Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times

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The Popular Prints If Hogarth's interest in the London hospitals and charitable foundations led to his idea to decorate public buildings and exhibit contemporary works by English artists, it also revealed a growing social awareness. At the same time he was painting his most successful sublime history paintings, between 1746 and '48, he also conceived and executed the first of a series of popular prints that sought to remedy social abuses. The sublime histories themselves were, in- directly, comments on contemporary social injustice—the lure of luxury for the poor and the plight of the innocent before a corrupt judge. As so often in Ho- garth's career, apparent gaps between phases conceal underlying continuities. Watching him move from the progress of a count and countess to that of two apprentices, however, one cannot escape feeling that he had been in some sense disappointed with the response to his most ambitious attempt at "comic history painting," consciously designed for the connoisseurs and upper classes. At this point he abandoned the painted modello completely for a drawing, and turned from a description of high life, in which "Particular Care" was taken, "that there may not be the least Objection to the Decency or Elegancy of the whole Work," to the lower classes. In form and subject matter, both "objec- tionable," he was proclaiming either that (as no one had ever denied) he could portray the lowest as well as the highest, or, much more likely, that he had given up the connoisseurs in favor of his true audience and was producing a more honest and useful art. He no longer had to worry about the discrepancy between form and content that was obtrusive in Moses brought to Pharaoh's Daughter. One cannot say, however, that Hogarth abandoned other sorts of work and devoted himself to the lower classes. Rather he simply turned one eye in that direction, adding another kind of work (and another source of income) to his repertoire. Financially, he wanted (as Vertue suggests) to save money on en- gravers and reach the large public that could afford only cheap copies of his other prints. Aesthetically, he sought a new source of inspiration, and in the process broadened his conception of modern history painting. Morally, he 57
58 probably intended to correct some of the abuses that he observed through his connection with the hospitals, and that Fielding, the Bow Street Magistrate, was to analyze at length four years later. Hogarth's first print after Marriage a la Mode and Garrick as Richard III was the full-length portrait of Simon Lord Lovat, one of the wiliest and most newsworthy of the rebels of the '45, a walking symbol of duplicity. His character was incorporated in the inventory of his trunk, made in December 1745 when he was taken as a captive to Inverness by Lord Loudoun: "some pieces of gold, silver and copper coin, a woman's equipage of silver gilt, loaded dice, Glys- ter pipes, an old silver watch, human hair, false teeth, physick, a brass ring with a crucifix, a silver medal of the Pretender, etc." Lovat had been discovered by the British Navy, searching the western coast of Scotland, as he hid in a hollow tree (or, according to another account, in a cave) on an island in Loch Morar where, thinking he had the only boat, he felt safe. Brought south, he reached St. Albans on about 12 August and rested there at the White Hart Inn for two or three days "under the immediate care of Dr. Webster; who seemed to think his patient's illness was more feigned than real and arose principally from the ap- prehension of danger on reaching London." 1 In fact, Lovat was an old man of seventy and in very poor health. Hogarth had spent part of July with Garrick at the Hoadlys' in the south of England, but he was back in London by the end of the month. According to the Rev. James Harris, in a letter written on 28 August, Hogarth made a trip to St. Albans to get "a fair view of his Lordship before he was locked up." 2 Dr. Webster told Samuel Ireland that he had invited Hogarth to come up and meet Lovat during his layover; there would be no further chance once Lovat was in the Tower. Webster was apparently another case of a Hogarth admirer who invited him to portray some particularly Hogarthian figure—analogous to the frequent invocations of Hogarth by novelists introducing a striking character, One story, first recounted by Peter Pindar, has Hogarth coming into the White Hart just as Lovat was being shaved; the old man leaped up and saluted him with a "kiss fraternal" in the French manner "which left much of the lather on his face." The early accounts claim that the two knew each other, but in his final edition Nichols is careful to state that Hogarth "had never seen him before;" 3 perhaps the salute should be taken as another case of immediate sympathy between this artist and his subject. The portrait, probably a pencil sketch, was made as Lovat talked. Harris, writing within a month of the event, said "the old Lord is represented in the very attitude he was in while telling Hogarth and the company some of his adventures," and he adds that "it is really an exact resemblance of the person it was done for—Lord Lovat—as those who are well acquainted with him assure me." Hogarth is said to have told his friends that Lovat was counting out the "numbers of the rebel forces" (in another account, the clans) on his fingers:
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cells to the court house of the Old
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