by Michael Dean
‘Oh, I like, Roubiliac. My, how I like. A lady with her clothes disarranged. You are my long-lost brother, my friend.’
As I turned back to him I noticed a form in Roubiliac’s narrow truckle bed, the only place in the minute icebox where a man could be off his feet. There was stiff black hair at the top of a filthy horse-blanket which covered the form.
‘There’s someone in your bed, Roubiliac.’
Roubiliac started as if poked in the ribs. ‘Is there? Oh … yes.’
‘Well, go and wake them, man. I can’t discuss my business while a person lies there, in front of me.’
‘No? Oh, all right.’
Roubiliac strode the two paces to the bed, being all the movement the garret allowed. He pulled back the threadbare horse blanket, revealing the corpse of a black woman. There was a moment’s silence in the room.
‘Roubiliac, there is dead black woman in your bed.’
‘How did that happen?’ Roubiliac scratched his head.
‘Roubiliac, if you don’t know how it happened I fear it may be destined to remain a mystery. Have you seen her before?’
‘Yes, of course. I … Her name is Marie-Rose or Rose Marie or something.’ Roubiliac waved his arms in a manner no Englishman would be seen dead doing. ‘She fucks for money,’ Roubiliac added, helpfully.
‘That is as may be!’ I said evenly. ‘The question is, you French poltroon, how did she die?’
Roubiliac unleashed the shrug. ‘How do I know? She was alive when we fucked.’
‘Glad to hear it. Anyway, Roubiliac, I’m somewhat pressed for time.’
This was a bit much, I realised, as it was I who had disturbed the lugubrious sculptor at his work, but Roubiliac merely smiled his creased-cheek smile.
‘I need you to recommend an engraver. This is for eight paintings of my latest Progress. It will take London by storm. I could do it myself, of course, but I simply haven’t the time. Commissions for phizes are rolling in. I’m much sought after. Anyway, who’s the best man?’
Roubiliac released the shrug. ‘Gravelot.’
‘No!’ I could feel my forehead scar colouring as I recalled Hubert Gravelot’s arrogance at the Old Slaughter table: his effortless assumption that he could arrive as an interloper and be the best engraver in London, as of right.
‘I know Gravelot is the best,’ I said, softly. ‘But I won’t work with him. I humble myself for no man. Not anymore.’ I turned sideways so I could no longer see the corpse of the black whore, which was disturbing my line of thought. ‘Give me another name. Another bloody Frenchman if you must.’
‘Louis-Gerard Scotin,’ Roubiliac said. ‘The best for you. Maybe better than Gravelot for you. Not so many curly-wurlies. Straighter lines. More English. Manly.’ Roubiliac beat his breast satirically. ‘Better English accent too. Even better than me.’
This was rendered as ‘Eevern bettair zan mee’. Roubiliac made his already terrible accent even worse to amuse.
I roared with laughter. ‘Where is he?’
‘He sleeps on floors. French floors mainly. But you can find him at the inn opposite the French church. You know? It has a sign with the head of John the Baptist.’ Roubiliac grimaced. ‘Horrible. Ils sont des barbares, les anglais.’
I grinned. ‘Oui, je sais.’
I went over to the corpse of the black whore, turning my back on Roubiliac long enough to get at my leather purse to withdraw a guinea coin. I put the coin by the corpse’s shoulder, then drew the wretched blanket back up over her.
‘Will you come back?’ Roubiliac said. ‘I want to do a sculpture of you. Your head. Your fine head.’
‘I would be honoured,’ I replied. ‘I shall commission it.’ And I shall pay top rate for it, to help Roubiliac.
The Engraving Copyright Act, based on the pamphlet I had written, was now being steered through Parliament by the estimable James Edward Oglethorpe. I wanted to be clad in its protection before Rake, my most important work to date, was launched on the world.
But no sooner was it launched than it fell to ground. It quickly became evident that Rake was not attracting nearly as many subscribers as Harlot had done. Also, the machinations of my old enemies, the booksellers and printers, were not, as I had hoped, consigned to the past.
The Engraver’s Copyright Act, already being called Hogarth’s Act, was now the law of England, having just passed through Parliament. The day I realised that this triumph had turned to ashes has long been engraved on my mind. I was sitting in the drawing room, bewailing the low numbers of subscription-buyers to my long-suffering Jane.
‘Where are the people?’ I was lamenting for the tenth or eleventh time. ‘Where is my public?’
I peered out of the window over Leicester Fields at ghostly queues of people, a thronging crowd of imagined subscribers who were not there. That very day, a disreputable looking fellow in a greasy black frock coat was caught at the window by our new footman, George Wells. This fellow was peering in, sketching the engravings in order to copy them back at the printer’s shop, and undercut my price.
I myself caught the next knave, right outside the house, finished sketch of the third part of the rake’s story in his hand. I set about the fellow, screaming imprecations, but the villain tore himself away.
Fellow artists Lambert and Hudson showed me vastly inferior pirate prints they had bought, some from virtually outside my own house. One printer, Giles King of Drury Lane, was even advertising copies engraved by permission of the artist when they were no such thing.
I wept and keened loud and long on the shoulder of my beloved. The wailing refrain of ‘Where are they?’ echoed round every room of the once so sought after house, now made wretched by the failure at a summit once undreamed of. Many years later, I asked myself if I once noticed how wretched Jane herself was at this time, let alone asked myself what the cause of her sadness could be. The answer was plain enough – no!
There were whispers that the rake’s story was too far outside the usual course of events. Too unusual. Profligates, it was held, were not usually denizens of the madhouse. In the newspapers I was beginning to be mentioned merely as the ingenious author of small conversation pieces.
The prints of A Rake’s Progress were priced at double that of Harlot: two guineas. Even so, the enterprise made a fraction of what Harlot had made, hardly a quarter. I was going backwards, no progress here. And I feared, in the depths of the night when the shadows of the rich are no different from the shadows of the poor, that I was progressing backwards all the way to Spitalfields and the debtors’ prison I had come from.
Rake exceeded Harlot in one respect only. William Beckford, a prominent Tory, bought the six paintings of A Harlot’s Progress for fourteen guineas each, but paid twenty-two guineas each for the eight paintings of Rake. Some years later, Beckford’s most peculiar dwelling, Fonthill by name, a monstrosity in Wiltshire, burnt to the ground.
I received word that, to the accompaniment of a clockwork organ set off by the blaze, all the paintings of the Harlot’s Progress and all those of the Rake were burnt to ash.
Sic transit gloria mundi. We and our works are fleeting. Progress is strictly temporary.
7
I HAD KNOWN Jonathan Tyers for more than ten years. I was always drawn to his ugly, florid face, with its puffy burgundy cheeks, his high forehead; all of which, taken together, made him look like an intelligent breathless pig.
I have always preferred ugly men, both as subjects of phiz-mongery and as companions. I have painted many squat, powerful, ugly men: Lord Simon Lovat, Bishop Hoadly, and the best of them, Dr Arnold of Ashby Lodge, looking like the criminal Lovat gone to the good. All were portraits of shoulder-driven energy and power, eschewing beauty. I was burstingly proud of them. And that, too, is how I saw myself, at this time, with youth a distant memory, old age not quite a certainty and not quite a fear.
Strangely, perhaps, I never painted Jonathan Tyers, though Hayman did – Tyers and his family in a Hayman-adequate co
nversation piece.
Like me, Hayman had known Tyers since 1732, when Tyers had opened up the old Spring Gardens, then cleaned it up both physically and morally in an attempt to persuade polite society it could be seen there. The gentlemen could stroll through the manicured paths between hedgerows and neatly pollarded trees, no longer for the old Spring Gardens whores, but for the music at the newly-built bandstands. And they could bring their ladies with them.
At this early time I had been teeming with ideas for Tyers – a shilling at the gate payment for entry to the gardens, instead of a subscription: that was my idea. It was me who had contacted the blind Justice of the Peace, John Fielding, brother of my friend, the novelist Henry, and persuaded him to hire out his watchmen to patrol the gardens, keeping them safe (well, safer) from cut-purses, footpads and the like.
But now, with Spring Gardens, renamed Vauxhall Gardens, established as London’s premier pleasure park, I had another brilliant (if I may say so) idea for friend Jonathan. Art. Art in the gardens. English art not foreign art, for the time had come for English art.
I had arranged for Tyers to join us at a table at Old Slaughter’s, to commission art for Vauxhall Gardens. He was to begin, I had insisted, with my idea of a major sculpture commission for Roubiliac. But, to my irritation, Roubiliac was not among those present. Why were people not where I wished them to be? My irritation deepened to annoyance. I hoped Roubiliac had not been delayed by the discovery of another dead black whore in his bed.
But, lo, just as Tyers got started, addressing a group consisting of Lambert, Laguerre, Hudson, Hayman, Gravelot and myself, Roubiliac appeared, the familiar genial half-smile playing about his lips.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ he croaked out in his husky French accent. ‘I had to watch something dry.’
This provoked smiles and even some laughter, as did almost everything he said, whether it was meant to be funny or not: something which was a source of pleasant bewilderment to Roubiliac himself.
‘I was just about to propose,’ Tyers said in his sonorous manner, ‘a sculpture of one of my collaborators in the Vauxhall Gardens, Mr George Frideric Handel, to be placed in a grand niche in the gardens. I have in mind payment in the sum of £300. Mr Roubiliac, your name …’
Such was the popularity of the gentle, unworldly, absent-minded Frenchman that a cheer ran round the table, led by the bass of Hayman and my own treble. Roubiliac unaffectedly started to cry, which, I noted with interest, changed his features far less than the lachrymose activity did with most people.
Roubiliac seized Tyers’ hand and kissed it, provoking groans around the table and mock-vomiting from me.
‘I take it that is an acceptance of my commission, then?’ Tyers spoke with the faintest of quarter-smiles.
‘Oui monsieur. Merci, mille fois. Je …’
‘No bloody foreign languages at our table, Roubiliac, you Frenchy!’ I roared. ‘Speak the king’s bloody English here. You foreigner.’
‘You mean the king’s German?’ said Hayman, deadpan.
The entire table, very much including me, collapsed in ribald mirth, only Hayman maintaining enough composure to order more porter and sliced beef all round as the waiter hove into view. Hayman and I were still not on speaking terms, but that didn’t stop me laughing at his jokes in company.
Tyers was plied with food and drink and only allowed to clear his mouth for speech because the assembled artists sensed more benison was on the way. As indeed it was.
Avoiding my eye, Tyers put forward my idea of decorating the supper boxes at Vauxhall Gardens with works by English artists. The idea was pounced on as it went up, like a hungry lion bringing down a leaping gazelle. Hayman was loudest in his support, very closely followed by Thomas Hudson, with me discretely bringing up the rear, so to speak.
‘I shall do you an engravure of your gardens, m’seur,’ Hubert Gravelot said from on high, speaking rather in the manner of a diplomat conceding small ground.
‘Why, thank you, sir,’ said Tyers, with great gravity. ‘And who are you, exactly?’
For the second time the table exploded with laughter. Gravelot, perhaps not surprisingly, did not join in. ‘The engravure will happen, M’sieur Tyers,’ he said. ‘That I promise you.’
And it did, of course. Too many wavy lines for my taste. ‘Makes the bloody place look like it’s an open-air brothel in France,’ as I put it, at the time. But that was a small price to pay for commissions for myself, Hayman and the pearl of artists, Roubiliac, all from one carefully planned lunchtime visit to Old Slaughter’s.
A grateful Jonathan Tyers gave me a handsome gold medal perpetuam beneficii memoriam, showing his own portrait on the obverse, giving entry into the gardens for life not only to myself, but also to a coach full of, namely six, companions who may accompany me on any visit. And as a season ticket to the gardens would set you back £1 9s, that medal was well worth having.
With my sisters established as milliners and my mother free from a life of toil on behalf of her children, I had purchased for the three of them a little dwelling on the north side of Cranbourn Alley, in St Anne’s Parish. My sister Jane, in the way of these things, cared for our homebound mother. I never saw Mama again, until her tragic death, but I made sure that she and my sisters wanted for nothing, both as head of the family and as a loving and dutiful son and brother.
One hot June day, the new second footman, the Irish lad Charles Mahon, burst red-faced into my studio as I was struggling with the engravings for Rake. He was wearing his day clothes; none of my servants were given livery, I loathed the pomp and the expense in equal measure.
‘Master Hogarth, sir. You are enjoined to come with all speed …’ The youth fell to coughing.
I looked up from my work, my annoyance at such an unprecedented interruption melting at young Mahon’s obvious sincerity and distress.
‘Whoah there, boy!’ I said, as if to a horse. ‘What’s all this?’
‘Word has been sent from the streets around your mother’s place. It’s ablaze, sir. There is a fire.’
‘What? My mother’s rooms …?’
‘The whole area, sir. Shall I tell Mistress Jane as well?’
‘No, come with me.’
The boy ran ahead, for all the world as if I had never been round the corner to my mother’s place before. But then, this was not so far from the truth. The boy naturally was far nimbler and fleeter, as I had grown portly by now. Still in my indoor cap, he left me puffing in his wake and cursing my aching knees. We could see the fire in the sky as soon as we drew abreast of Leicester House.
The further half of Cranbourn Alley, including the place I had bought for my family, was ablaze, the fire continuing towards St Martin’s Lane. The street was thronged, as ever at a time of fire, with people watching, thieves going into the burning houses, and pickpockets and cut-purses trying to take what they could.
In the distance, apparently bobbing in the smoke and the dancing throng, to my intense relief I caught a glimpse of my sisters, clinging together. With young Charles Mahon heedlessly shouting ‘Make way there,’ and even using his elbows on the crowd, a path of sorts was cleared for me, which closed behind me, as if I were Moses parting the Red Sea.
My senses were all the keener for my fear; I heard every word around me, every colour assailed me brightly, the acrid smell of the smoke covered my clothes, seeming to rise up to me from inside my own body. I heard a voice close, echoing, say ‘It started in that brandy shop in Cecil Court.’
Even as I fought my way through to my sisters, suffused with fear for my mother, an image came to me of the two-penny gin shops I had passed in St Giles that day with Captain Coram. It etched on my mind, much as it was to be when I etched it with a burin and called it Gin Lane, and then did a companion piece called Beer Street.
‘You are safe!’ I shouted, close to tears, as I made to seize both my sisters, as they were practically borne off their feet in the melee.
Anne, the younger, was crying. The
elder, Mary, desperately pale, was peering at their home as yellow and red flame licked its timbers, and smoke plumed and billowed into the sky.
‘Is she in there?’
Mary nodded. ‘We were at the shop. She … She was at home.’
The boy Charles tore at his jerkin. ‘Let me try, sir. I’ll effect a rescue, if I can.’
I seized him by the shoulders, even in this desperate chaos repressing a smile at the youth’s brogue, together with a tear at his goodness. ‘To lose you, too, would hardly aid my mother, Charles. But, thank you.’
The youth miserably re-tied his jerkin. And then, ‘Look, sir, the soldiery.’
Troops had indeed been called out to the fire. They were conspicuous in their red coats, already barging people out of the way, trying to tackle the thieves and organising a chain to pass buckets, leading back in the St Martin’s Lane direction where there was presumably a pump.
Next to me, a portly man, a gentleman by his garb, was appointing himself the resident expert on the scene. ‘The soldiery, indeed,’ he said, responding to what Charles Mahon had said, though naturally addressing me, as a gentleman, and ignoring the boy and the women.
‘The Prince of Wales himself is in attendance,’ said my informant, ‘at the head of his Foot Guards. I am reliably informed that Lord James Cavendish and Sir Thomas Hobby are also among those present.’
I glared at him. I was minded to say I did not care if the Archangel Gabriel was among those present, so long as they saved my mother. But instead I turned to the young footman.
‘Charles, please escort my sisters to Leicester Fields where they can be cared for. I shall join the bucket-chain to fight this fire.’
‘Please, sir. Please let me fight the fire with you. Sir, look!’ The boy pointed through the crowd at Henry Tompion, the butler, and George Wells, our footman, making their way to them. The boy’s blue eyes were bright with tears. ‘Sir, we’d all go down for you. We’d go into the pit of hell itself for you, sir!’
I almost forgot my mother in my startled amazement. I regarded myself as a fair master to my servants. I was the only person I knew who forbade his servants to take vails in front of visiting guests, not wishing them to fawn for money. But against that I paid them all, the two housemaids, the cook and the men servants, £9 a year, far more than anybody else in Leicester Fields. And they were paid on time, too, regular as Sunday, without fail.
