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Файл:Практикум по культуре речевого общения искусство. Часть 1. Практикум
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To appreciate that Hogarth was not inferior to the most skilled of the baroque painters of his
day in creating a sense of recession one should study the subtle artistry with which the eye is guided
step by step, past alternating projections, from either side of the street to the towering steeple in the
background of his engraving Gin Lane. No less subtle is the feeling of recession created, despite the
crowded foreground, by the highlights in the far and middle distance of The March to Finchley or,
by the street scene in the background and the shafts of light entering through two successive
openings in the side wall of The Election Entertainment.
The election satire was occasioned by the Oxfordshire election of 1754. In The Election
Entertainment two Whig candidates for Parliament give a banquet for their supporters in the local
inn while the rival Tory party parades outside the window. On this occasion there are no social
distinctions between gentleman and voter, and alcohol has contributed to the general sense of equality.
At the left the first candidate, Sir Commodity Taxem, receives the confidences of a fat
woman, a shoemaker pushes their heads closer together and turns his pipe out over the head of the
knight, while a young girl admires his ring. In the next group a chimney-sweep takes a similar
opportunity to score off his social superior by squeezing painfully the hand of the second candidate
in an affected demonstration of friendship and loyally. A gluttonous clergyman acts as the division
between these groups and the two succeeding ones, in which the gentry are successfully amusing
their social inferiors.
The inscriptions, slogans, etc. refer to the rival policies of the Whigs and Tories, the former
advocating “Liberty and Loyalty” and the latter “Liberty and Property”.
Hogarth’s method of suggesting depth through receding structures and lighting effects is
artificial and deliberate: it is the scenic artist’s device for articulating and emphasizing the dramatic
action of his figures. But Hogarth’s actors are the citizens and tradesmen, the soldiers and
politicians, the beggars and thieves and idle rich of eighteenth–century London. His earth-bound
scenes teem with life, every one of his actors is engaged in a special plot of his own. Hence Hogarth
cannot, as a rule, concentrate his spotlight on a single point, but must disperse his highlights over
his composition to pick out its successive sub-plots one by one.
He loathed symmetry and put his faith in the beauty of a composed intricacy of form that
leads the eye along a serpentine line through three dimensions – his famous S-line and especially it
enlivens his series of pictorial satires.
The first successful series The Harlot’s Progress, of which only the engravings now exist
(the originals were burnt in 1755), was immediately followed by the tremendous verve of The
Rake’s Progress; the masterpiece of the story series the Marriage à-la-mode followed after an
interval of twelve years. Hogarth seems to have hit on the idea of these series by accident, but once
conceived it was soon backed by a deliberate programme. Hogarth’s satires were not burlesques;
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besides being, in the formal sense, serious painting, they were also serious moral and social satires.
He was entirely in key with the moral and philanthropic mood of his age. His art was a reflection,
an interpretation, and a commentary on the social condition of his time. He found inspiration not in
other people’s art (though he borrowed readily from a great variety of sources), but in life and
nature on his doorstep and in the London streets. The Rake’s Progress, like the other series, was
made a commercial possibility by its widespread sale in engraved form (the paintings were basically
only one stage towards the engravings).
In portraiture Hogarth displays a great variety and originality. The charm of childhood, the
ability to compose a vivid group, a delightful delicacy of colour appear in The Graham Children of
1742. The portrait heads of his servants are penetrating studies of character. The painting of
Captain Coram, the philanthropic sea captain who took a leading part in the foundation of the
Foundling Hospital, adapts the formality of the ceremonial portrait to a democratic level with a
singularly engaging effect.
The quality of Hogarth as an artist is seen to advantage in his sketches and one sketch in
particular, the famous Shrimp Girl quickly executed with a limited range of colour, stands alone in
his work, taking its place among the masterpieces of the world in its harmony of form and content,
its freshness and vitality. In this portrait he reveals himself as more concerned with character than
with basic form, and it is usually dependent upon a feeling for the revelation of a transient mood.
The swift brush working, one feels, at top speed to seize the passing moment, gives an
impressionist’s picture. Franz Hals, despite his richer impasto, comes to mind. The canvas is alive
because of the swiftness of the artist’s vision, his understanding of the significance of expression.
Like everything which came from Hogarth it is his own, unprejudiced and uninfluenced.
2.2. Hogarth – Satirist, Engraver, Portrait Painter. William Hogarth was born in
November 1697 in Grub Street in London. Grub Street was a place of dirty houses where
unsuccessful writers, always arguing with publishers and each other, lived. He was a son of a
schoolmaster, who was an author of textbooks and dictionaries, and thus considered himself a
literary man. Unfortunately it did not bring him money, and he stayed for a long time in prison for debts.
In such circumstances, it was not easy for the young Hogarth to advance. Taught mainly by
his father, Hogarth was cut off by lack of formal education and patronage from universities and professors.
In his early twenties Hogarth found himself making an unsatisfactory living as engraver of
low-priced designs for cheap novels, funeral tickets, etc. Yet this work allowed some invention.
Until he was able to become an independent artist in his early thirties, Hogarth remained part
of this unreliable literary world. Only when he became a member of St Martin’s Lane Academy (a
painters’ school) in 1720, did he see that an artist could play an important role. But his work as an
engraver made him do endless imitations, getting little money.
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His first attempt to proclaim himself as an artist was through political satire. In 1721 he
produced two prints, The South Sea Bubble and The Lottery, showing crowds of London going mad
with speculations.
The artistic scene in England in 1774 was somewhat provincial. There was no Academy as
in France, there were no places for exhibitions, very few places of artistic education and no books
on art theory. Patrons preferred to employ well-trained foreigners. Nevertheless, in the early XVIII
century English painters began to appear. At the top end of the profession were painters of
allegorical wall decorations as they had the prestige of the Grand Manner about them, and they
were able to create an illusion of a completely false architectural space out of a plain room.
In the 1720s there began to appear criticisms of illusionism. Hogarth’s attacks against those
Palladians brought him closer to the painter Sir James Thornhill, who played an important role in
Hogarth’s career and whose daughter Hogarth later married.
Hogarth’s decision to become an oil painter was a momentous one, but we do not fully know
the circumstances. We do not know who gave him “insight and instructions” as well, but the most
probable candidate is Thornhill. Hogarth managed to make himself one of the most skillful and
popular painters in England within only a few years. In the early 1720s he had worked out his own
method of approach to nature: he came to the unusual conclusion that to capture nature it is better
not to draw from it. He proposed a kind of memory training and a sort of a drawing shorthand. He
looked at the visual world as a kind of language to be learned. In his mind he reduced the forms of
people and things to an easily memorable system of lines. It is completely different from using line
to make a contour of a form. His paintings present an aura of spontaneity, and the brushwork is
broad and open; the figures contain individuality and expression.
Still, some of his pictures continue to be allied with literature and retain an illustrative
character. His Falstaff still remains a representation of a fictional scene, though the most singular
feature of the Beggar’s Opera is that the pictures include the audience (in earlier versions).
In late 1720 he began painting small group portraits. He produced a considerable number of
those “conversation pieces”, and he tells us that he preferred them to the individual portraits,
because they gave him “more scope of fancy”.
Modern Moral Subjects, or “novels in paint” as they were often called, are regarded as his
most important achievement, and led to statements that Hogarth was second only to Shakespeare in
his study of human comedy. Hogarth created a new kind of work of art. Like most plays of the
period, they have well-worked out plots, dramatic confrontations and changes of scene. In the epoch
when the rules of acting were strictly regulated and certain situations and emotions required a
prescribed pose or gesture, Hogarth observed attitude and the movement of the figure as a form of
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language. The two “moral series” of A Harlot’s Progress, of which only the engravings survive, and
The Rake’s Progress, tell stories well understandable to the contemporaries.
It is believed that most of Hogarth’s characters had a real prototype and that each episode
was observed in real life. Hogarth was aware from the beginning of his career as a painter that the
public got pleasure from seeing real people and that this could give a work an instant popularity.
But though the characters and events are so close to reality, Hogarth plays with them so skillfully
that it is not easy to separate theater from real life.
In his “moral series” Hogarth precisely followed the topography of London. Both the Harlot
and the Rake not only progress toward their sad ends, but they also make metaphorical progress
through the streets and institutions of the city.
The division of London into the City and West End (merchant and aristocratic areas) became
clear by the beginning of the XVIII century. This distinction can clearly be seen in The Marriage à-
la-mode series in the personalities of the Merchant and the Lord and in the interiors of the houses.
2.3. Hogarth’s Paintings – Reflection of the World around Him. The greater majority of
Hogarth’s paintings are direct reflections of the world around him. One of his aims was to create
works that “may be instructive to the future time when the customs, manners, fashions and humours
of the present age may change”.
Hogarth painted portraits in most periods of his life; in the early 1740s, and at the end of his
life he made it a regular practice. His single figure portraits are done nearly in the same manner as
his conversation pieces, but at the same time they are painted in a more dignified style that speaks
of his wish to present himself as a leader of his profession. His first major success in this new
manner was a great seated figure of the well-known philanthropist Captain Coram – a “mighty
portrait”. Hogarth painted a number of half-length portraits in 1740s that are close to what his
professional colleagues did. Many of them are quite dull, but some break free and create
individuality, even dangerously near to satire.
Hogarth’s paintings of children of this time almost represent a separate genre for their rare
sympathy and freshness. There is an element of instability in them – a poetic image of the passing
of childhood and human life.
Hogarth was passionately interested in the teaching of art, and put this desire into practice
when he took over the St. Martin’s Lane Academy after Thornhill’s death. He was against any kind
of hierarchy in school, even against having a formal head of it and salaried professors, i.e. he
opposed the French model of arranging the Academy. Like Voltaire, he felt that formal Academies
discourage genius. He was not at all against systematic education, but he had his own view on what
should be taught and what should not. The essential qualities of art, to his mind, can only be
achieved by observation: variety, character and means of expression come from nature, and they
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should be learned in a way that does not hold back the imagination. That means that he opposed the
standard method of artistic training by endless copying of the Old Masters’ paintings. This view
strongly contradicted the common opinion of his contemporaries, and as far as the artistic education
is concerned, Hogarth became increasingly isolated from the 1740s advanced painters.
Problems of social nature were not alien to Hogarth. One of the innumerable proofs of this
statement was the publication of Industry and Idleness – another series of engravings – in 1747.
They were devoted to the problems of life and education of foundlings, whose minds, being a
tabula rasa in the sense defined by the philosopher John Locke, must be filled with ideas of
goodness and kindness and love for labour.
The publication of the prints Beer Street and Gin Lane was addressed to a specific measure
against the vice of drinking – an Act of Parliament also supported by Henry Fielding. The Four
Stages of Cruelty were also in support of Fielding’s reaction to the horrors of London crime.
Hogarth was sincere in his belief that his popular prints could keep people away from gin or prevent
“in some degree that cruel treatment of poor animals”.
Being a purely English painter, Hogarth through the years also painted some pictures in the
old traditional manner, but those works were usually done to order, and were painted on Biblical themes.
In the last years of his life the intellectual world of London was alien to Hogarth. His hope
for the native school of painting did not come up. English painters followed the wishes of the
aristocrats who looked to Italy and Greece rather than to the low-life of London streets. Hogarth’s
reaction to his defeat was such that some people who knew him in those last years of his life
thought that he was mad.
In 1762 after having published some prints of a clearly political and anticlerical nature, he
got to experience the hostility of the public. This attitude was not the only reason that brought him
to his death-bed – he was generally in poor health and felt his end to be near – but one cannot deny
that it played its destructive role.
Hogarth died in October 1764.
2.4. William Hogarth – the first great English-born artist to attract admiration abroad, best
known for his moral and satirical engravings and paintings; e.g. A Rake’s Progress (eight scenes,
begun 1732). His attempts to build a reputation as a history painter and portraitist, however, met
with financial disappointment, and his aesthetic theories had more influence in Romantic literature
than in painting.
.Hogarth, the only son of Richard Hogarth, a minor classical scholar and schoolmaster, grew
up with two sisters, Mary and Ann, in the heart of the teeming city. Richard’s evident abilities as a
classicist brought him scant reward but provided an educated and industrious, if not prosperous,
home. Looking back on this period later, Hogarth dwelt almost exclusively on his father’s shabby
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treatment at the hands of printers, booksellers, and wealthy patrons. Apart from confirming his
distrust of learning, his resentment at his father’s disappointing experiences fostered the boy’s selfassertiveness and independence of character.
As a boy with little inclination to scholarship but gifted with a lively perception of the world
around him, he enjoyed mimicking and drawing characters, interests that were encouraged by visits
to a local painter’s workshop. While not discouraging his artistic inclinations, his father, Hogarth
later complained, could do little more “than put me in a way of shifting for myself”. He
consequently sought the security of a solid craftsman’s training and became apprenticed, at about
the age of 15, to a silversmith. Hogarth presumably moved to his master’s house, where he learned
to engrave gold and silver work with armorial designs – in his own phrase, the “monsters of
heraldry”. Valuable years lost on what the engraver George Vertue aptly termed “low-shrub
instructions” had crucial bearing on Hogarth’s subsequent development. Apart from the insecurity
they bred, Hogarth’s frustration with his training led him to exploit unorthodox methods of selfinstruction in order to make up for lost time. His originality and flexibility as an artist owed much to
this pragmatic and unconventional approach to his career.
Hogarth’s years of apprenticeship were by no means devoted exclusively to hard work,
however. Sociable and fond of fun, a keen and humorous observer of human behaviour, with a
special love of the theatre and shows of all kinds, he was evidently a convivial companion. Never
prudish, he knew the exuberant life of the London streets, bawdy houses, fairs, and theatres at
firsthand and derived from them a fertile appreciation of the vitality of popular tradition. At the
same time, he felt drawn to the coffeehouses and taverns frequented by writers, musicians, actors,
and liberal professionals, forming lasting friendships in such lively intellectual circles. His
sympathies rested with the middle classes and, specifically, with the critical, enlightened element –
rational, tolerant, and humanitarian – that played such a prominent role in the cultural life of
Hanoverian England.
From close observation of the everyday scene, Hogarth trained his unusual visual memory
until he could dispense with preliminary studies, committing his ideas directly to paper or canvas.
This inspired improvisation was supplemented by a formidable knowledge of the European tradition
in art, acquired through familiarity with a vast range of reproductive engravings. Meanwhile, he
earned his living as a copper engraver, executing trade cards, tickets, and book illustrations. His
growing success as an illustrator brought Hogarth little satisfaction, for it entailed unwelcome
dependence on the booksellers who had exploited his father; he later insisted that engraving “did
little more than maintain myself in the usual gaieties of life but (was) in all a punctual paymaster”.
He had long been an admirer of Sir James Thornhill fluent adaptation of the late Baroque style, and
in 1724 he joined a drawing school, newly opened in Thornhill’s house. It was the start of a critical
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association. Holding the official post of serjeant painter to the King and being the first knighted
English-born artist, Thornhill in his career affirmed the vitality of native art and the social
respectability of the artist. Hogarth cared passionately about both, primarily for personal reasons but
also because he believed in art as a vital creative force in society. He despised the connoisseurs’
exclusive admiration for the old masters and their prejudice in favour of foreign artists. In his first
major work, published independently of the booksellers in 1724, Masquerades and Operas,
Hogarth attacked contemporary taste and expressed attitudes that were vigorously sustained
throughout his life. Boldly questioning the standards of a powerful clique that was supported by the
Earl of Burlington, an influential art patron, Hogarth’s first blow with the connoisseurs was
shrewdly designed to appeal to his hero, Thornhill, who was himself suffering from Burlington’s
Neoclassical revival. Thus, Hogarth made powerful enemies at the start of his career, and when they
retaliated in about 1730 by nullifying royal interest in his work, he was cruelly disappointed.
Indeed, despite his own intransigent frankness, Hogarth was always discouraged and offended when
his opponents hit back.
2.5. Auspicious Debut. A lawsuit he brought in 1728 against Joshua Morris, a tapestry
weaver, throws eloquent light on his susceptibilities. The details of the case reveal that, by the age
of 30, Hogarth felt sufficiently confident of his abilities to embark on a painting career. Morris
failed to share this confidence and rejected a painting he had ordered on grounds that it was not
finished. Hogarth indignantly sought and obtained public vindication with the help of professional
witnesses, including Thornhill. Their testimony was amply justified by his first dated painting, The
Beggar’s Opera (1728), a scene from John Gay’s popular farce on low life, which emphasized
Hogarth’s prevailing interests: his involvement with the theatre and with down-to-earth, comic
subjects. Closely attentive to realistic detail, he recorded the scene exactly as it appeared to the
audience and included portraits of the principal actors and spectators. He thus anticipated both his
later narrative paintings and the small, informal group portraits, or “conversation pieces”, that
occupied him in the years immediately after this auspicious debut.
Friends he made in the theatrical world, the actor-manager David Garrick and writer Henry
Fielding, shared his enthusiasm for honest naturalism in art. Like his great predecessor, the XVI
century Flemish painter Pieter Braegel the Elder, Hogarth wanted to extract entertaining and
instructive incidents from life. In telling the story of a young country girl’s corruption in London
and her consequent miseries, he not only ridiculed the viciousness and follies of society but painted
an obvious moral. The engravings were aimed at a wide public, and their tremendous success
immediately established Hogarth’s financial and artistic independence. He was henceforth free,
unlike most of his colleagues, to follow his own creative inclinations. To safeguard his livelihood
from unscrupulously pirated editions, he fought to obtain legislation protecting artist’s copyright
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and held back the eight-part Rake’s Progress until a law of that nature, known as the Hogarth Act,
was passed in 1735. In the following year Hogarth moved into the house in Leicester Fields that he
was to occupy until his death.
After Thornhill’s death, in 1734, Hogarth reestablished his drawing school on a cooperative
basis, and it became an important arena for artistic discussion and experiment. In 1735, in line with
the humanitarian concern that occupied enlightened opinion of the day, he was elected a governor
of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, and he seized this opportunity to decorate the main staircase with
two large religious works, to Pool of Bethesda and The Good Samaritan. In abandoning comic
narrative and genre for history painting, he was generally held to have overreached himself,
however, and modern critics have tended to endorse this opinion.
2.6. An Artistic Manifesto. In about 1740 he turned once again to painting portraits, chiefly
of middle-class sitters. He derived special enjoyment from painting the full-length, seated portrait of
his friend, the philanthropist Captain Thomas Coram – a compelling and deeply sympathetic image
that injected the dead aristocratic tradition with forthright realism and earned far-reaching
implications for European portraiture. Hogarth, well aware of its importance, judiciously placed it
on semipublic display at the Foundling Hospital, a benevolent institution for orphan children
established by Coram in 1739. From the start Hogarth played an active role in the affairs of this
charitable venture, and when the buildings were completed in 1745 he persuaded a group of fellow
artists to join him in contributing paintings as edifying decoration. Their cooperative effort
produced the first public exhibition of contemporary art in England and was a vital step toward the
foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768. .
The famous self-portrait of 1745, a year that marked, in many ways, the high point of
Hogarth’s career, was also an artistic manifesto. He mischievously juxtaposed his own blunt and
intelligent features with those of his sturdy pug-dog, Trump, and placed volumes of the great
English writers William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Jonathan Swift beside a palette inscribed
with the sinuous “line of beauty”, his shorthand symbol for the variety, intricacy, and
expressiveness of Nature. In the same year he published the long-announced prints of Marriage à-
la-mode censuring the marriage customs of the upper classes, for which he had completed the
paintings in May 1743.
Apart from a gratifying commission for a large history piece, which he won from the
lawyers of Lincoln’s Inn (one of the four legal societies and schools in London), Hogarth
concentrated for the next fewer years on simple, didactic prints aimed at an unrefined public,
executed from drawings not paintings. Beer Street, Gin Lane, and Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) he
cut deliberately crudely on wood blocks to make them cheaper and facilitate a wide distribution. In
these years Hogarth’s uncertainty and frustration expressed themselves in a number of unfinished
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paintings. In several spontaneous sketches, he succeeded where he had failed in his heroic pictures
and synthesized dynamic elements of the XVII century Baroque style with an uncompromising
realism and fully expressive handling of the paint. These sketches were ignored in his lifetime, and
it is only in the wake of the XIX century Impressionist movement that such sketches have received
serious attention.
2.7. The Analysis of Beauty. In 1745 and again in 1751 Hogarth organized auctions of his
work. Both fetched extremely low prices, and Hogarth, in anger and mortification, retreated into
aggrieved isolation, pursuing his philanthropic interests but adopting, in public, a defiant and
defensive pose that involved him in increasingly rancorous debate on artistic matters. He expounded
his own theories in The Analysis of Beauty (1753), combining practical advice on painting with
criticism of the art establishment. He expressed his belief in the “beauty of a composed intricacy of
form”, which “leads the eye a kind of chance” and advocated variety, irregularity, movement, and
exaggeration in the interests of greater expressiveness. Though his ideas were respectfully received,
especially on the Continent, the book inspired much adverse comment from his opponents.
The XIX century English painter John Constable rightly remarked, “Hogarth has no school
nor has he ever been imitated with tolerable success”. His immediate influence had been more
strongly felt in literature than painting, and after his death it was significantly the Romantics, many
of whose ideas Hogarth had anticipated, who first recognized his greatness. Though never
neglected, Hogarth was chiefly remembered for his satiric engravings, and like that other lonely
pioneer, the XIX century painter J.M.W. Turner, the implications of his work were better
understood on the Continent than in England.
2.8. Hogarth’s Marriage à-la-mode. 1743–1745. The National Gallery, London. The
famous set of pictures called Marriage à-la-mode contains the most important and highly wrought
of the Hogarth comedies. The care and method with which the moral grounds of these pictures are
laid is as remarkable as the wit and skill of the observing and dexterous artist. He has to describe the
negotiations pending between the daughter of a rich citizen Alderman and young Lord Viscount
Squanderfield, the dissipated son of a gouty old Earl. Pride and pomposity appear in every
accessory surrounding the Earl. He sits in gold lace and velvet – as how should such an Earl wear
anything but velvet and gold lace? His coronet is everywhere; on his footstool on which reposes one
gouty toe turned out; on the sconces and looking glasses; on the dogs; on his lordships’ very
crutches; on his great chair of state and the great baldachin behind him; under which he sits pointing
majestically to his pedigree, which shows that his race is sprung from the loins of William the
Conqueror, and confronting the old Alderman from the City, who has mounted his sword for the
occasion, and wears his Alderman’s chain, and has brought a bag full of money, mortgage deeds,
and thousand pound notes, for the arrangement of the transaction pending between them. Whilst the
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steward (a methodist, therefore a hypocrite and cheat, for Hogarth scorned a papist and a dissenter),
is negotiating between the old couple, their children sit together united but apart. My lord is
admiring his countenance in the glass, while his bride is twiddling her marriage ring on her pocket
handkerchief, and listening with rueful countenance to Councellor Silvertongue, who has been
drawing the settlements. The girl is pretty, but the painter, with a curious watchfulness, has taken
care to give her a likeness to her father, as in the young Viscount’s face you see a resemblance to
the Earl, his noble sire. The sense of the coronet pervades the picture, as it is supposed to do the
mind of its wearer.
The pictures around the room are sly hints indicating the situation of the parties about to
marry. A martyr is led to the fire; Andromeda is offered to sacrifice; Judith is going to slay
Holofernes. There is the ancestor of the house (in the picture it is the Earl himself as a young man),
with a comet over his head indicating that the career of the family is to be brilliant and brief.
In the second picture, the old Lord must be dead for Madame has now the countess’s coronet
over her bed and toilet glass, and sits listening to that dangerous Councellor Silvertongue whose
portrait now actually hangs up in her room, whilst the Councellor takes his ease on the sofa by her
side, evidently the familiar of the house and the confident of the mistress. My lord takes his
pleasure elsewhere than at home, whither he returns jaded and tipsy from the “Rose” to find his
wife yawning in her drawing-room, her whist-party over, and the daylight streaming in; or he
amuses himself with the very worst company abroad, whilst his wife sits at home listening to the
foreign singers, or wastes her money at auctions, or, worse still, seeks amusements at masquerades.
The dismal end is known. My lord draws upon the Councellor, who kills him, and is apprehended
whilst endeavouring to escape. My lady goes back perforce to the Alderman in the city, and faints
upon reading councellor Silvertongue’s dying speech at Tyburn, where the councellor has been
executed for sending his lordship out of this world.
Moral: don’t listen to evil silver-tongued councellors: don’t marry a man for his rank, or a
woman for her money; don’t frequent foolish auctions and masquerade balls unknown to your
husband; don’t have wicked companions abroad and neglect your wife, otherwise you will be run
through the body, and ruin will ensue, and disgrace, and Tyburn. [...]
What man was he who executed these portraits – so various, and so admirable? In the
London National gallery most of us have seen the best and most carefully finished series of his
comic paintings, and the portrait of his own honest face, of which the bright blue eyes shine out
from the canvas and give you an idea of that keen and brave look with which William Hogarth
regarded the world. No man was ever less of a hero; you see him before you, and can fancy what he
was a jovial honest London citizen, stout and sturdy; a hearty plain-spoken man, loving his laugh,
his friend, his glass, his roast beef of Old England, and having a proper bourgeois scorn for French
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