Mere Cartoonist?

London was staging a show of Hogarths last week that would have pleased the old 18th Century painter-engraver pink. Instead of featuring the satiric, story-telling picture series (Harlot's Progress, Rake's Progress, Marriage a la Mode, etc.) which made him famous in his lifetime, the show was crammed with the portraits of prominent folk and the sprawling historical canvases which Hogarth himself considered his finest and most important work.

The cross William Hogarth had to bear was that he simply did not impress his contemporaries as a serious painter. His colors were too fresh, his draftsmanship too free & easy, his characterizations too blunt and unflattering. When he held auctions of his oils in 1745 and 1751, the paintings he liked best were laughed at. Even the oil originals of some of his most popular engravings sold for little more than the price of their frames. Finally, in disgust and despair, he took down the shingle of his trade from his London house and retired to the country. He wrote in discouragement: "Time only can decide whether I was the best or the worst face painter of my day."

Last week's show supported a conclusion that time and later critics reached long ago: besides being one of the most biting social satirists and moralists who ever etched an engraving, Hogarth at his best could paint circles around most of his contemporaries. His portrait of Captain Thomas Coram, philanthropist-founder of London's Foundling Hospital, displays a British humor and humanity that Hogarth's two famous 18th Century successors, Gainsborough and Reynolds, too often sacrificed for a slick and fawning elegance. His March of the Guards Towards Scotland, an action-filled canvas of the departure of George II's soldiers to put down Bonnie Prince Charlie's Highlands uprising of 1745, is ironic Hogarth realism at its sharpest. Hogarth's most famous oil, The Shrimp Girl, is missing from the show, but a gently smiling Mrs. Salter and the portrait of Hogarth's niece, Mary Lewis, have much of the same spontaneous, light-brushed charm. In his self-portrait, The Painter and His Pug, Hogarth seems to have made a gentle joke at his own expense, played up the resemblance between man and dog.

It was the first big Hogarth exhibition in London in more than 100 years. Nobody in Britain seemed able to explain the long oversight for sure. Roland Beckett, art historian and Hogarth expert, suspected it was the old trouble: "People think of him as a mere cartoonist."

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