In no other painting of Hogarth’s that I have seen does he make this
striking use of primaries and complementaries. He adopted a different
technique for the robust and cheerful portrait of “Miss Lavinia
Fenton” (who became Duchess of Bolton) as “Polly Peachum” in the
“Beggar’s Opera,” and also for the lively representation of a scene
from the opera which he saw at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1723. This
vivacious development of the Conversation Piece genre hangs close to
“Hogarth’s Sister,” and to the right is the group of his
“Servants”--six heads rather less than life size, one of the most
quietly beautiful renderings of character, seen with the eyes of
affection, with which master has ever immortalised his dependents.
After this, the “Calais Gate,” or “The Roast Beef of Old England,” a
record of his collision with the Calais authorities, seems grotesque
and gratuitously ugly in spite of its Hogarthian _brio_ and beautiful
colour. The carrion crow on the top of the gate is an example of his
ingenuity in extricating himself from a difficulty. The picture, when
finished, fell down, and a nail ran through the cross above the gate.
Failing to conceal the rent, Hogarth substituted for the cross a
crow, and was quite pleased. In the engraving the cross appears in its
rightful place. Carrion crow or cross! It was all one to this capable,
confident, eighteenth-century Britisher, who would as lief paint a
murderess in the condemned cell as a miss in yellow and laces, a
Teniers-like “Distressed Poet” in a garret as a Velazquez-like “Scene
from The Indian Emperor,” a “Right Reverend Father in God” as the
portrait of Quin the actor, Garrick’s portly rival, in full-bottomed
grey wig, lace ruffle, and brown coat richly frogged with gold. There
can be no mistake as to the identity. The portrait is inscribed “Mr.
Quin.” Note the eloquent eye and the voluble mouth of this hearty
eighteenth-century mummer.
I have kept the most popular of the Hogarth National Gallery pictures
to the last--the famous “Marriage à la Mode” series. The detail of
this “pictur’d moral” is a source of unending interest and pleasure to
an endless procession of visitors. The eighteenth century may have
found in the series a “horrible warning” of the consequences that
follow profligacy in high life, but I am perfectly sure that no one in
the twentieth century deduces any moral from this melodrama in paint.
It is more than that, it is a minute and craftsmanlike record of the
rooms and decorative adjuncts of a wealthy and fashionable man’s house
in Hogarth’s day, with his manner of living pushed almost to
caricature, which was Hogarth’s method of satire and fierce moral
rebuke.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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