ticket, which is specifically a defence of satire; and, though she covers most of Hogarth's work, she does miss out a couple of enchantingly good pieces. But otherwise — and this is an area which constantly trips up even specialists — I could not fault it, and could not stop reading it. It's very good to see so much about Hogarth's portraits, which are some of the most profound of the century, and which often get relegated to some second-rank status; the engraving of Lord Lovat before his execution, or the painting of the murderess Sarah Malcolm, or the famous painting of his servants are, however, among his most serious and adult works. Uglow is greatly to be preferred to the standard life, Ronald Paulson's multi- volume biography, which is no doubt deeply admirable, and which one day I look forward to finishing.
She clearly loves Hogarth, as everyone who looks at him seriously inevitably comes to, and loves his prickly personality. There is a story about an ugly duke who refused to accept his (too-true-to-life) portrait, until Hogarth informed him that in three days he proposed to add a tail and 'some other little Appendages' and sell it to `Mr Hare, the Famous Wild-Beast-Man'. 'The money came,' Uglow remarks, 'the picture was collected, taken home, and burned.'
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