I, Hogarth

by Michael Dean

  I marvelled at the language of lines on the face, smiles and the rest of it, and its capacity to send signals and their capacity to be misunderstood. It occurred to me that such signals were more various and subtle than, say, the language of flags on ships or the language of fans, but for that more likely to be received incorrectly, as here.

  I resolved to make a note of the thought when I reached the sanctuary of home, as Sir James’s place now was.

  ‘I have no doubt of the efficacy,’ I said, although I had. They said the French Pox was for life, though you could make it milder.

  ‘In addition, you should visit the bagnios,’ the apothecary recommended. His old fashioned wig, stiff with grease and flecked with white powder, came down almost to his elbows. It tilted to one side as he spoke, so he straightened it.

  ‘The bagnios?’ I felt my eyes open wide in surprise – the face speaking for itself, so to speak. I understood the doctor to mean some sort of ‘hair of the dog that bit you’ cure, as stated in Pliny, like giving the collapsed drunk a drink.

  For once the ghastly apothecary had read my face aright. ‘No, not for a night with Venus, sir. Rather for a night in the baths.’

  ‘In the baths?’

  ‘Sweat, sir. Perspire. The evil humours will leave you through the skin.’

  I laughed. ‘That is quite the most ridiculous thing I have heard in my entire life.’

  The apothecary shrugged, again dislodging the newly straightened greasy wig. He made a sucking noise with his mouth, then swallowed. ‘Well, there is something else. Nancy!’ This last as a roar towards the door.

  The girl-child who had greeted and cheeked me when I first arrived came in so quickly she had surely been at the other side of the door. Her switching skirt reminded me powerfully of the mother, with her sleeves made of the same stuff. But Nancy’s demeanour had changed completely. She stood meekly before me, lowered her eyes, raised them a second then lowered them again. Then she bobbed a curtsey, the picture of submission. She reminded me of Sarah Young, such was the degree of surrender. She waited with head down.

  ‘Well?’ said the ghastly apothecary, quietly, wiping his sleeve across his half-nose.

  I had heard the old story that having carnal knowledge of a girl-child or even, God forbid, a baby, transferred the pox to them. To my horror, I felt stirrings at Nancy’s well-trained meekness.

  ‘No!’ I waved Nancy away, flapping my arms. ‘Not her …’

  Again, perhaps with practice, the apothecary read my meaning all too well. As Nancy trotted from the room, he said ‘Mrs Malloy, is it?’

  I hesitated. ‘Is she your …?’

  ‘… my wife, good sir?’ The apothecary chortled. ‘Oh, dear me, no. A widow in great distress, is our good Mrs Malloy. But there is no distress so great it cannot be helped a little. Eh, good sir? Eh?’

  ‘Look, I …’

  ‘Come back next week, sir, when you’ve used the medicines I’ve given you. You’ll be better by then, but you’ll be needing more to keep it down. When we see you again, we can make some arrangements.’

  3

  THE COMMISSIONS for the new fashion for conversation pieces were coming in thick and fast; Mr Rich was happy with his four figures, all painted directly onto the canvas with no preliminaries, and told Mr Wood, who eventually became happy with his four figures. Mr Jones wanted five figures plus a child, and outside at that. Mr Cock required no fewer than six.

  In The Cholmondeley Family the children were shown separated from the adult world by two bold diagonals, a screen and a bookcase. This was the family of Walpole’s daughter. I was within touching distance of the most powerful man in the land. I could almost see his shadow.

  Labouring away at this task, I took Antonis van Dyck as my ideal. Heroes long dead cannot disappoint, and for all my reputation as a man of the moment, abhorring the aspic of the past, I preferred them.

  The mighty Antonis van Dyck I took as master not only for his unsurpassed technique but for his ability to flatter and comment at one and the same time. This is the aspiration of many, reached by very few. But I would have grown a van Dyck beard in my bursting efforts to ape the master, had time allowed between commissions, which happily it did not.

  I did have time to frequent Old Slaughter’s, though, for I have ever been a sociable fellow with time for friends and companions. Old Slaughter’s Coffee House, that was – St Martin’s Lane, number seventy-six, when they used the numbers, and hard by Newport Street. I went to Old Slaughter’s most days.

  Old Thomas Slaughter, who had started the place nearly forty years ago, was still in evidence, though tottery now on his spindly gambs and increasingly in need of a restorative lie down. What I adored, though, was the wood panelling, smoked black into strange shapes by the Dutch clay pipes favoured by my friends, the painters Lambert and Hayman, in particular, and by myself on occasion.

  The company of artists was divided on whether to sit at the same table every time we met, a policy favoured by George Lambert, Jack Laguerre and I myself, for I liked to watch the same wood panel as the smoke changed what it suggested. Or whether, as a blow against artistic rigidity and for the sake of variety, we should take a different table each time.

  This was the policy favoured by, among others, Francis Hayman, another painter by the name of Thomas Hudson, the engraver Hubert Gravelot and the sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac, who had the shortest journey to Old Slaughter’s, as his studio was a few doors down, in St Martin’s Lane.

  The Frenchmen, Gravelot and Roubiliac, between them healed some of the hurt in my heart at the loss of Frenchy Pellett. I knew myself well enough to know that while the French were, in the abstract sense, the enemy, I needed a flesh and blood Frenchman around me to inspire me and I needed French skills.

  I had tried to get Gravelot to engrave the Harlot progress, but the scoundrel had asked for too much money. This had hurt me more than I let on, because Gravelot’s sinuous ‘S’ shapes and feather-light engraving style, pouring out of his studio in King Street, impressed me also more than I was prepared to let on – far more.

  The other Frenchman, Roubiliac, always seemed to me to be older than myself – though I doubted he really was. His face alone fascinated me: his high-domed forehead, amazing mouth with the fleshy lower lip, that strong Roman nose so sharp you could cut paper with it, and the hungry, hooded eyes that sucked a man in. His smile and the air of wisdom secretly daunted and attracted me in equal measure. I wanted to impress Roubiliac, always.

  That day in Old Slaughter’s, the conversation started with the gossip of the day, which was typical, and the theme was set by me, which was typical, too. Colonel Charteris had finally been convicted for rape. This was the same Charteris who I had portrayed beyond misidentification in the first picture of the Harlot’s Progress, lowering in a doorway attended by his pimp, John Gourlay, as the innocent goose of a girl got off the coach.

  Now a mezzotint had appeared, showing Charteris in profile with his thumbs tied together at the bar of the Old Bailey, together with much bawdy material about the man. I had got hold of Some Authentic Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Ch---. I delighted the company with it, especially Hayman who roared at Charteris’s taste for ‘buttocks as hard as Cheshire cheeses’, having always a particular fondness for the combination of carnal matters and foods.

  However, under the levity they all angrily condemned Charteris. The latest, as the gentlemanly Lambert knew it – he was always first – was that Charteris’s poor wronged servant, Ann Bond, had set up with a tavern keeper in Bloomsbury.

  ‘But Charteris has only contrived to have this tavern keeper arrested for debt,’ said Lambert.

  I smashed my fist on the table. ‘The foul fiend from hell!’ I yelled, loud enough to turn heads at other tables.

  Again steered by me – their bantam-cock leader, the smallest man in the group – the conversation turned to another talk of the town. John Gay’s sequel to The Beggar’s Opera, Polly, had been printed but, a
s I said, ‘that fat country boy who sits on our Parliament,’ (I meant Walpole), ‘has banned it.’

  ‘I hear the fat country boy has taken his salver up to Norfolk, where he regularly serves his cronies sherry off it,’ said Hayman, eyes agleam with mischief.

  I stared at him pop-eyed, then roared with laughter. Of all those round the table at Old Slaughter’s, perhaps only Hayman could have got away with that jibe. As Hayman knew, I had not only accepted Walpole’s commission to engrave a salver with alacrity, but the subject of the engraving, Hercules supporting the sky to help Atlas, flattered the plump First Minister. My critical references to Walpole in paintings and engravings had stopped thereafter, an implicit condition of the commission. You have to be practical, you see?

  ‘Shut your mouth, Francis,’ said I, giving him a fond squeeze on the arm and even momentarily resting my head on his shoulder to deny the sting of my words. ‘I did the salver before I knew he was going to ban the play, didn’t I? What sort of man does that, eh, Frenchy? Bans a play, eh?’

  It was Roubiliac who I thus singled out, and by Frenchy Pellett’s old nickname too, because he knew Edward Walpole, the Prime Minister’s son.

  ‘Or do you think that’s all right, Frenchy?’ I pursued the new tack, the matter of the salver now forgotten. ‘Because you know the family. All right is it, to behave like some autocratic Louis-king and stop people from seeing decent entertainments? Eh? Speak, man, what’s got into you?’

  ‘He can’t speak until you’ve stopped, Bill,’ said Hayman, mildly.

  ‘All right, I’ve stopped.’ To Roubiliac. ‘Work your French tongue loose.’

  Roubiliac smiled. ‘Of course he shouldn’t have banned it. Can anyone lend me some money?’

  ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘See me afterwards.’

  ‘How’s Lavinia?’ This from Lambert. ‘How has she taken it?’

  I had not seen dear fascinating Lavinia Fenton in a while, as her lover, Charles Paulet, Duke of Bolton, had whisked her away out of London, the better to enjoy her, no doubt. But I had received a letter from her, furious at the banning of Polly, in which, of course, she was to star.

  ‘Lavinia has touched despair,’ I announced, loudly and portentously. ‘But she will rise above it, like a true artist.’

  ‘And what is a true artist?’ said Hayman, with a touch of mischief.

  ‘I am,’ I said, knowingly rising to the bait. ‘I’ll show you what you can do with a couple of straight lines. And a bit of thought.’

  Some of them knew what was coming now, too, and smiled.

  I always brought paper and chalks in a leather bag to these meetings with the artists – so did Hayman and Lambert. I lovingly withdrew a piece of blue paper and unwrapped a black chalk. Smoothing the paper with my forearm on the rough oak of the table, I then bent over it, working close as I had learned to do when engraving at Gamble’s.

  Hayman, having seen my party-piece many times before, gave one of his huge belly laughs and decided he had gone quite long enough without eating anything. He seized a passing waiter by his right elbow and left shoulder and ordered a plate of thin cut ham and some bread. Meanwhile, he more or less lifted Lambert out of the way, sat himself between the two Frenchmen, Gravelot and Roubiliac, pulled their heads towards him and started whispering in their ears.

  I, for my part, closed out the rest of the world while my chalk moved over the paper. I was finished quickly. I looked up, to find Hayman shovelling ham and bread into his mouth.

  ‘A line,’ said I, didactically, ‘is not there to represent an object, let alone an object the world has grown weary of seeing, down the centuries. A line is there to suggest an occurrence, an event, something of interest as it may be told, for example in the tales of Fielding or Richardson.’

  I peered combatively round the company, shoulders squared to battle opposition. My hand even briefly touched the pommel of my sword, slung diagonally across my legs as I sat. I was met with polite interest from the quiet gentleman Lambert, boredom from Thomas Hudson (who had seen it before), almost satiric keen interest from the two Frenchmen, and more boredom from Jack Laguerre. Hayman was eating.

  ‘What is the story here?’

  I pushed my paper at the company. It showed a well-drawn straight line, labelled A, a shorter line off it three quarters of the way up to the left, at about a thirty- three degree angle, labelled B, and a much shorter line off it also to the left with a curl at the end, labelled C.

  ‘Could be anything,’ said Lambert. ‘It is meant to suggest an event, you say? An occurrence?’

  Hayman stopped eating long enough to dig both Frenchmen in the ribs with his elbows simultaneously.

  ‘Line A is surely the perspective line of a door,’ said Roubiliac, with heavy mock innocence.

  ‘And B!’ cried Gravelot. ‘B is the end of a sergeant’s pike, who has gone in.’

  ‘’Ow do we know it’s a sergeant?’ said Roubiliac, in a stage whisper.

  ‘Imbecile!’ shouted Gravelot. ‘Line B shows the pike of a sergeant! ‘Ow could it be a yeoman or a captain, c’est Line B? Idiot.’

  By now everyone round the table was laughing in his own style, from the gentle smile of Lambert to the heaves of Hudson and the roars of Hayman. I was laughing, too. I may tell you frankly, I have never resented jokes at my own expense.

  ‘And that little line,’ said Hayman, finishing it off, ‘is a dog’s tail. The dog is following the sergeant, isn’t he, Bill? Because he’s hungry.’

  ‘Shut up, Francis!’ But I was still laughing.

  ‘The dog is a pug,’ continued Hayman, deadpan. ‘And he’s just about to piss up the sergeant’s pike. Heavens above, it’s truly amazing, the narrative Hogarth can coax from just three lines.’

  The laughter was now so loud it became a contagion to other tables, who laughed without knowing why they were laughing.

  ‘Mr Francis Hayman,’ I announced, shouting, ‘will now do his party-piece. He will pickle his penis in brine. Or I will do it for him.’

  ‘Sorry, William.’ Hayman was mock contrite.

  ‘I shit on your sorrow. The class will come to order. I will now show you something none of you has seen before. Including Hayman.’ I lovingly took another piece of paper. ‘For we can go further!’ I cried. ‘The line not only has the power to suggest. The line has the power to deceive. For art, my children, is deception raised to glory! What is art, Hayman?’

  ‘It is exactly what William Hogarth says it is. Deception raised to … whatever it was.’

  I waved for silence. And got it. I drew a few lines on the paper, head down, concentration total. And then …

  ‘What’s this? Qu’est ce que sait, mes enfants?’

  There was new laughter round the table. The drawing showed a mournful fellow, no longer the youngest, with horns coming from his wig.

  ‘A cuckold,’ supplied Laguerre, obligingly.

  ‘A cuckold,’ I confirmed. ‘And who has made him a cuckold?’

  With astonishing speed, though I say so myself, I made a few passes with his crayon, and there stood a fat lady next to the man.

  ‘His wife has made him a cuckold,’ said Hayman, nodding to himself at the ways of the world.

  ‘And why?’ I demanded to know.

  To a man they looked to the drawing for the answer. I smothered my glee. ‘She’s younger than him,’ supplied Hayman, the naughty boy turned best pupil.

  ‘Yes, she is,’ I said.

  ‘Ee can’t get it up,’ said Gravelot.

  ‘No!’ said Roubiliac, wide-eyed. ‘Ee’s English and so she ‘as taken a lusty French lover who can satisfy ‘er.’

  The table groaned. Hayman playfully cuffed Roubiliac, who playfully cowered.

  ‘Maybe there is a French dimension to this,’ said Lambert, the gentleman. ‘Maybe he’s got the French Pox.’

  I gave a thin-lipped smile. I pride myself on my enjoyment of raillery, always easier, mind you, when it was me doing the railing rather than being the bu
tt of it. Everybody else at the table was roaring.

  ‘Be quiet, boys!’ I said. ‘I’ll give you the answer.’

  ‘What’s the answer, Bill?’ said Hayman, pretending not to have heard me.

  Pausing only to throw a piece of bread at Hayman, I returned to my drawing. Behind the wife, behind the man, I sketched a cow. The cow’s horns now appeared to be behind the man’s head.

  They all roared with laughter.

  ‘So, is he still a cuckold?’ asked Thomas Hudson.

  ‘Aye, there’s the rub,’ said I. ‘Because I no longer know. And neither do you. The man might be a cuckold. Or he might just be standing in front of a cow. So our deception has created uncertainty. And why is uncertainty good art, gentlemen?’

  ‘Because it sells well,’ said Hayman.

  Everyone laughed, including me. ‘No!’ quoth the master. (That’s me.) ‘Because it is interesting. The repetition of an old truth is not interesting. It is stale. The creation of a new truth is more interesting. But the most interesting is the creation of a new uncertainty.’

  ‘Like the point of choice,’ said Lambert. ‘Events can go either way …’

  ‘Precisely!’ I was delighted.

  ‘And artefacts about to fall …’ supplied Hayman, from my well-worn catechism.

  ‘Ex-act-ly!’ rewarded the teacher again. ‘Will they fall or will they not? If they fall, what will happen? There’s the interest. And there’s more!’

  ‘I thought there might be,’ said Hayman. ‘With Hogarth there is always more.’

  ‘Silence, Francis! The creation of new uncertainties is not the truth. It’s my truth. And now my truth is as good as …’

  ‘No!’ warned Hayman, truly alarmed, thinking he was about to hear ‘God’s truth’. But I am, if I may say so, far too clever for that.

  ‘… is as good as anybody else’s truth.’

  4

  A SADNESS HAD COME OVER JANE. It left me with a feeling of quiet desperation.

  Outwardly all was well. She talked and laughed, she contributed to every aspect of my work – if anything more than before. But there was a sadness in the large grey eyes which pained me: a heaviness in the tread, the occasional sigh, a new seriousness in repose. There was a new weight about her, as if the heaviness of her own heart had become a burden to her.