Pictures Every Child Should Know: A Selection of the World's Art Masterpieces for Young PeopleBacon, Mary Schell Hoke
General
Pictures Every Child Should Know: A Selection of the World's Art Masterpieces for Young People
Bacon, Mary Schell Hoke
Art -- Juvenile literature; Painters -- Juvenile literature; Painting -- Juvenile literature
In time he moved into lodgings at the "Golden Head," in Leicester
Fields, and there he made his home. He had already begun the great
paintings which were to make him famous among artists. These were a
series of pictures, telling stories of fashionable and other life. His
own story of how he came to think of the picture series was that he
had always wished to present dramatic stories--present them in scenes
as he saw them on the stage.
He had married the daughter of Sir James Thornhill, and had never been
thought of kindly by his father-in-law till he made so much stir with
his first series. Then Sir James approved of him, and Hogarth found
life more pleasing.
There are very few anecdotes to tell of the artist's life, and the
story of his pictures is much more amusing. One of his first satires
was made into a pantomime by Theophilus Gibber, and another person
made it into an opera. Many pamphlets and poems were written about it,
and finally china was painted with its scenes and figures. There was
as much to cry as to laugh over in Hogarth's pieces and that is what
made them so truly great. One of his great picture series was called
the "Rake's Progress" and it was a warning to all young men against
leading too gay a life. It showed the "Rake" at the beginning of his
misfortunes, gambling, and in the last reaping the reward of his
follies in a debtor's prison and the madhouse. There are eight
pictures in that set.
In this series, especially in the fifth picture, there are
extraordinary proofs of Hogarth's completeness of ideas. Upon the wall
in the room wherein the "Rake" marries an old woman for her money, the
Ten Commandments are hung, all cracked, and the Creed also is cracked
and nearly smudged out; while the poor-box is covered with
cobwebs. The eight pictures brought to Hogarth only seventy guineas.
One of his pictures was suggested to him by an incident which greatly
angered him. He had started for France on some errand of his own, and
was in the very act of sketching the old gate at Calais, when he was
arrested as a spy. Now Hogarth was a hard-headed Englishman, and when
he was hustled back to England without being given time for argument,
he was so enraged that he made his picture as grotesque as possible,
to the lasting chagrin of France. He painted the French soldiers as
the most absurd, thin little fellows imaginable, and that picture has
largely influenced people's idea of the French soldier all over the
English-speaking world.
As Hogarth grew old he grew also a little bitter and revengeful toward
his enemies, often taking his revenge in the ordinary way of
belittling the people he disliked, in his paintings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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