Hogarth's Works, with life and anecdotal descriptions of his pictures. Volume 3 (of 3)Ireland, John
General
Hogarth's Works, with life and anecdotal descriptions of his pictures. Volume 3 (of 3)
Ireland, John
Hogarth, William, 1697-1764
The nobleman, and lady dropping her deified image in the pew beneath
the pulpit, are discarded, and a pair of vulgar and uninteresting
characters put in their room. The handcuffed felon is obliterated,
and his place supplied by two figures, one weeping, the other asleep.
The ragged woman hugging a model is altered to the boy of Bilson; and
on the hassock, where was the howling dog, is a shoeblack's basket,
with Whitfield's _Journal_ placed upon King James's _Demonology_.
The characters of cherubin and seraph are changed; and though the
duck's wings are left, the legs are lopped off. In the place of
the corpulent and consequential clerk, the artist has inserted a
meagre and moon-eyed monster, with wings that either grow out of his
shoulders, or appertain to a foul fiend planted behind him and acting
as his prompter. Mother Douglas is beaten out of the copper, and in
her room Hogarth has introduced Mrs. Tofts and her rabbits, one of
the popular impositions of his own day. The smelling-bottle applied
to recover Mrs. Douglas from fainting, is with Mrs. Tofts very
properly changed to a dram glass. The Jew is altered, and altered
for the worse: the print of "Abraham and Isaac," in a book before
him, is obliterated, and a knife inscribed "bloody," and laid upon
an altar, supplies its place. In the characters of the common people
of the congregation there are several variations; the models which
some of them held in their arms are totally changed. The pigeon in
the Methodist's brain is discarded; in the place of the inscription
in the top division of the thermometer he has inserted the Cock
Lane ghost; and instead of the glory, which in the "First Thought"
crowned the whole, we have the Tedworth Drummer, a tale which, had
it not given the subject for Addison's comedy, would have been long
since forgotten. On the scale of vociferation and the chandelier, the
names of W--d and Romaine are only to be found in the present state
of the plate; in the scale of the thermometer there are numerous
alterations. In "The Medley," the artist has made an addition,
and placed Wesley's _Sermons_ and Glanville's book _On Witches_
as supporters to the Methodist's brain. To do this, and introduce
the rabbits on the foreground, he has brought his work so near the
bottom of his plate as not to leave room for a title, which, with the
quotation from St. John, "Believe not every spirit," etc., is, in the
present state of the plate, engraven on another piece of copper.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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