Hogarth in hiding

By MICHAEL CAINES

May 17, 1799: Samuel Taylor Coleridge reports back to his wife on his travels through Germany. He has passed through a village where Whitsun Tuesday was being celebrated with dancing around the maypole on the village green, leading him to remind her: "I am no judge of music". The musicians themselves, however, are another matter. "The fiddlers! - above all the bass-violer - most Hogarthian phizzes! God love them!"

William Hogarth had died some years earlier, in 1764, and the 250th anniversary of his death fell today; and today's political cartoonist could presumably draw just such a collection of "phizzes" if required, since the adjective "Hogarthian" has endured, I reckon, in precisely the sense Coleridge uses it.

As it happens, many TLS subscribers will have been reading this weekend (or online, here), about a sometime neighbour of Hogarth's, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds "dominated British art for some three decades" during the eighteenth century, as Norma Clarke writes in her review of Mark Hallett's Reynolds: Portraiture in action. For about a decade, these two British artists resided in Leicester Fields as uneasy neighbours: one of them in decline, the other on the up.

There's a good account of this period in Vic Gatrell's most recent book, The First Bohemians. In a nutshell: goodbye brilliant satirical series, Marriage à-la-mode and all that; hello, flattering depictions of the elite. Reynolds could keep on welcoming the bon ton into his studio because, as Norma Clarke points out, he could assure them something of the dignity or grace of an Old Master; by contrast, Hogarth could count among his last works the fiery "Enthusiasm Delineated" (1761), which, if Bernd Krysmanski is right, scorns the zeal for "sublime", traditional religious art. Having already parodied Dürer and Da Vinci, Hogarth had to revise this work, disguising its meaning entirely, as "Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism" (1762), a satire on Methodism that was deemed to be safer for public consumption:

Like "Francis Matthew Schutz in Bed" (which the vomiting sitter's descendants had censored, covering up his chamberpot with a newspaper), it's a reminder that, well beyond "Beer Street" and "Gin Lane", Hogarth's distinctive vision of the world hasn't always been appreciated. And that Hogarth himself was conscious of that, opting to keep hidden this, one of his most extreme statements of his views on art. He could adopt others' styles, as Reynolds could, but if that was all there was to it, "Hogarthian" would hardly have been Coleridge's word to describe the "phizzes" of German bass-viol players.