I, Hogarth

by Michael Dean

  I was still assisting the great man, latterly on his painting of a House of Commons committee. This had seen me, briefly, in the same room as Walpole himself for the first time – dealings concerning the salver commission having of course been handled by minions. But my concern for Sir James outweighed even that trophy of my rise.

  The thought was never spoken, but it was accepted that Sir James was not long for this world. Indeed, he himself had begun manoeuvrings to have his son, John, inherit his title of Serjeant Painter to the King, on his death.

  So tears from her good heart were indeed pricking Jane’s eyes at the thought of her father dying, but she did not blame her husband for them.

  ‘Don’t be silly, William,’ she said, dabbing at the tears with a lace handkerchief. ‘Your Tom Rakewell must indeed inherit on the death of his father. What next?’

  ‘I shall pay great heed to the text below the pictures this time,’ I resolved. ‘I wish my praises sung equally as the author of the words and the author of the paintings. For they are gifts which run parallel in me.’

  Jane, I was sure, doubted that this was true, but I went on:

  ‘I was a dutiful son, who loved my father with all his heart. Sometimes it is better for an author to have lived the opposite experience to that he is portraying, the better to see it clearly. How’s this? “Hast thou a son? In time be wise. He views the world with other eyes.”’

  ‘Not bad!’ she cried out, genuinely surprised.

  ‘You continually astonish me!’

  ‘Huh!’ I waved the balled pommel of my fist in triumph. ‘Right now, come on. Come on! Picture one, he inherits his wealth. The last picture he ends in prison.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. Suppose he ends … He may pass through prison, we have eight canvases to fill after all. But suppose he ends … in Bedlam!’

  ‘That’s good. Bedlam is good. Very dramatic. And what sends …?’

  ‘What sends a man to Bedlam?’

  We said it together. ‘Gambling!’

  I had exhausted myself pacing. I stopped in front of Jane. ‘Gambling, yes, itself a sign of madness. Very well. But we have quite a few canvases left. We must show Tom squandering his money.’

  ‘Yes, but show him enjoying it first.’

  I pointed at her dramatically. ‘Good, good. And … How about a wedding scene? Rather like our own!’

  ‘Rakewell marries for money?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Not the daughter of a leading society painter, I hope? That would strain credulity.’

  I laughed. ‘You’re marvellous. You know that?’

  She nodded slowly. ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t keep all this in my head.’

  I seized a piece of drawing paper and a crayon, pinned them to a board, and sat at the easel, silent, gathering my characters into myself. Then I drew eight rectangles, four above and four below. Then below each rectangle small frames for the rhyming text, which should offer commentary and guidance.

  I began the cartoon for each painting as it occurred to me, out of order, those strongest in my head the first. Bold lines, shapes as ideas. I had entered my own world, forgetting even Jane, until I needed her to prompt me with ideas, or approve my rhymes for the text.

  5

  AS I WORKED on the paintings for my Rake’s Progress, bile rose in me anew at the actions of those pirates, swindlers, copiers and cheats who had stolen my work, lowered my reputation by fabricating and spreading inferior copies, and mocked me with their lofty treatment of me as they pursued their grubby schemes.

  It was not to happen again! I resolved it as I prepared and stretched canvases and affixed battens. I willed it as I mixed and applied the grounds then layered on glazes. I knew it as I dabbed on highlights, rendering the faces of people I knew before creating any strange phizes.

  IT WAS NOT TO HAPPEN AGAIN!

  And I knew very well, clear as northern light, how to stop it – by the law. For I had something of the lawyer in me, like my father before me. But unlike my father before me I always sought a mentor, a hero, a guiding light; though at the time I was not always aware of it.

  For there was a sense in which poor, blundering Richard Hogarth was a prouder man than me. More dignified. I, the small son, the genius, forever had someone to take me by the hand and some would say met my doom when I did not, but that was many years hence.

  Now, approaching the crest of my fame, I sought out a lawyer to wield the law for me. And I sought him not among strangers at the Inns of Court, but from the tables of my repose, from among my many acquaintances. As I say, I have ever been a social man. The man’s name was William Huggins.

  William Huggins was the son of John Huggins, who I had first met when he demanded £1 6s 8d garnish for my father’s fetters. The very same John Huggins who was arraigned before the House of Commons, or at least a committee of it, for his foul cruelty to helpless prisoners, like my father.

  But nonetheless I had painted his portrait, an individual oval of John Huggins in historical garb then fashionable. For the thing was, the going rate for a head and shoulders was £8, and John Huggins was ready to up that to eight guineas. This was especially tempting to me as I strove to reach £1,500 a year, striving all the harder once I had exceeded it.

  And now the morally good, billiard ball head of William Huggins, with its comic stuck-on features, sat opposite me at the Bedford Arms and advised me as to the creation of new laws.

  ‘Very little in life is new,’ opined William Huggins, bent carrot nose dibbing, both eyebrows arched. ‘Everything is based on something else.’ A lawyer’s point, that.

  ‘That doesn’t mean you have to copy it, though, does it?’ said I, testily.

  The mild, slow thinking Huggins looked surprised.

  ‘Er … no,’ he said, judiciously.

  We were both drinking thre’pence-a-pot porter. I wanted to bring Huggins to the point, as I feared I would be paying, as it was I who had issued the invitation to this alehouse for advice. Sure enough, two more tankards of the dark stuff were banged down on the table, unordered, with the waiter away before I could draw breath to protest.

  Huggins drained the old tankard, then thoughtfully sipped at the new. ‘In your case, what you need is 8 Anne cap 19.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Most certainly.’

  ‘What is it? Where do I get one?’ I took a huge slug of porter, tilting my throat back.

  Huggins smiled, extending the lipless slit of his mouth. ‘It’s an Act of 1709. An Act vesting the copyright of printed books in the authors or purchasers of copies for twenty-one years.’

  ‘Wonderful. Does it work?’

  ‘Oh, indeed. Indeed it does. The pirates must forfeit all the offending books with a fine of 5s a sheet, half going to the Crown and half to the author.’

  ‘And for engravings?’

  ‘That is what you presently require, William. Not an extension, I think. That would be too complicated. A new law.’

  ‘How do I get one of those?’

  Huggins drank judiciously, consideredly, the dark liquid making a faint glugging sound as it went down. ‘First of all,’ Higgins paused to smile, ‘get as much support as you can.’

  ‘A petition?’

  ‘Write a pamphlet.’

  I was pleased. Writing to me was a concomitant of painting, another form of authorship. I fancied myself a dab hand at it, despite some pedantic criticism of my orthography. And syntax. And logic.

  ‘Good. Then what?’

  Huggins shrugged. ‘Simply get a champion to present it to the House of Commons. They’ll send it to committee. A bit of to-ing and fro-ing, no doubt. Then …’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Then you get a law.’

  ‘Who, exactly, do I present it to?’

  ‘As many men of influence as possible. Within the Commons, obviously.’

  ‘What do you think the chanc
es are?’

  ‘Personal opinion? Quite good, actually. The printers are terribly unpopular. And the extension of the Act from Queen Anne’s time that you are proposing appears quite logical to me.’

  I threw myself into work on the pamphlet later the same day. I entitled it The Case of Designers, Engravers, Etchers Etc stated. In a Letter to Members of Parliament. I wrote as I have always written, hunched over, furiously forcing the pen to move at something like the speed of my thoughts, making obliterating crossings out, writing over, under and through previous words, blotching, scratching, speaking the words as I wrote, writing the sounds I spoke.

  The result, according to Jane, was passionate, but well-nigh unreadable by anyone but me, and difficult to comprehend even by those who could make out the occasional chain of thought. William Huggins visited our home at Leicester Fields. He and Jane helped to shape the pamphlet to a document worth presenting to potential supporters.

  And that is how matters stood when Sir James Thornhill died.

  Servants at our home in Leicester Fields as well as the Thornhill establishment at Covent Garden were dressed in mourning suits. The funeral was held on a chill April evening, with the family making their farewells after the service as Sir James stared waxily up at us from his open coffin.

  I spoke the longest to the dead Sir James, thanking him for his guidance and friendship. Lady Judith, dressed in dowager black, rocked silently to and fro before the bier. Son John said filial words of gratitude on his own behalf and that of his sister, Jane. The mourners returned to the Covent Garden house for drinks and biscuits.

  In truth, I was in some turmoil at the passing of this benefactor who was also my father-in-law. But still, in honesty, I acknowledged to myself with sadness that Sir James’s passing was good for my career, because the association with a style now perceived as old-fashioned was beginning to harm me. Nevertheless, I would have given anything to have him back.

  My main concern in the spring and summer months after Sir James died was my beloved Jane. Jane wept copiously, long and frequently, her shoulders and her full bosom heaving. I had never before seen her give way like this to something beyond herself: to have no remedy, to be so elemental. I had had no real idea of Jane’s view of her father in his lifetime, but realised that that was not the matter here. The matter was of loss, of grief, of pain: as if an organ in one’s own body had died.

  At this time I was absorbed in the Rake series, but I resolved to help and comfort Jane, whatever the loss in time. And while naturally sad at her grief, I was almost joyful at this opportunity to bring her comfort and prove my love, despite all my faults.

  So I held her, I did. I held her tightly to me, for hour after hour on occasion, while she sobbed her grief. There was something animal-like in it, in her howls and cries and in her refusal to actually speak of her lost father. It was not, I understood, what the dead father had done; it was not about his actions, but about him as a being, an entity that no longer was.

  On occasion, Lady Judith joined us, while Jane wept. She was much shrunken and reduced. Once or twice even John came. I gave comfort to them all, as best I could. I knew that what I was doing came from the best of me, and I was glad. Because I needed the best of myself like a salve for what I had done and even for what I had become, with success. That is how I thought of it, then, this comforting of my wife, with those tears: as being like a balm, like applying mercury to the cesspit wounds of sin.

  But all the while I continued the fight for an Engraver’s Act, as Jane insisted on it. I continued to paint for five hours a day, mainly bringing the rake’s journey to life. Jane insisted on that, too.

  Mind you, I was never happier than when I was fighting (painting, to me, being a form of fighting), and the early stages of the battle for justice for engravers were particularly congenial to me, carried out, as they were, at Old Slaughter’s in St Martins Lane.

  When I had a cause, be it, as it often was, a slight to myself or the cruelty of man to beast, or man to child, or some other enemy, that cause dominated my discourse to the near exclusion of all else. So the denizens of Old Slaughter’s – the mild sculptor Roubiliac, the painter Hudson, gentleman George Lambert, big bluff Hayman, Laguerre, Gravelot and the rest – well knew what to expect when they saw a swaggering little figure, just one and a half times the size of his sword, come sauntering in singing the Lillabullero to himself.

  Over porter and thinly sliced beef, all talk of whoring stopped. All talk of the price of a tube of paint and a bit of canvas, the paucity of commissions, especially for poor Roubiliac and his terracotta work.

  And what replaced all that, as soon as I sat down, was full-steam pressure from their most prominent man, for that I certainly was by then, to sign what bluff Hayman referred to as ‘that bloody petition’: namely The Case of Designers, Engravers, Etchers Etc stated. In a Letter to Members of Parliament.

  Hayman, satirically, tried to get the waiters to sign it. Gentleman George Lambert gave quiet steadfast support. Roubiliac signed, then tried to hide from the group that the last meal he had eaten was two days ago. Only, between all the roaring, I spotted it and quietly ordered mutton pies for him – many times.

  The artists – painters and sculptors – had to sign first. Then, stage two as I thought of it, the campaign to get the Whigs and Tories behind it. Finish stage one before starting stage two. Step by step.

  But eventually came the time for the Parliament men.

  The core of my connections in Parliament came from my days painting the Select Committee inquiry into gaols. It had been Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk, a close friend of Sir James, close enough to attend the funeral, who had smoothed my way into the inquiry and the all-important commission to paint the deliberations.

  So it was to Sir Archibald Grant that I turned first in the matter of putting an Engraver’s Bill before Parliament. To my great pleasure, Sir Archibald agreed to see me by return, at his London house in Hanover Street.

  The greeting was warm; indeed, I was ushered into the tasteful green wallpapered drawing room by the lady of the house herself, Grant’s second wife, Anne. She, I noted with a half-smile, was considerably younger than Sir Archibald, who was my age, give or take a year.

  The graceful sweep of Sir Archibald’s brown frock coat and the low bow reminded me of my painting of the Select Committee. Sir Archibald had been posed standing, not elevated at all, with his dandyish manner shown by one hand being tucked inside his waistcoat and a pointing of his left buckled shoe.

  Tea was served along with a gooseberry tart which I, mindful of my need of favour from Sir Archibald, fulsomely praised. The pamphlet, The Case of Designers, Engravers, Etchers Etc stated. In a Letter to Members of Parliament, was waved aside with a swan-neck gesture of his arm by the host, but Sir Archibald indicated that I should outline its contents to him.

  Now, when I am master of my matter I can sing like a bird. I outlined the many ways in which booksellers and printers could cheat the poor artists, then proceeded to a clear account of remedy, based heavily on what I had learned from William Huggins, especially concerning the Act from Queen Anne’s time protecting writers.

  ‘What do you think my chances are?’ I concluded bluntly, all Pug Hogarth now, the ingenious Mr Hogarth having been left behind in the studio.

  Sir Archibald shut his eyes, shrewd, calculating. ‘The connection to the other Act is gud,’ he said judiciously, in his light voice with its strong Scots accent. ‘They like laws that build on other laws.’

  ‘Good.’ It came out as a pug bark. I could feel my forehead scar flushing pink. ‘Thank you. Will you …?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll certainly support you, ma’sen. No doubt of that. And I’ll give you letters to some people. Let me see. Pulteney, Pelham, Wyndham …’

  This was beyond my wildest dreams. ‘Yonge?’ I suggested pretty much at random, pushing the act of kindness to the point of destruction, as ever.

  Graceful swan arm wave. ‘Hmm. Mebbe.’

/>   ‘And what’s happened to Oglethorpe? I can’t find him. I even went round to his house. It was boarded up.’

  I adored James Oglethorpe, sometime chairman of the Gaols Committee of the House of Commons. He had approached the work of prison reform like an avenging angel. A firm friend of Oglethorpe’s, James Castell, had died of smallpox while in the Fleet. And, indeed, Oglethorpe had once been imprisoned there himself, for killing a man in a brawl. To my amazement, he spoke of this frequently while he was being painted.

  ‘Oglethorpe? Oh, aye. He’s in the New World.’

  ‘America?’

  ‘Aye. Georgia, I believe.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A new colony. But he should be back any day. I’d try him again soon.’

  Sir Archibald stood, signalling that my time was over.

  I could feel myself flushing again, annoyed with myself for having stayed too long.

  Sir Archibald rang a pretty silver bell for a footman, asked for his secretary and instructed letters of support written there and then. He started to usher me out.

  ‘Could I just …? Before I go, I couldn’t just have a look at the painting, could I?’

  ‘I’m running a wee bit late for an appointment, Mr Hogarth.’

  ‘Just quickly!’

  ‘Aye!’

  Visibly annoyed, Sir Archibald led me through to a small parlour, where my painting hung above an archway, higher than I would have wished. I stared at it. I was still happy with my Oglethorpe, but wished I had made the prisoner look less well.

  Sir Archibald left for his appointment, leaving me standing in his parlour, lost in contemplation of my work, feeling pleasure at the best of my achievement and rage at its faults and weaknesses.

  The letters of introduction from Sir Archibald arrived the next day. At Jane’s insistence I wrote a gracious reply, thanking him for his help. I then arranged appointments with all the influential parliamentarians – Pulteney, Pelham, Wyndham – all of whom promised support, while visiting Oglethorpe’s shut up house every day.