HUGIJENOT ARTISTS DESIGNERS AND CRAYPSNEN IN GREAT ...

10.
In 1685, the only other conformist congregation in Soho met in
the Eglise des Grcs, in Hog Lane, now part of Charing Cross Road. The
building appears in the background of Hogarth's painting 'Noon', which
was published as an engraving in 1738.16 It contrasts the disorderly
natives on the other side of the gutter with the soberly dressed members
of the Huguenot community emerging from their worship. The image (P1 .2)
emphasizes the distinctive character of the Huguenot community sixty years
after the first refugees of the third wave of emigration hd settled in
London. The elaborately dressed group in the immediate foreground are
probably English fops, identifying with the Huguenot community in their
eagerness to pursue the French taste. Hogarth's image aptly illustrates
a revealing passage published by Philip Stanhope, kth Earl of Chesterfiela
in Common Sense, November, 1738, in which Chesterfield comments on the
search for 'The French Taste',
'I could point out to these itinerate spirits a much shorter, less
expensive and more effectual method of travelling and frenchifying
themselves, which is if they would but travel to Old Soho and stay two
or three months in le quartier des Grecs.
- Lodgings & legumes are very cheap there, and the people very civil to
strangers. There too, they might possibly get acquainted with some French
people which they never do at Paris, and it may be learn a little French
which they never do in France neither, and I appeal to any one who has
seen these venerable persons of both sexes, of the refugees, if they
are not infinitely more genteel, easier, arid better dressed in the
French maimer, than any of their modern English miniics."7
Apart from the Savoy extension, the Eglise Neuve, Fournier Street,
Spitalfields, is the only other church which is recorded as having been
built to the requirements of the refugee community. It still stands,
having since catered for the changing refugee community in that area, in
the capacity of a synagogue, and now as a mosque. In 17k2,the ministers,
elders and deacons of the Threadneedle Street Church petitioned the King
for a licence to erect a church and school on the site, and the purchase
money was provided by the second generation Huguenot merchants, David
and Charles Bosanquet.18 Ironically, the craftsmen employed were English,
but it is interesting to compare the plan of the Eglise Neuve with Wren's
design for the Savoy, and with Salomon de Brosse's design for the
Huguenot Temple at Charenton, on the outskirts of Paris, which was destroyed