Albion (40 page)

Hesitancy and awkward formality: “Mr. and Mrs. Andrews” by Thomas Gainsborough. Are they embarrassed to be the owners of such a landscape?

Theatre in painting: “Mr. B. finds Pamela writing.” From Joseph Highmore’s illustrations for Richardson’s novel
Pamela
.

Pegwell Bay, Kent, “A Recollection of October 5th 1858” by William Dyce: the landscape of the English shore-line “touched by mystery and enchantment.”

“Margate from the Sea” by J. M. W. Turner, “the Cockney boy who felt the romance of the ocean, becoming once more the seafarer of the Anglo-Saxon lament.”

The romantic imagination: “The artist is then one surrounded by invisible powers.” “The Great Day of His Wrath,” from John Martin’s Judgement series.

The celebrated painting by Henry Wallis of the doomed young poet, Chatterton, the most successful faker of the eighteenth century.

“Stroud: An Upland Landscape” by Philip Wilson Steer. It was in the Malvern Hills that Langland dreamed his marvellous dream and Elgar was inspired to express yearning and nostalgia in
The Dream of Gerontius
.

“Reliance upon practical detail and purposeful experiment seems to breathe an English spirit.” “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” by Joseph Wright of Derby.

The open elaboration of the Lloyds Building reflects an English love of surface decoration.

His first paintings were of scenes from Gay’s
The Beggar’s Opera
, in which “high” and “low” are confounded, but his gift for moral portraiture can be seen most clearly in relation to Langland or Chaucer. Only in the city can true drama and allegory be discovered. “In these compositions,” he wrote, “those subjects which will both entertain and improve the mind, bid fair to be of the greatest utility, and must therefore be entitled to rank in the highest class.” That emphasis upon “utility” might of itself be enough to characterise his English genius, but his demotic and egalitarian temper is also pertinent. He dwelled keenly upon the details of “low life,” and crowded his engravings with the weak and helpless. In part it represents a Hogarthian defiance of “high” art, and a kind of embarrassment at the striking of heroic or historical attitudes; in practice, too, it relies upon the representation of homely or familiar details rather than the grandly or generally expressive painterly gesture. The deflation of magnificence has always been part of the English imagination.

Hogarth also depicts pantomimes and masquerades on the streets of London, as if in implicit homage to the theatrical reality by which they are surrounded. In an engraving completed in the early months of 1724,
Masqueradesand Operas
, the London crowd is seen to patronise a pantomime entitled The Necromancer; in the same street, Haymarket, is displayed the notice for a midnight masquerade. Hogarth also drew Punch, whom in
The Analysisof Beauty
he called “droll by being the reverse of all elegance, both as to movement and figure.” The same may be concluded of the Londoners in his engravings, who are often rendered as caricatures or as types.

Hogarth is of London, too, in his disregard for the conventional pieties of Christianity. Turner died murmuring that the sun was god, and this pagan spirit is very much part of the city’s instinctive and energetic life. In the fifth plate of
Marriage-à-la-Mode
, Hogarth parodies the Descent from the Cross in the dying posture of a nobleman; he also parodied the effects of sermonising in The Sleeping Congregation and burlesqued William Kent’s altar-piece at St. Clement Danes Church. One curious detail may be mentioned in this context. In
The Sleeping Congregation
Hogarth has included an hour-glass, but this is only one of the many time-pieces which he incorporates within the scenes of London. In the work entitled
Morning
the clock of St. Paul’s Church is clearly visible, with an image of Father Time above it and the legend “
Sic
Transit Gloria Mundi
” below. Smoke rises from a chimney pot towards these emblems of time, as if to represent the elements of transitoriness and forgetfulness in the passages of London life. In such paintings as
The
Graham Children
and
The Lady’s Last Stake
, clocks appear as emblematic features of a rushing or decaying world. In his last completed work,
Tailpiece
, or
The Bathos
, he again depicts Father Time with his scythe at a ruinous tavern in Chelsea known as “The World’s End”; here on the edge of London is the broken portal of eternity. So Hogarth was vouchsafed an intuition of London existence in the context of time and evanescence. It has been remarked that, the more local and specific a sensibility, the more it may aspire to universality. It is appropriate, therefore, that, in the words of one historian of art, Hogarth “was the first British artist ever to achieve international fame.”
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We may go further, and suggest that he was one of those Cockney artists who saw real visions in the streets of London.

H
is
influence was profound
, but also particular. Rowlandson, Gillray and Cruikshank were the three principal English caricaturists who considered themselves to be in the Hogarthian tradition of London portraiture, combining a fluency of line with a gift for grotesque or comic observation. The cartoons of Gillray and Rowlandson are vigorous and energetic, filled with the life and variety of the city, savagely denunciatory or gargantuan and tumultuous. They were true London artists because they were entranced by the scenic and the spectacular; in a city built upon greed and upon commerce, Gillray in particular was preoccupied with the shadows of money and power. His great works are striated with light and darkness, as if he were an heroic artist of the streets. He was neither sentimental nor introspective; his power came out of caricature and theatrical display, even though a note of rancid poetry emerges in some of his more demonstrative compositions. Each one strikes a different attitude, some grave, some gay, with a readiness of wit and rapidity of association which are also associated with urban life. As one historian of the national character has observed, the dweller in a great town “is always receiving fresh impressions; and he may readily fall into a longing for a constant renewal of his sensations.”
³