I, Hogarth

by Michael Dean

  It was in Golden Square, within walking distance of Leicester Fields. I soon found myself going there twice, three times a day. My feeble attempts to hide this from Jane were uncovered, like a housemaid pulling back a bed sheet.

  As ever when an idea took me over, engrossing my mind, courting madness, she let me see that she was concerned but did not directly try to stop me, even when time was lost from painting the Rake series. And eventually I got what I wanted, as I so often did, thus making my previous obsession seem more reasonable.

  James Edward Oglethorpe returned to England.

  Oglethorpe greeted me warmly in the vestibule of his house. With an informality typical of a certain type of military man, he dismissed his footmen, and led the way himself along mazy corridors to a small panelled study. There he donned a red indoor cap, lit a cheap clay pipe and sprawled at his desk, waving me to an armchair opposite.

  I regarded him quizzically, head to one side, just as my pug dog Trump did. The cause of my quizzical look was a sudden realisation that the soldier in Oglethorpe – he had been in the Peninsular War as a young man – was entirely missing from my portrayal in the Gaols Committee painting.

  And more. Worse! Oglethorpe was a Tory, a Jacobite sympathiser to boot. Could all that have been shown in a painting? And a conversation piece at that, not a portrait. van Dyck could have done it. Oh, I was wretched!

  What had happened? I saw what had happened. Without knowing it, I had rejected elements of Oglethorpe I disliked. I had invented a new Oglethorpe who did not exist. I had told lies. Even on the surface level there were lies. As Oglethorpe was speaking, I noted the curve of his big nose, the jut of his chin. Zounds, the man was almost Mr Punch! The real Oglethorpe, that is, not my milky version.

  I resolved then and there to tell the truth in future, to find the real man and show him, not to create my own version – someone I liked. That, in its way, was as wrong as merely copying the sitter as he sat still as a statue, as if he were a still life: like fruit, flowers, a gallipot or a broken earthen pan.

  Meanwhile, I was continuing my talk with James Oglethorpe. Although only recently returned from Georgia, Oglethorpe was already aware of everything cooking in the bubbling cauldron of London events. He not only knew of my pamphlet to gain support for an Engraver’s Copyright Act, he had read Grant’s copy.

  ‘Of course I’ll support you,’ Oglethorpe was saying. ‘The book trade is run by scoundrels and idle incompetents. Always was, probably always will be. But we’ll fire a few shots at them, eh, Hogarth? Bit of enfilade, eh? Show me where to sign.’ At that moment the doorbell rang, a high tinkle from the vestibule. Oglethorpe uncoiled himself and jumped up, hanging on to his indoor hat as it slipped.

  ‘Ah, I can guess who that is. Old friend from our new colony south of the Savannah. You know about our work there, Hogarth?’

  ‘No.’

  Oglethorpe was moving lithely to the door. He called over his shoulder. ‘Oh, you should. The poor will be given another chance, a fresh start. And people hounded for their beliefs. French Protestants and the like.’

  ‘I …’ I was aware that Oglethorpe had not yet signed, but he was gone.

  He was back shortly, though, chattering nineteen to the dozen with one of the few men I had ever seen who was as short as myself. The voluble little fellow wore a gold-faced red coat of some bastard form that was at most only partly wool, a pair of workaday, grubby yellow gloves and, remarkably, no wig at all. His fine, long grey hair fell nearly to his shoulders.

  He stopped talking as he saw me. ‘Thomas Coram,’ he introduced himself, before Oglethorpe, who had his mouth open to do just that, had a chance to. ‘And who might you be, sir?’ A blunt chin jutted at me.

  I liked him on sight. ‘I am William Hogarth, sir.’

  ‘The ingenious Mr Hogarth? The painter? Modern moral whatsits?’

  I was gratified. ‘Subjects. Indeed, sir. Modern moral subjects. That is me.’

  ‘Mr Coram is a sea captain,’ Oglethorpe managed to get out, as he sat down again.

  But Coram took over, glaring at me. ‘Where do you stand on Walpole, sir? Come! You must be for or against.’ He spoke as if countering hours of prevarication on my part.

  ‘I have had no dealings with the man, sir,’ fibbed I, carefully. And then, seeing the sea captain’s face cloud black, ‘He has set himself against actors, playwrights and their plays. I love the theatre, sir. So I think badly of him for that.’

  As I spoke, I was calculating that Coram was unlikely to have heard of my commission to engrave a silver salver for Walpole, let alone of my subsequent softening towards him in polemic. Yet something about my fellow little man’s directness and blazing, painful honesty made me ashamed of the calculation even as I made it.

  ‘Walpole has been chary of supporting our south Savannah project,’ explained Oglethorpe with a smile.

  ‘Chary of …?’ Coram was rigid with indignation. I realised that, like many people with little or no sense of humour, the sea captain was not open to teasing. ‘Chary of …? The great tub of lard has been no help whatsoever. And what we are doing is worthwhile, good work!’ Again the little man spoke as if rebutting fierce counter-argument.

  While he had been speaking, Oglethorpe had signed my petition to Parliament and silently passed it to me. My business completed, I could have left, but a powerful attraction to the compact force of nature that was Coram kept me there.

  ‘I am a trader, sir, in wood among other goods, not only a sea captain.’ Again Coram spoke as if countering powerful slanderous contra-assertions. ‘And in my trade and on my travels I have seen enough evil in the world to want to combat it.’

  ‘Indeed, sir,’ I said, mildly.

  ‘Yes. Indeed sir, indeed sir. Anybody can say that. So what evils have you seen, sir? What evils would you combat?’

  A picture came to my mind, as it usually did before I ventured into argument. It was from my boyhood in East Spitalfields. I had come across two ragamuffins who had captured a poor street cur, tilted it upside down and were ramming an arrow up its anus. I had run at them, yelling, causing enough distraction for the poor dog to struggle free. I had then had to run for my own life as the ghastly urchins turned on me.

  Another picture: late at night a link boy laughing, giving light so two of his companions could better burn out the eyes of a hen they had captured.

  My eyes filled with tears at the pictures. ‘The evil I would combat, sir, perhaps above all others, is our treatment of God’s dumb creatures who are mainly helpless before us and who so often are shamelessly abused.’ I realised my voice was shaking as I spoke. One more picture appeared before me, my beloved pug Trump who I would have died to protect, or at least so I felt at that moment.

  To my amazement, Thomas Coram gripped my forearm with amazing power. ‘Your feelings do you great credit, sir. Great credit. And they embolden me to tell you of the evil that burns at my heart and which, indeed, I shall combat.’

  ‘And that is, sir?’

  ‘Why, the greatest evil of them all,’ cried the sea captain. ‘The death of babies on the streets of our city. Our shameful neglect of our own young.’

  To the delighted amusement of Oglethorpe, we two small men were still chattering, clutching at each other’s arms, when we left his establishment, apparently oblivious to all around us. It was like love. Perhaps it was love.

  ‘I was living in Rotherhithe and walking into the city,’ Coram was saying, as we strode out into the rain. ‘Day after day, at dawn and dusk, I saw the corpses of abandoned babies by the road.’

  ‘I’ve seen them, of course … when I was a boy.’

  ‘Let’s go and see it now. Come on!’

  ‘What? Rotherhithe?’

  ‘No, too far. We’ll take a hackney to St Giles.’

  ‘But … Do we need to see it?’

  ‘What, you a painter and you ask me that? Yes, we need to see it, William. We need to see it every day. And so do the likes of Walpole. And
so does the king. And so …’

  ‘Yes, all right. We can get a hackney at the corner.’

  We took a hackney as far as St Giles churchyard. I hesitated as we got out, but Captain Coram paid readily enough, even though we had cleared the first mile, so it was 1s 6d. The good Captain not only paid, from a healthily plump leather purse, he also gave the driver a thumping 3d for a drink, which, as I pointed out, would be enough in this area to have him thoroughly fuddled on gin within minutes.

  For St Giles, as everybody knows, consists entirely of hovels, run down churches and gin palaces, populated by whores, watchmen, sailors and drunks. Nothing but idleness, poverty, misery and ruin. ‘Drunk for a penny, Dead drunk for twopence, Clean straw for nothing,’ as the first sign they saw announced.

  And through this hellscape strutted we two small men, me with my sword, Coram with his coat flapping, looking for dead babies.

  ‘Not a one!’ shouted the sea captain as we made our way at a trot down Broad St Giles, left into Dyot Street, right into the narrow Phoenix Street, along to Castle Street, then to Hart Street. Coram’s indignation at being thwarted was the equal even of my own.

  ‘I know there are usually many dead babies on the edges of such streets.’ I sought to console him, even as I ran out of breath at the pace he was setting.

  ‘We should have gone to Rotherhithe,’ riposted the angry Coram. ‘I tell you, day after day, at dawn and at dusk, I have seen dead babies in the streets.’

  ‘A sad part of London life,’ I said, still seeking to placate.

  In this I clearly failed. The sea captain stopped dead in his tracks and turned to face me. We were nose to nose, neither nose much more than five feet off the ground. ‘A sad part … Sir, I believed I had made it clear that my purpose is to end this savage situation. Not to mouth platitudes about how sad it is.’

  ‘But how can you …?’

  ‘A sanctuary for foundlings, sir. Such as they have in other countries.’

  I felt he could not mean the New World, even though he was just returned from Georgia. No doubt France again, ahead again. No wonder we were always at war with them. I thought it politic to say nothing. But I believed instantly and passionately in his cause.

  Finally, with me out of breath but the leather-lunged sea captain still in full stride, we came upon a spot with the elegant spire of St George’s in the distance. Below this finger of elegance all was degraded squalor: pawnbrokers, gin shops and not a house in tolerable condition. The most palatial establishment was that of the undertaker.

  I saw a housewife pawning her cooking pot for gin, a workman handing over the tools of his trade. Over there, a man gnawed at one end of a bone while a dog gnawed the other. Another man, no doubt bankrupt, was trying to hang himself from a beam. And as we looked on, amazement turning to horror, finally a dead baby.

  A woman sat atop a flight of stone steps opposite Kilman, the distillers of gin. Garbed only in a ragged shift and a strip of cotton headband, with angry open sores on her bare legs, she had long lost the blessing of youth, but was nonetheless suckling a baby, both full breasts being exposed to the gaze of the populace for the purpose.

  Then, before our horrified gaze, the woman appeared to sink into a gin-sodden trance, a ghastly, leering smile lifting her features. As we two small men started forwards to prevent the inevitable, the baby tumbled from the breast, falling, flailing over a wooden railing to smash head-first on the stone paving of a courtyard some ten feet down, its poor, wretched head splitting open like a ripe melon, bits of brain spattering a foot high up the brick wall.

  Of the two of us, I was clearly the more shaken. Coram shook his head ruefully.

  ‘You see?’ he said belligerently, as if the death of the baby proved some point in argument, which perhaps it had. And then, abruptly, ‘I must go.’

  ‘What? Because of … what we have witnessed?’

  Coram allowed himself a tight smile – he had thin lips, I noticed. ‘No, no. Eunice will be waiting for me.’ His face, I noted with fascination, was transformed at the mention of this name – Eunice. It softened, dough-like, the features returning to babyhood, eyes widening and rounding.

  ‘Your wife?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. We met in Georgia. My good fortune!’

  He stopped but he wanted to talk about her; that was very evident. He wanted her there, with us, even more than she already was. Coram’s face was flushing now, his changing features making a progress every bit as vivid as one of my famous stories in paint.

  And at that second, I understood, with lifelong realisation, that what Coram felt in his soul about his Eunice I felt about Jane and I always would. The realisation shook me profoundly with its depth. It was coloured with fear that I might not be worthy and chill regret that I had already lapsed, feeling indeed the mercury weakness in my bones.

  But feeling and contemplation, two sides of the same coin with a character such as mine, were brought to a sudden end by the sea captain fleeing from me, calling a ‘Farewell’, over his shoulder. A chair had just deposited its gentleman client, already unsteady even before his descent into the Hades of St Giles. Coram gave a bellowed hail to the two chairmen and installed himself in the seat just vacated by the unsteady well-born. With a lift and a wave he was off, out of my sight.

  6

  IT WAS UNDERSTOOD, the very next time the two of us met, as we both knew we would, that I would support Coram’s cause of a home for the abandoned babies of London. And this I did with a full heart. Coram, as I expected, indeed took for granted, was equally warm in his support for my cause, the Act of Parliament to protect engravers from the depredations of pirates.

  Support for my pamphlet and my petition had been overwhelming, but there was one sad exception. I had had a falling-out with the big, bluff West Country painter, Francis Hayman. Such fallings-out were nothing unusual, for my spleen rose in me as often as food went down the other way, and when the spleen reached my mouth I tended to lose control of my tongue. Also Hayman was sensitive to slights, both real and imagined. His fragile dignity was hard-won and cherished: hard on the outside, soft within.

  On this occasion, the artist crew at Old Slaughter’s had been discussing the setting up of an academy to teach art and show paintings. I was loud in my insistence that there must be no copying in the teaching, no slavish imitation of dead Roman limbs. Nobody supported me, except the French sculptor, Roubiliac, to whom I was increasingly close. Hayman led the opposition, arguing for a more formal, dignified academy.

  But real trouble at Old Slaughter’s only arose when Hayman started discussing my painting. In the middle of a paean of praise, broken only to devour a Cornish pasty, the Devon man remarked that my painting had no single light source, unlike, say, Rembrandt. I maintain that Hayman said my work had no focus, all its detail being equal, but Hayman always denied he ever said that.

  Considerable quantities of porter fuelled the misunderstandings piling against each other, the muddy and confused argument, melding it into a feud. I was wounded and I called Hayman ‘a boy’, – I always hated other artists being younger than me – and a ‘scene painter’ – this latter being undeniable as Hayman had indeed painted stage scenery at Goodman’s Fields and Drury Lane.

  The heated row ended with Hayman refusing to sign my petition to Parliament to protect engravers, something which hardly concerned Hayman anyway, as he did no engravings.

  Meanwhile, there was the problem of who was to engrave the Rake story. Engravers, as the whole world knew, were French, just as singers were Italian and beef was English. So, with a light heart and a song on my lips, I went to see Roubiliac.

  Roubiliac was not at Old Slaughter’s, so there was only one other place where he would be: in his studio at St Peter’s Court, off St Martin’s Lane, working.

  Roubiliac was much-mocked for his dedication to his work, for it made him absent-minded. He had often broken off conversation with a guest at his studio in the middle of a sentence, or even in the middle of a
word, because an idea for a line in his sculpture had appeared in his mind, obscuring the real world. Roubiliac would then instantly and wordlessly go to work, not noticing when the abandoned guest left his garret of a studio.

  The other aspect of Roubiliac’s character that provoked much laughter among the Old Slaughter group was his thicket of a French accent. Hayman led the way in imitating this hideous monster of sound but, for all my lifelong facility at imitation, I never joined in because, as I admitted only to Jane, my view of Roubiliac bordered on awe. Roubiliac was the only man I ever met who was, without the slightest question or demur, a genius.

  But a genius who was, at this moment, intensely cold, indeed shivering as a knife-edge wind blew in his miserable studio, billowing his thin shirt. There was no sign of his wife, Celeste. Roubiliac had opened the door to me himself, showed me up the stairs to the studio and now sat shivering alone. Alone, not in the literal sense but in the sense that having nobody near him was Roubiliac’s natural state, just as being surrounded by clubbable types was mine.

  Roubiliac gave one final large shiver, as if attempting to banish all the smaller ones. The sculptor, I knew, was from some hot part of France – Lyon was it? – so felt the cold winters in England keenly. He was new to them, too, having only of late arrived in London after disappointment, so they say, in some competition or other in his native France, which he had, unaccountably to me, failed to win.

  ‘My father was a marchand,’ Roubiliac had said apologetically once, with that shrug which all Frenchmen are surely taught at school. The sculptor meant he was not used to hunger and cold.

  Roubiliac shivered and smiled his thin-lipped smile as I stopped breathless before an amazing work of a reclining female figure, her clothes disarranged, with a man standing over her.

  ‘My God!’ I groaned out my admiration. And then, ‘Does it have a title?’

  ‘Gentleman Surprising a Lady on a Couch. You like?’