Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times

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stipulates that "I do hereby release, and acquit, and discharge my sister Ann Hogarth, of and from all claims and demands which I have on her at the time of my decease." 37 He left her £80 a year for life out of the profits of his engrav- ings; and if Jane had remarried, the Harlot, the Rake, and Marriage a la Mode, evidently the most popular of the prints, would have gone to Anne. As to Jane, more can be said about the origin of their relationship, and what it meant in 1729, than about its later development. The only letter that has sur- vived was written to her on 6 June 1749: he was in London, probably working on The March to Finchley, his most ambitious "comic history painting" since Marriage a la Mode, and she was in the country: Dear Jenny I write to you now, not because I think you may expect it only, but because I find a pleasure in it, which is more than I can say of writing to any body else, and I insist on it you don't take it for a mere complement, your last letter pleased more than I'll say, but this I will own if the postman should knock at the door in a weeks time after the receipt of this, I shall think there is more musick in't than the beat of a Kettle Drum, & if the words to the tune are made by you, (to carry on metafor) and brings news of your all coming so soon to town I shall think the words much better than the musick, but dont hasten out of a scene of Pleasure to make me one [I wish I could contribute to it-s.t.] you'l see by the Enclosed that I shall be glad to be a small contributer to it. I dont know whether or no you knew that Garrick was going to be married to the Violette when you went away. I supt with him last night and had a deal of talk about her. I can't write any more than what this side will contain, you know I wont turn over a new leaf I am so obstinate, but then I am no less obstinate in being your affectionate Husband W m Hogarth 38 Up the side he has written, "Complement as usual," referring to Lady Thorn- hill, who would have been with Jane in the country. He sends some money but makes no comment on business or on the project-that engages his attention at the moment. He gossips about their close friend Garrick, who was about to marry Eva Maria Veigel, an Austrian dancer whose stage name was Violette: the marriage took place on the twenty-second, when the London Evening Post (of 20—22 June) described her as "a beautiful Lady, with a Fortune of 10,000 I." The tone of Hogarth's letter combines good-natured gallantry with affection, how much real and how much an automatic gesture it is impossible to say. I have found no record of any children of the Hogarths, either in the parish registers or in the family Bible. One might leave the matter at that, were it not for Hogarth's apparently free-and-easy social habits, the difference between his origins and his wife's, and certain rumbling sounds from the early anecdotists. 85
86 Responding to a typically ungenerous and vague description by Steevens of Ho- garth's childless marriage, Thomas Morell, who knew the Hogarths well, wrote to Nichols: I knew little of Mr. Hogarth before he came to Chiswick, not long after his marriage; but from that time was intimate with him to his death, and very happy in his acquaintance. His excellencies, as well as his foibles, are so universally known, that I cannot add to the former, nor shall I attempt to palliate the latter. To assert, however, that he had little nor no acquaintance with domestic happiness, is unjust. I cannot say, I have seen much fondling between Jenny and Billy (the common appellation of each other); but I have been almost a daily witness of sufficient endearments to conclude them a happy couple. 39 Although the popular prints are obviously concerned more with morality and society than with art and the artist, their underlying subject matter should be understood in relation to the prints that began with The Distressed Poet and ran from Marriage a la Mode, with its indirect emphasis on the artist, to the self- portrait with Trump and even Garrick as Richard III (to the extent that Ho- garth uses Garrick as an analogue for himself as artist). The Gate of Calais, of course, includes Hogarth himself in the act of sketching the Gate, and Industry and Idleness is in its way as much about Hogarth as this or as the self-portrait. Two contrary aspects emerge: the respectable and the unrespectable, the astute businessman and the naif, the orderly and the disorderly, and, not least impor- tant, the admired and the suspect. One side is constantly striving for union with the master by succeeding to his business, marrying his daughter, winning his honors, buying a house in the country; this side seeks governorships of prestig- ious institutions and the friendship of Lord Mayors. The other side includes the artist of the grotesque and caricature (which is called "comic history painting" and "character" by Side One): this side is constantly tending toward his "pleas- ures," toward entropy and, in the major prints and paintings of these years, bal- ances this disorder, almost equating it with Nature, against various kinds of excessive and meaningless order. In short, in these years of his middle age Ho- garth was beginning to look back, take account, study himself, and wonder where to go from here: he was attempting new forms, vacillating from sublime history to a "comic history" of high life to the most popular blockprint sort of broadsides—which, moreover, were increasingly focused on himself or (what amounted to almost the same thing) his art. The great synthetic work of this period, before he settles down to art as his subject on the one hand and purely popular prints on the other, is The March to Finchley (pl. 224a), and here, though Hogarth does not appear as one of the dramatis personae, there is a direct confrontation of opposites: order, in the lines
Page 1 and 2: Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times b
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Page 6 and 7: voted to the painting of Moses brou
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Page 17 and 18: 72 two plates of The Four Times of
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Page 32: of troops marching to defend Englan
Page 36 and 37: painting was late in 1749. It must
Page 38 and 39: oad daylight of Finchley; the inter
Page 40 and 41: for subscribers on 3 January. The a
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Page 44 and 45: "new kind of drunkenness . .. which
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Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times

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