I, Hogarth

by Michael Dean

  I was impatient, panting, the excitement overcoming the pain in my leg from the lesion, the pain in my gums, my back and all the rest of it.

  I knew with great certainty, as soon as I seized my crayon, that this work, this Sigismunda, was to be my crowning glory. It would be even greater than my immortal Thomas Coram, even more memorable, in the annals of art, than my two lost masterpieces of narrative painting, my progresses, The Rake and The Harlot. I will finally, finally, put even the likes of van Dyck and Albert Duerer in the shade, with this portrait!

  I frantically crayoned in the pose that had come to me, direct on the canvas. I bothered less and less with preliminary sketches these days, let alone cartoons or the modelloes of my youth. No time, old man. No time.

  A dark background, then: brown like that old warhorse Rembrandt. Sigismunda seated at a table in her shift, showing the tops of her breasts. Oh, yes! Master Hogarth may be old but he’s not yet dead! Her right elbow is up on a casket, which will show even more of her breast, while four fingers are bent at the first digit, pressing against her cheek, with her little finger alone extended.

  You know why? Because I can paint hands. Many artists cannot. It is hands, then to a lesser extent feet, then to a lesser extent horses, which sort the men, such as me, from the likes of the boy Ramsay and the Gainsborough upstart, who was my pupil for a while at that ridiculous Academy. And do you know what sorts the windy charlatans, like Reynolds, from the true artists? Time. Oh, time will show the difference, you mark my words, though I may not live to see it myself.

  Anyway, where was I? Old men digress, old men ramble. Oh, yes, in her other hand Sigismunda holds the heart of her poor murdered lover, Guiscardo, cupped in a gold chalice. We see her just before she adds the poison to her tears, to drink it from around Guiscardo’s heart.

  After putting in the background colour, I bring Jane upstairs to pose for Sigismunda. I also have, pinned to the easel with sharp pins, the sketches I made of Jane when her mother died in 1757. I talk to Jane as I work. She is enthusiastic about this commission. It is bringing us back together, close, as we used to be, and that is balm for my poor old battered heart.

  This time I requested for Jane to pose in her shift.

  ‘It’s cold!’ she said, in a tone which clearly showed her delight in being the object of my gaze so attired.

  I adjusted her hand, I adjusted her bare shoulders, I stroked the tops of her breasts: the greatest pleasure known to man on this earth.

  ‘Billy! Has this to do with the portrait, do you think? These caresses.’

  ‘It makes your skin blush, my Jenny darling. It’s quite essential.’

  Then we fell to kissing and I lowered my breeches but neither of us was able to encompass the descent to the floor, me because of my leg and her for shortness of breath.

  Jane seized her dress from the corner, to my sadness putting it on. But happily this was only to be temporary.

  ‘I’ll go and find Fanny,’ she said. ‘We can go to the bedroom, but I’ll not have the footmen or Henry seeing us.’

  Jane went off to find Fanny, leaving me to haul my breeches back up, a process which took even longer than the lowering. But when Jane came back there was a gleam in her eye.

  ‘Fanny has sent George and Charles out on errands. Henry is busy.’ She held out her hand. ‘Come along then.’

  With our various afflictions, it took us some time to reach the bedroom, which happily we still shared, unlike many couples of my acquaintance. Once there, though, although we shared many delights on the foothills, I was unable quite to conquer the summit. One reason for this was that I kept studying Jane’s face to see how it might look if she were holding a goblet with her dead lover’s heart in it.

  I had sent to my friend, the bloodletter Caesar Hawkins, for a heart. He had provided one which I later found out was from a pig, but also the goblet to contain it. Heart and ornate golden goblet were a perfect match, the heart peeping redly out of the goblet.

  Now that I had that and the casket, I could begin work on my evocation of Sigismunda’s grief unto death, the expression that would put me out of reach even of van Dyck. I follow Dryden’s poem here, not the original of Boccacio. In Dryden, Sigismunda’s sorrow, though profound, is nobly borne.

  To the pathognomonics – when the heart grieves, the corners of the mouth sink. Jane’s lips, then, slightly apart, with the line of grief roughed with the end of the brush at the corner. The full lower lip is straight, pale red. The upper shorter, curved, a gasp cut off, a pout in the face of agony.

  Above this, the nose is noble, evidencing suffering nobly borne. The brow, too, noble. And under it, a tear at the corners of viscous grey eyes. This is a tour de force, the conveying of this consistency. Nobody else could have done it, nobody. There is a fitness in this face because the proportions are perfect. And the varying of the features from the norm conveys a beauty. No two faces since the beginning of time have been alike: mine of Sigismunda shall surpass them all.

  After two hundred days’ toiling at the painting, I was so pleased with my Sigismunda, so soaringly, floatingly ecstatic, that out of sheer fun, as a jeu d’esprit I put the sprite Hogarth in the painting.

  On a leg of the ornate scagliola table, on which the casket and the chalice with Guiscardo’s heart rest, I had painted a snub-nosed gargoyle who was me in my painting cap. I was just under the rim of the table, looking between Sigismunda’s legs. By putting myself there I was telling the world that I was inviolate, impervious; I could do no wrong.

  How long did that euphoric mood last? It ended more suddenly than it started, when that which I had dreaded most occurred to me in the dead of night. I began to see possible improvements. I began to see how I could have done it better. Yet again, this need to revise my work had returned to haunt me, as indeed I believe it does all great artists.

  That gold cord on the curtain behind Sigismunda. It looks as though she is about to be hanged. It must go. I frantically poured turpentine, soaked a rag and took it out, immediately restoring the curtain while the canvas was still wet from the turpentine. That, of course, made the colour weaker than it was in the rest of the curtain, so I had to thicken it up and blend it in.

  Then, raining down on me like blows from some footpad’s cudgel, I saw more and more faults and problems with the Sigismunda I had so recently regarded as perfection.

  Fundamentally, her aspect was too calm. Yes, she clutched the heart of her dead lover to her bosom, pushing up her full breasts in the process. Yes, the expression I had caught so perfectly evoked anguish at the loss of her one true love. But what of her bearing? There was too much symmetry, too much order.

  Do you know what had happened? I, who had spent my life inveighing against the dead hand of the past, against the mindless copying of what had gone before, had done exactly that, without knowing it. I had imitated the graceful poses of past Sigismundas. Perhaps that of van der Werff, perhaps that of Furini. It doesn’t matter.

  The very shape of the table was wrong. van der Werff’s was square; I had followed that. It should be round. The message from Tancred, sent with the heart, hung over the table. So it was the message that leaped out at the viewer. But all that achieved was to take the viewer’s gaze away from the heart, which is where the power of the picture lay. So I launched myself at the painting, frantically altering it to break its calm symmetry in as many ways as I could.

  I started with Sigismunda’s veil, which must now hang down on one side of her face only, not both. Her hair had to be taken up, making the face less even. That meant redoing a lot of the skin I was so proud of.

  I worked on like this for days, weeks. Jane no longer wished to come and sit for me because I had become so irascible, what with the repainting and the various pains from my stomach, this time, and my leg. I implored her for days, before she finally came. I even had the feeling the servants had grown wary of me, such was my wild state.

  Once, I awoke bolt upright in the middle of the night, seize
d by the certainty that my last week’s work had been too timid. I had lowered the hairline, angling it to the left to break the symmetry and portray Sigismunda’s distress, but I had not done it by enough!

  I needed to start again and lower the hairline by far more. Jane was sleeping deeply by my side, snoring slightly. Surely we kept candles in the bedroom? But where? I needed to make these alterations now, even by candlelight. I dare not wait until morning in case the picture I had in my head was vanquished by sleep and I could never get it back.

  I struggled out of bed, feeling my way in the gloom. No candles. I woke Jane, shaking her as gently as I could by the shoulder.

  ‘Jane! Jane, my dearest. I need candles.’

  Jane moaned. ‘There are none here, William. For fear of fire. Don’t you remember?’

  I snorted in the blackness. I had indeed, for a while at least, forgotten my fear of fire. Fire which had cost me my most famous paintings and my mother’s life.

  ‘Go to sleep, William,’ Jane said. ‘I fear you will end your days in Bedlam if you go on like this, just like your Tom Rakewell.’

  I felt my way in the stygian darkness all the way up to the top of the house where the servants slept. I felt my way past the door where the women were and opened that to the garret shared by Henry Tompion and the two footmen. Young Charles Mahon stirred as I came in, shaking his head and blearily opening his eyes.

  ‘Mr Hogarth? Sir?’ he whispered into the darkness.

  He raised himself on one elbow, on his truckle bed in the corner.

  ‘Charles!’ I whispered. ‘I need a candle. I need to work.’

  ‘All right, Mr Hogarth.’

  Charles rolled to his feet. Even on such an errand as this, in pitch dark in the middle of the night, I could not but admire and envy his young grace. There was a candle on a table by his bed. There was also a book. Young Charles had been reading, in the darkness.

  ‘Will this candle do, sir?’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  We left the bedroom, both of us in nightgowns, whereupon Charles got the candle lit using a couple of flints. He led the way to the studio, warning me of various pitfalls from tables and stairs on the way, for all the world as if this were not my own house.

  When we finally reached the studio, I threw off the sheet of linen I kept over Sigismunda, suddenly feeling a wave of tiredness, accompanied by a pang of despair at the size of my task and the futility of it all. Charles put the candle down, leaving the room without a word. I hardly noticed him go.

  By the light of a single flickering candle, I began to undo the work of weeks on Sigismunda’s brow and hairline. Hours later, as dawn broke, I realised I had ruined it. It had been far better the way it was, before I had started.

  Finally, I wished to desist from painting and repainting, not so much because I regarded my Sigismunda as complete, more because I was weary in body in soul at my labour of Sisyphus. With no forethought whatsoever, entirely on a whim, I sent word to Sir Richard Grosvenor that his commission was ready and he might have it.

  As George Wells set off with the letter, I felt a great relief, only for this to be overtaken by a huge foreboding as soon as he was five minutes gone from the house.

  For as long as I have been eminent, I have regarded the opinion of patrons with impatience. They are influential fools, no more, no less. Children with money. But in this case I was consumed with worry at young Sir Richard’s reaction to my work. For the first time in my life I ceased to eat and drink robustly, pacing the studio for hours in fear of what his view of my Sigismunda might be.

  By the time he was indeed standing before the painting, ready to give his verdict, I had convinced myself that my worries had been unnecessary, the mere terrors of an old man. A terrible jocularity overcame me as I drew the linen sheet away, exposing Sigismunda.

  ‘There you are, young Sir Richard. There’s your masterpiece. Never seen anything like it, eh?’

  There was a moment’s deep silence. Then another. The expression on his rather asinine face, as it waved on that pole of a neck, was neutral, serious.

  ‘There’s blood on her fingers,’ he said finally.

  ‘Well, of course. She has been handling the heart of her dead lover, Guiscardo.’

  ‘That would have to go.’

  ‘All right, I can take it off.’

  ‘It’s not like a Hogarth at all.’

  ‘I don’t repeat myself. I break new ground. I …’

  ‘You’ve done that all right.’

  I put my hands on my hips and glared at him. ‘Don’t you like it? I have done all I can to it. If you think the sum of four hundred guineas too much for it, just say so. I have a commission from Mr Hoare the banker, also for four hundred guineas. If you wish I could offer him Sigismunda.’

  Sir Richard shrugged, head wobbling on long neck. ‘If he should take a fancy to the Sigismunda, I have no sort of objection to your letting him have it.’

  And with that Sir Richard left. There was no commission from Hoare the banker. Sir Richard’s rejection was the first time in my life that a man had commissioned a work from me and then not taken it. It confirmed in me more than ever my belief that my Sigismunda was a masterpiece, but ahead of its time, just as the David statue of Michelangelo had been.

  The vultures lost no time in gathering.

  Sir Joshua Reynolds, theorist of the copying faction, produced a satirical work mocking my Sigismunda. He painted the whore Kitty Fisher, through whom half of London had passed, as Cleopatra, but with her chalice a copy of mine: her brow, her bubbies, everything a reference to my work.

  The subscription list for an engraving of Sigismunda by Basire had to be withdrawn, having failed to attract above forty subscribers. And that after Ravenet refused to engrave it at all. My Sigismunda was being ridiculed in the newspapers.

  I intended to retaliate. I intended to set sail, flying my Sigismunda like the proudest Union Jack flying from the mast of a ship of the line. I WOULD EXHIBIT.

  Do you hear me? I would EXHIBIT my Sigismunda, as soon as I had finished changing the shape of the table.

  The Spring Gardens exhibition: that would be the place. The St Martin’s Lane crowd were organising it. All my friends from the once happy time at Old Slaughter’s – Lambert, Laguerre, Hudson, Gravelot, even Roubiliac, all those sometime friends from the golden days – were now absorbed in this bloody St Martin’s Lane Academy. It’s a wonder they found time to paint at all.

  Having failed to strangle this academy at birth, I had contented myself for a while with trying to guide it from within. Guide it, that is, away from ranks and positions and professors and suchlike rubbish of the French, towards a more Greek style of academy, namely a confederacy of equals.

  I also wanted a place where artists could draw and paint in spontaneity and harmony, in the tradition of Wren and Thornhill, away from foreign influences and above all away from the ideas of Reynolds and his crowd.

  I was, naturally enough, losing heavily in all of these areas. The only good news I had in quite a while is that one of my artist opponents had been sentenced to death. One Theodore Gardelle, a Swiss. He slaughtered his landlady in a rather colourful way.

  The cart taking Gardelle to his execution passed Leicester Fields (as I still insist on calling it, it isn’t bloody SQUARE). I waved him goodbye from an upstairs window, regretting only that Reynolds wasn’t in the cart with him.

  But I digress, as old men do. The exhibition at Spring Gardens was intended to promote and sell our wares – the paintings of the St Martin’s group. It was the first time something like this had been done, I believe. At any rate, the paintings I entered for exhibition were my surviving series of portraits, An Election Entertainment and my masterpiece, Sigismunda. It will be Sigismunda, naturally, which will make them all gasp.

  Before Sigismunda was exhibited, Jane warned me against portraying her in her shift, with her bubbies pushed up like that.

  ‘I don’t know why you have give
n her so much flesh,’ she said, sounding not at all like herself. ‘It looks terrible.’

  ‘All right, all right. I’ll clothe her,’ I said.

  So at the last minute, working fast and with some impatience, I rapidly clothed my Sigismunda in the blue of the Madonna. I dashed in a froth of flouncy white sleeves, covering not only her bubbies but her elbows as well. It altered the entire tonal balance of the composition. For some reason it made her face look more petulant, too, but I was past caring.

  ‘There,’ I said to Jane, or rather shouted, I admit it. ‘I’ve done what you want. Come and look at it.’

  But she didn’t. She turned her back, then walked off in a huff. I suspected that I had embarrassed her, with my rendition of her (sometime) orbs. A day later, with her still refusing to look at the clothed Sigismunda, a quarrel arose between us which involved her throwing a tureen dating from the time of Queen Anne at my head. We did not speak for days, an increasingly frequent occurrence. At one point we communicated by notes carried by the maid, Fanny.

  At any rate, when a crew of rude mechanicals turned up to haul Sigismunda away to be gawped at, at this exhibition, my broken-hearted heroine was chaste as a bloody nun. Not a pink and white trace of her bubbies to be seen. Irritated beyond measure by then, by the whole damned business, I yelled at the rude mechanicals when they hit Sigismunda’s frame against the walls.

  To my horror and amazement, two of them yelled back, which would not have happened in my day, I can tell you. They dropped the picture on the floor and refused to touch it again until I apologised. One of them, a great drunken lout, made to put his foot through the painting, so I apologised with some haste.

  Word of Sigismunda’s reception at the exhibition reached me almost immediately. I did not take it seriously, putting it down to the jealousy and spite of my rivals: