“I don’t take the slightest account of an artist’s period,” said my companion, as we moved away from the auction room. “The date of his birth doesn’t interest me in the least. I ask myself only, Was he a great artist? Call Hogarth the Father of English Painting if you like, say that he set the ball rolling, that he gave life to dry bones, then recall his achievement, and where does he stand? What are his six best works against Gainsborough’s best six? What is his ‘Captain Coram’ to Reynolds’s ‘Lord Heathfield,’ and much as I admire his ‘Stay Maker,’ what is it to Watteau’s ‘Gersaint’s Sign’? Compliment Hogarth as much as you like, say that he was half-a-dozen men in one--satirist, publicist, draughtsman, engraver, moralist, caricaturist, painter--but keep him in his place. I admit that he had an extraordinary gift for putting on the colour clean, swift, and straight, but don’t magnify his gifts. Hogarth was a fighting preacher, an eighteenth-century Dr. Clifford with a natural aptitude for drawing and painting. He was half publicist, half artist. Now Matisse was artist all through. Maurice Denis understands him perfectly, and that article of Denis’s in ‘L’Occident’ was--But you haven’t told me what you think of Matisse?” II HOGARTH AS DELIVERER I refused absolutely to consider Matisse. Let all thought of Matisse be banished. The subject of this little book is Hogarth, and in studying him or any other artist, I entirely disagree with my friend, the connoisseur, that one must disregard his period, ignore his birth-date, and consider only his achievement. Hogarth was born in 1697, and being an original he turned his back upon convention and faced realities. But although he reproduced, with consistent forcefulness, the life of his day, now and again he suffered himself to be influenced by convention. Did not he write: “I entertained some hopes of succeeding in what the puffers in books call the _first style of history painting_: so that without having a stroke of this _grand_ business before, I quitted small portraits and familiar conversations, and with a smile at my own temerity commenced history painting, and on a great staircase at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital painted the Scripture stories, ‘The Pool of Bethesda’ and ‘The Good Samaritan,’ with figures seven feet high.” These are his failures, because he was looking not at life, but at picture-land. A failure, too, was the altar-piece for St. Mary Redcliffe at Bristol, painted as late as 1756, when he was fifty-nine. For this huge altar-piece, in three compartments, he received five hundred and twenty-five pounds. Removed in 1858 to the Bristol Fine Arts Academy, this immense triptych was last year sent to London for sale, which seems unkind, if not cruel, to the memory of Hogarth. He painted these “grand manner” canvases because, as he says, “I was unwilling to sink into a _portrait manufacturer_.” Had Hogarth succeeded in “the first style of history painting,” had he continued