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William Hogarth
Satirical Genre Painting

  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 a 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 a 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 Moliere 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 did not attack foreign art as such, that he passionately admired the Old Masters.
What manner of man was he who executed thse portraits--so various, so faithful, and so admirable? In the London National Gallery most of us have seen the best and most carefully finished series of his comic paintings, and the portrait of his own honest face, of which the bright blue eyes shine out from the canvas and give you an idea of that keen and brave look with which William Hogarth regarded the world. No man was ever less of a hero; you see him before you, and can fancy what he was --a jovial, honest London citizen, stout and sturdy; a hearly, plain-spoken man, loving his laugh, his friend, his glass, his roast-beef of Old England, and having a proper bourgeois scorn for foreign fiddlers, foregn singers, and, above all, for foreign painters, whom he held in the most amusing contempt.
Hogarth's "Portraits of Captain Coram"
Hogarth painted his portrait of Capitain Coram in 1740, and donated it the same year to the Foundling Hospital.
It was painted on Hogarth's own initiative, without having been commissioned, and was presented to a charitable institution in the making, one of whose founder members Hogarth was, and it depicts a friend of his, the prime mover of the whole undertaking. The very format of the picture shows that Hogarth was exerting all his powers to produce a masterpiece. It measures about 2.4 by 1.5 metres, the biggest portrait Hogarth ever painted.
In producing a work like this, of monumental proportions, where there was no purchaser to sistort the artist's intentions, Hogarth mst have had a definite aim or aims, and it is probable that he desired his work to express something of significance to him at this period of time.
The portrait is conceived in the great style, with foreground plus repoussoir, middle-ground, background, classical column and drapery. Coram is depicted sitting on a chair, which is placed on a platform with two steps leading up to it.
Hogarth makes use of the conventional scheme, traditional in portraits of rulers and noblemen, with its column, drapery and platform as laudatory symbols to stress the subject's dignity, a composition, which in the England of that time, was usually associated with Van Dyck's much admired but old-fashioned protraits of kings and noblemen. Hogarth's painting, with its attributes and symbols is not far removed form history painting. But the subject is a sea-captain, whose social position did not, by the fixed conventions for this category of picture, entitle him to this kind of portrayal. His relatively modest position in society is emphasized by his simple dress, a broad-coat of cloth, by the absence of the wig obligatory for every parson of standing, and by the intimace and realism with which the artist has depicted this figure with his broad, stocky body, shose short, bent legs do not reach the floor.
The mode of depiction refers back to , and creates in the beholder an expectation of a somewhat schematized and idealized manner of human portrayal. But by depicting Coram in an intimate and realistic fashion Hogarth breaks the mould. In one and the same work he has made use of the means of expression of both the great and the low style. By making apparent the low social status of his subject, Hogarth seems also to wish to breach the classic doctrine, whose scale of values provided the foundation of the theories about the division of painting into distinct categories, where the nature of the theme determined a picture's place on the scale "high" to "low".
კატეგორია: British painting | დაამატა: nukria (22.04.2012)
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