English literature -- History and criticism; Greenaway, Kate, 1846-1901; Thomson, Hugh, 1860-1920
These words are quite in the spirit of Hogarth's later "Time smoking a
Picture." As a matter of fact, they are reproduced almost textually from
the writer's letter of five years earlier on the "March to Finchley." To
return, however, to History Painting. According to Rouquet, its leading
exponent[19] under George the Second was Francis Hayman of the "large
noses and shambling legs," now known chiefly as a crony of Hogarth, and
a facile but ineffectual illustrator of Shakespeare and Cervantes. In
1754, however, his pictures of _See-Saw, Hot Cockles, Blind Man's Buff_,
and the like, for the supper-boxes at Vauxhall Gardens, with Sayer's
prints therefrom, had made his name familiar, although he had not yet
painted those more elaborate compositions in the large room next the
rotunda, over which Fanny Burney's "Holborn Beau," Mr, Smith, comes to
such terrible grief in ch. xlvi. of _Evelina_. But he had contributed a
"Finding of Moses" to the New Foundling Hospital, which is still to be
seen in the Court Room there, in company with three other pictures
executed concurrently for the remaining compartments, Joseph Highmore's
"Hagar and Ishmael," James Wills's "Suffer little Children," and
Hogarth's "Moses brought to Pharaoh's Daughter"--the best of the four,
as well as the most successful of Hogarth's historical pieces. All
these, then recently installed, are mentioned by Rouquet.
Note:
[19] This is confirmed by Arthur Murphy: "Every Thing is put out
of Hand by this excellent Artist with the utmost Grace and Delicacy, and
his History-Pieces have, besides their beautiful Colouring, the most
lively Expression of Character" (_Gray's Inn Journal, February
9, 1754_).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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