On the 23rd of March 1729 he was married at old Paddington church to
Jane Thornhill, the only daughter of Kent's rival above mentioned. The
match was a clandestine one, although Lady Thornhill appears to have
favoured it. We next hear of him in "lodgings at South Lambeth," where
he rendered some assistance to the then well-known Jonathan Tyers, who
opened Vauxhall in 1732 with an entertainment styled a _ridotto al
fresco_. For these gardens Hogarth painted a poor picture of Henry VIII.
and Anne Boleyn, and he also permitted Hayman to make copies of the
later series of the "Four Times of the Day." In return, the grateful
Tyers presented him with a gold pass ticket "_In perpetuam Beneficii
Memoriam_." It was long thought that Hogarth designed this himself. Mr
Warwick Wroth (_Numismatic Chronicle_, vol. xviii.) doubts this,
although he thinks it probable that Hogarth designed some of the silver
Vauxhall passes which are figured in Wilkinson's _Londina illustrata_.
The only engravings between 1726 and 1732 which need be referred to are
the "Large Masquerade Ticket" (1727), another satire on masquerades, and
the print of "Burlington Gate" (1731), evoked by Pope's _Epistle to Lord
Burlington_, and defending Lord Chandos, who is therein satirized. This
print gave great offence, and was, it is said, suppressed.
By 1731 Hogarth must have completed the earliest of the series of moral
works which first gave him his position as a great and original genius.
This was "A Harlot's Progress," the paintings for which, if we may trust
the date in the last of the pictures, were finished in that year. Almost
immediately afterwards he must have begun to engrave them--a task he had
at first intended to leave to others. From an advertisement in the
_Country Journal; or, the Craftsman_, 29th of January 1732, the pictures
were then being engraved, and from later announcements it seems clear
that they were delivered to the subscribers early in the following
April, on the 21st of which month an unauthorized prose description of
them was published. We have no record of the particular train of thought
which prompted these story-pictures; but it may perhaps be fairly
assumed that the necessity for creating some link of interest between
the personages of the little "conversation pieces" above referred to,
led to the further idea of connecting several groups or scenes so as to
form a sequent narrative. "I wished," says Hogarth, "to compose pictures
on canvas, similar to representations on the stage." "I have
endeavoured," he says again, "to treat my subject as a dramatic writer;
my picture is my stage, and men and women my players, who by means of
certain actions and gestures are to exhibit _a dumb show_." There was
never a more eloquent dumb show than this of the "Harlot's Progress." In
six scenes the miserable career of a woman of the town is traced out
remorselessly from its first facile beginning to its shameful and
degraded end.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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