I, Hogarth

by Michael Dean

  Our Chiswick place was surrounded by a high brick wall. Entry was across a small triangular garden with a mulberry tree at its centre and an orchard behind it, then into a portico with two great lead urns, and in through a doorway much less grand than the one at Leicester Fields. And two storeys only, this little brick-built place, not four as at Leicester Fields. In, up a narrow curving staircase, left to the dining room for the guests, right to Mrs Parsons’ domain, the kitchen, scullery and pantry. Then the bedrooms and a delightful small, wood-panelled parlour with inset cupboards and views across the fields.

  Sarah Young and Fanny shared one tiny part of the roof space, Mrs Parsons another, and Henry Tompion, George Wells and Charles Mahon a third. In other words, they had much less space than they had in London, on the rare occasions that they all attended at Chiswick together. But most of the time, naturally, either the butler, Henry Tompion, or the first footman, George Wells, held the fort at Leicester Fields, while Sarah Young’s increasingly poor health limited her to just two visits to Chiswick.

  They had been in Chiswick a year when, one day when I was painting and Jane supervising preparations for luncheon, the house shook, the fields shook, the earth shook: objects and ornaments fell, my easel tilted and tumbled, closely followed by an increasingly portly, stiff and ailing painter. (I refer here to myself!)

  An earthquake it was, such a strange, exotic thing to be visited along the Thames. But we survived the shake and the tumble. Our new summer cottage survived. And our world with it.

  12

  IT WAS MY POLICY to visit the eight masonic lodges dotted around London from time to time, to maintain contacts in high places.

  It was at one of these lodges, the Piccadilly, near St James’s church by Garlick Hill, that I again encountered Captain Coram. It had been some four years since our last meeting, at the home of the Punch-like figure of James Oglethorpe.

  I did not expect Thomas Coram to remember our subsequent rather strange trip to St Giles, finding throughout my life that my memory of encounters was always greater than those who had experienced the encounters with me. But I had met my match with the diminutive sea captain, who remembered not only the cost of the hansom fare but also the tip he had coughed up, on that occasion.

  ‘Three pennies in coin of the realm for the legem pone!’ boomed the sea captain, as we sat side by side at a masonic Grand Festival.

  I winced as I registered this need to display knowledge, whether of the Latin tongue, of literature or of philosophy, so common in those unschooled and to which I was by no means a stranger myself. Not for the first or last time, I saw myself mirrored in the compact form of the choleric pink sea captain.

  ‘But worth every penny for a most enjoyable meeting with yourself, sir!’ the little captain boomed on, still reminiscing about our trip to St Giles, pink turning to red over most of his face, both from bonhomie and wine.

  I sensed a new joy in Coram, and a new bounding confidence coming from it. I was happy enough to prompt the news which would surely soon burst the bulging breast of the sea captain if it was not released.

  ‘And how is it with you, sir …?’

  Coram’s great news, as I hoped, was the fruition of his plans and dreams. After a full score of years and more, as Coram put it, our good German ruler, George II, had put his signature to the charter for a Foundling Hospital during one of his visits to this island when there was nothing pressing to detain him in Hanover.

  And as the roar of masonic celebration continued unabated around us, presided over by the Grand Master no less, Robert, Lord Raymond, Coram roared his delight into my ear as both of us continued to drink, eat and talk.

  ‘Patience and the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown,’ bellowed the sea captain. Adding for good measure, ‘“Beware the fury of a patient man”, as our good poet, the estimable John Dryden once wrote.’

  Coram’s narrow lips, the top one especially thin, were stretched in a permanent smile at his success. He spoke through this smile; he drank and ate through it. Only a churl would have begrudged him his smile for so good a cause after so long a time. And my delight at his success was fuelled by a total belief in his cause, a belief in the rescue of those poor children who were born in the depths, as I was.

  I clapped the sea captain on the back, out of appreciation of his virtue and tenacity, and in fellow feeling at the club of small battling men, who had taught themselves what they needed to know and wanted the world to sit up and thank them.

  Many years later, as my life draws to a close, I asked myself, as I embarked on my portrait of Thomas Coram, if I knew then that it was to be my masterpiece? The answer, I believe, was yes. I knew it before I started. I knew it would be the best work I would ever do. Yes, I did.

  I took on something of Jane, her certainty, as the portrait of Coram proceeded. After so many years of matrimony I had in any case become much of her, willingly so, and she some, though less, of me. But in this case the process was helped on its way by Jane’s fondness for Coram, a man so much like her husband, and by her passionate belief in what Coram was doing.

  The pattern of the daily sittings at the studio in Leicester Fields was this; especially during the preliminaries, I let Thomas Coram talk until he relaxed into himself, offering the real man, not the stiff being he imagined was required for a portrait.

  So while I stretched the canvas, covered it in size to stop the oil seeping into it, then primed it in grey – something I always insisted on doing myself, by the way, I never bought ready-primed canvas – Coram would be chattering away about how he first met Eunice Waite when she chose him for her dance partner at a gathering in Boston.

  Another layer of size, another layer of ground, fast right to left with stiff-elbowed, whole-arm strokes. And all the while Coram shifted in the throne-like chair I had seated him in, his little legs not quite reaching the floor, and talked on and on.

  Then I arranged the colours on my palette, as my belly tensed, much as it had done when I was in my twenties. I had a system for the arrangement of colours. Of course I had a system!

  It was of my own devising, but based on Rubens’ three-colour theory (the primacy of the primaries, red, yellow and blue). The tints would be bright separate and distinct, not blended together, so there would be blocks of colour, even though this was far from fashionable.

  Coram, meanwhile, would be expounding on how the charter, when he finally had it, did not overcome certain weaknesses in the Poor Law, so there was yet more work to be done.

  And while I lovingly prepared my brushes – the stiff ones of hog’s hair, the delicate ones of sable and squirrel – and made sure my maulstick, with its leather knob, was clean of splashes of paint, Coram would be explaining that the governors of the Foundling Hospital could now purchase land not exceeding £4,000.

  And by the way would I like to become a governor? I said yes immediately because it would please Jane, but also because of my passion for his work.

  So by the time I had prepared the old-fashioned linseed and the walnut and poppy oil, the sea captain was showing all the layers of self that such a man had accrued, by turns hard and soft, by turns warm and shrewd.

  And by the time I stood before a canvas that was twice the size of the one I had used to paint my wife and my mother, ready with the restricted palette recommended by Rubens, the sitter, too, was ready: his soul as happily naked as a baby to my sight.

  Then I began. I began slowly, as van Dyck had done, not fast like the moderns, like Kneller and Highmore. First, put in blocks of dead colours, working in patches directly onto the canvas, hardly glancing at the most rudimentary of cartoon preparatory sketches, which did little more than establish proportions.

  Beneath the certainty in my mind there was controlled excitement now. I was in touch with and working from the deepest and best part of myself. I was aware of that in the same way you are aware that your kitchen cold store contains cheese. There is no need to keep opening the door to check.

  And
while putting in this background, before approaching the summit of the all-important soul, as outlined in the face, I not only allowed Thomas Coram to continue talking, I encouraged it, I prompted it.

  ‘What will happen to the foundling children …?’ I was speaking absently, mixing flesh pinks, sweetening them while still wet. ‘What will happen to them after? Have you thought of that?’

  ‘Thought of it!’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘What do you mean, sir? Thought of it. I’ve thought of little else.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The boys will go to the navy, sir. A life at sea, such as I led myself. “All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full.”’

  ‘And the girls?’

  ‘Why, into service, sir. We will make housemaids of them. Cooks. They will lead useful lives.’

  I gave a small smile. You will lift them to useful lives, I thought to myself, and I will lift you to a king. As I painted, I was aware of the effect my creation would have when it was finished, but I did not paint to achieve that effect. I knew better than that. For to have done so would have ruined the painting. I painted the life of Thomas Coram and let Coram, not the painting, challenge the world and all that had gone before.

  So, the noble seated pose, tubby stomach bursting out of his waistcoat and red coat opened wide. The royal charter prominent, but the globe carelessly at his feet and one tiny, buckled foot almost kicking the black hat that represented his Hatter’s Company associations.

  And the crowning glory, in every sense, the hair; Coram’s pure white hair tumbled down to his shoulders, reaching the gold-facing on the red sea coat, like a purification of a despot’s wig. His smile, lips slightly apart, for all its goodwill dared the viewer to trifle with him or to see him as anything less than regal.

  I, Hogarth, Spitalfields boy, had taken another parvenu upstart, of similar diminutive stature, sat him on his throne and fashioned a king from the stuff of a citizen. And in doing so I had made a king of myself.

  Resolved to do everything I could to help Coram, I had written to Charles Paulet, 3rd Duke of Bolton, present lover of Lavinia Fenton. With spelling and grammar improved by Jane, I requested him to become a governor of the Foundling Hospital.

  The reply, when it came, was from Lavinia. In characteristically forthright tones, Lavinia had demanded my appearance at the Boltons’ London home to paint her portrait again. Charles becoming a governor of the Foundling Hospital, so said Lavinia, could be discussed then.

  Charles Paulet had a mansion in St James’s Square, on the Pall Mall side, facing the Earl of St Albans’ place. I was much less easily impressed by this address in late middle-age than the callow youth Hogarth would have been, but I was reluctantly won over by the scale of the Bolton pile, even though it was (as I well knew) merely hired on a short winter lease. The place looked like a long, thin castle, abutted on either side by terraced housing.

  Hanging from the square-faced towers was the Bolton escutcheon, in three or four places. As my hansom departed, I clutched my artist’s materials in the wind, looking up at one of the Bolton crests with the boyhood eye trained by stout Gamble. Three swords pointing down, that was none too difficult to execute. But the crest, a falcon with its wings displayed, would have been the very devil.

  Shaking my head in rueful sympathy at those charged with the execution of the Bolton arms, I rang the bell, to be admitted by a footman in silk livery of a bilious shade of yellow. This flunky carried my artist’s burdens for me. I was led to a parlour with flashy mouldings bumping out the ceiling like a child’s cheek sucking a bonbon.

  An over-ornate, no doubt French, armchair was indicated to me by the flunky, into which I gratefully sank like a lumbering galleon holed beneath the waterline, while my easel and so forth was balanced against the wall. The sitting relieved the lesion on my leg somewhat, and to a lesser extent the pain in my right big toe, although if anything it made the pain in my lower back even worse: a pain shared, for what it was worth, with nearly every artist in the St Martin’s Academy.

  And there I waited. I know I am an impatient man, but the wait seemed to me an eternity. I glanced up at the paintings; there was one of a Bolton ancestor which I judged even worse than my own recent hack commission of a finger-pointing Daniel Lock, undertaken solely because he was a governor of the Foundling Hospital. There was a Gaspard Poussin (Nicolas’s brother-in-law), and there was a landscape which appeared to be a Lorraine copy.

  I thankfully shut my eyes. I occupied myself by imagining a young Lavinia naked, a sight I had never seen in fact and flesh. Finally, the real Lavinia Fenton appeared, still not the Duchess of Bolton de jure, as the Duke’s wife, mad Lady Anne Vaughan, still lived and lived well, though not here.

  The de facto Duchess rolled towards me like a siege tower of old being towed into place. A long, platform-like arm was extended. I struggled from the blandishments of the French armchair, wincing as the lesion in my leg protested with a sharp pain. I pictured Lavinia this time as a child at Fenton’s Coffee House, then as the portrait I had painted of her in her hovel near the Cowpats soap factory. Could I even equal the freshness of that work now?

  ‘Master Hogarth! You may kiss my hand.’

  I made to do so before a squawk of glee just preceded a remarkably hard punch on my arm (fortunately the left, not my painting arm).

  ‘Ouch!’

  ‘I’ll give you “ouch” my darlin’! Oh, Billy Boy, that was priceless. Ready to kiss my ’and, you was. Wish I’d offered you me arse now. You’d sure as ’ell ’ave kissed that.’

  ‘Time was, Lavinia …’

  ‘Oy! No lip from you, now, or I’ll hhhave the fffoootman throoow you owwwt.’ This last was in Lavinia’s parody of a fop accent, before breaking into cackles of laughter.

  ‘Lavinia! You haven’t changed. Not a jot. Not an iota.’

  ‘Yeah! Apart from being twice the bleedin’ size and me looks half gone.’ I naturally began the obligatory denial, but Lavinia cut it short. ‘Yeah, yeah! Sing a new song, Billy. I got eyes. I also got a present for you.’ A sharp look must have come over my face, as Lavinia broke out laughing again. ‘Oh, you don’t change, Billy Boy. Both eyes on the main chance, that’s our Will-ey-um.’

  I shrugged modestly. ‘Er … what …?’

  ‘I only got you a commission!’

  I groaned inwardly. Martin Folkes, also a governor of the Founding Hospital, wanted a portrait. There was this present painting of Lavinia. There were portraits of Lord Viscount Boyne, Pine the engraver, John Palmer of Ecton. Time was when I was scratching and begging for work … Now, all I wanted to do was complete the real work, my apotheosis, the portrait of Thomas Coram. The rest of it could go hang.

  ‘A commission!’ I said, attempting to convey delight. ‘Good-O. Who?’

  ‘Garrick. The great actor. You know him, don’t you?’

  ‘Yup. And his wife.’

  ‘’Ee wants doing as Richard II.’

  ‘Would that be Richard III?’

  ‘No, ’ee thought you’d charge more for that.’ Lavinia cackled at her own joke. ‘It might be. You contact him and find out which bleedin’ Richard he wants. Personally, I couldn’t give a tinker’s fart.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’ve got you £200 to do it.’

  ‘Whaaat!’

  She laughed. ‘Don’t say I ain’t good to you, Billy Boy.’

  Tears came to my eyes. Nobody got £200 for a portrait. Not Reynolds, not Ramsay, not van Loo. Nobody. It would be a record in England.

  ‘Thank you, Lavinia.’

  ‘Oh, you’re very welcome.’

  I laughed. ‘You’ve always been a duchess to me.’

  ‘Oh, shut up! You’ll have me blubbin’ in a minute!’

  ‘So … how’s life as the Duchess of Bolton? In a manner of speaking, of course.’

  As I spoke, I feared the worst. The Duke’s passion was gambling of all sorts, from hazard, faro and basset to huge bets on bear
and cock fights and (a favourite, this) women fighting in their shifts. Alongside the gambling, whoring with large numbers of women in every room of the house and drinking vast amounts of brandy accounted for the rest of his time.

  As if she could read my mind, Lavinia answered ‘Charlie ain’t the problem. What to do all bleedin’ day is the problem. Billy, I am bored, bored, bored. Sometimes the days go so slowly I could shoot meself, just for something to do.’

  This interested me, as I have never experienced a moment’s boredom in my life, unless the engraving of heraldic beasts for stout Gamble counted as boredom, but really it was more tedium, as I was doing something: working, in fact, quite hard.

  ‘Well, I’ll try to entertain you, shall I? As I paint you? And then …’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, Billy Boy. I’ll get my Charlie to be a governor of your Foundling Hospital, never fear. A deal’s a deal. I ain’t changed that much. But first …’ Lavinia rang for a footman. ‘Let’s ‘ave a little drink, shall we? And I don’t mean coffee. They’re calling it Dutch courage these days, you ’eard that one?’

  I laughed. ‘No!’

  At that moment, Charles Paulet put his head round the door. His dissolute, jowly face with its hooded eyes was the picture of misery. I recognised the syphilis on him instantly, mournfully registering as I did so that my own was getting worse again. The Duke glanced at Lavinia and me, and without a word disappeared again. Lavinia shrugged heavily at me, for a second looking almost as miserable as her ‘husband’.

  13

  A BLUSTERY WEDNESDAY evening towards the end of March, with a spiteful wind whipping across Lamb’s Conduit Field, saw the opening of the Foundling Hospital, after more than twenty years’ work by Thomas Coram. The Hospital stood in Lamb’s Field, by the Bloomsbury and St George the Martyr burial grounds.