William Hogarth: The Rise and Fall of a Phizmonger (Part 2)

0:01 Welcome to Stories of Art. I'm Alastair Souk. And I'm James Fox. Before a stone gate in Calais, on the northern coast of France, a motley procession of bedraggled, half-starved, no-hopers comes into view, framed as if in a theatre, by an archway in the foreground, deep in shadow. And at the head of the crew, there's a weakling in a white cap and apron, a cook...

0:28 stumbling along, holding a hunk of mouth-watering beef destined for a nearby inn frequented by English travellers passing through this old French port. And as he staggers, oppressed by his heavy cargo, a fat local fryer, seemingly already salivating, reaches out to press the fat that swaddles this sirloin like a blanket.

0:51 Meanwhile, further off, there's a man, wearing a tricorn hat, I think, staring intently while sketching this sorry scene. So that's a short description, James, of course, of a very famous 18th-century painting called Oh, the Roast Beef of England, the Gate of Calais. And there's something about the profile of that fellow in the background which is quite familiar.

1:15 So who is he? And why can we see this soldier's hand emerging from the other side of a building to grab his shoulder? Well, it's Billy Hogarth, of course. Good old Billy. Good old Billy. This is such a fun story, Alistair. So it's 1748, and after almost a decade of war between England and France, a treaty has been signed, Calais has been reopened, and Hogarth decides to make a trip to France.

1:41 And he's not very impressed. Can I read what he says? Please do. He says, A farcical pomp of war, pompous parade of religion, and much bustle with very little business. To sum up all, poverty, slavery, and innate insolence covered with an affectation of politeness. The friars are dirty, sleek, and solemn.

2:01 The soldiery are lean, ragged, and tawdry. And as to the fishwomen, their faces are absolute leather. Yeah. So Swiss women appear in the painting, don't they? They do. So Billy, William Hogarth, he wanders around the streets in France like a classic British holidaymaker. He's noisy, he's arrogant, he's rude, probably drunk most of the time as well.

2:23 And eventually the French do get their revenge because when he's back in Calais at the end of the trip, he's waiting by the harbour to catch a boat across the Channel. And he starts doing some sketching, as we see in the painting, of the gate. Now, the gate's just very briefly, the gate's quite interesting, isn't it?

2:37 Because it was built centuries earlier at a time when the English controlled Calais. So the landmark that he wants to depict... is something which is a reminder of English greatness. And I think you can see the English coat of arms on the gate. So he is actually there in real life, right? That's what he's doing.

2:57 He's sketching that gate. Yeah, this is so Hogarth. But anyway, they think he's a spy. And so the soldiers arrest him. We can see the hand on the shoulder, as you say. And he is then escorted at the point of a bayonet to the governor's mansion, where he's imprisoned, interrogated. He's eventually released...

3:15 And when he gets back across the Channel to England, this is when he gets his revenge and paints this incredibly French-bashing painting. I mean, this is, revenge is the word, this is the ultimate revenge picture. And he goes to town in terms of absolutely taking down the French. And he's really, let's be honest, drawing on every stereotype.

3:36 I know. So, I mean, one detail is in the foreground, you can see actually, I think, a Scottish Jacobite who next to him, he has some of this rather scanty fare that Hogarth encountered in terms of the diet, the cuisine that you'd find in France, which consists of essentially, I think it's, is it a hunk of bread and a raw onion?

3:55 Yes. You've got the fishwives who are cackling like the witches in Macbeth. With their leather skin. With their leather skin. And a wonderful detail of this is they have this rayfish. And the rayfish has a very distinctive face on it. And they seem to be laughing at the fact that if you look closely, the fish...

4:13 Its face seems to resemble that of the friar at the centre of the composition. Weirdly, the friar was based as, I suppose, a bit of a joke. Hogarth painted him thinking it's like a caricature of one of his friends. And then you have various soldiers associated with the French armies, mercenaries. They're quite Inspector Clouseau, aren't they, the soldiers?

4:33 I mean, you know, all of them are looking at this hunk of beef that what sort of symbolises... The plenty, the liberty, the kind of good life back home in England. And meanwhile, they are really thin. Some of them are drinking this very meagre soup that's just come out of this kettle that's passing by.

4:49 They're ragged. They're really just not well put together. In the distance through the arch, you can see some Catholic priests carrying a cross. Eight of the Catholics, old Hogarth. The thing... That interests me, and genuinely I want to hear your take on it, is it is so easy to look at this and say this conforms to all of our stereotypes of Hogarth, right?

5:10 The kind of the true Brit, the xenophobe, he hates the French, the French bashing, you see it here in possibly its kind of most aggressive form in his career. But can you make another case, do you think? Do you think that beneath it, there are actually hints that perhaps he could have been, for all of his bluster, a closet Europhile?

5:30 Interesting. Well, I think that there's definitely a xenophobic streak to him. There's definitely a francophobic streak to him, and we can see it in this painting. Yeah. But I think it's also true that he is deeply indebted to European culture. He doesn't always want to say he is, but I think he is. And I think to give you one example of this, though he's constantly carping on about foreign artists coming over here and stealing our jobs, what we actually see when he makes his big moral series, he uses French engravers to make them, not English engravers.

6:02 So he does respect... European continental art. And I think in some respects, Alastair, I think he is wanting to try to make English art and British art more like French art, where there is a far more developed art world. I think you can even see it in this painting, because I mentioned like a sort of theatrical proscenium arch.

6:19 The whole thing is framed by this shadowy archway as if we are looking out through it, which just this is now an aside, but quite interesting that it's almost as though we are... as the viewer, furtive spies looking through from this shadowy area to see the scene before us. But, you know, that's a classic framing device that you might find in the work of, say, Canaletto.

6:40 And actually, Canaletto in the 18th century, interestingly, spent some time in London. I think it had a studio a couple of streets away from where we're recording this now in Soho. There's another French painter, beautiful painter, I think we've mentioned before in the series, Chardin. Yeah. 18th century, absolute master of the still life amongst other genres.

6:59 And here at the centre, in a sense, that big hunk of beef could be Chardin-esque. So, I mean, this idea that perhaps there is a European context in which we should view him, I think it's worth bearing in mind through this episode. Yeah. And I should say as well that there are a couple of big Tate shows.

7:18 One was more canonical and classic from, I think, 2007. The catalogue for that is brilliant, by the way. That was curated by a man called Mark Hallett and a woman, Christine Riding. But then there was a more recent one, which was very controversial, that I panned in print and seemed to come at the sort of peak culture wars post-Brexit, tried to position him.

7:36 Curated by one of my old students, actually. Oh, was it? Oh, God, I feel bad now. But I've been revisiting that and I sort of thought... There was a lot they got wrong. We don't need to get into that today. But it is interesting to try and reposition him in that European context, which they were doing.

7:51 And I think there is a genuine case to be made for that. So look, before we get stuck in, we probably need a recap, right? Right. And I think last time was quite a good fun knockabout episode where we established that William Hogarth is obviously born in London, 1697. He's the son of this rather unfortunate schoolmaster from the north of England who had this ridiculous business idea to set up a coffeehouse where you could only speak Latin.

8:17 Surprise, surprise. He ended up bankrupt and ended up in prison. He was in the fleet prison. This was a big deal for Hogarth. And I think it probably encouraged his entrepreneurial instincts. Certainly. don't you think, to try and become as commercial as possible, which he really did. He was apprenticed to a silver engraver.

8:33 He then sets up by himself. He's really churning out hack work at that point. He becomes involved with an art academy that was run by his future father-in-law, the slightly neglected figure in British art, Sir James Thornhill. He then marries Thornhill's daughter, Jane. They possibly elope. And... We saw him become a painter, drift into painting and paint a lot of these pictures known as conversation pieces.

8:59 And then also he pioneers pictorial satire. I mean, of course, he's known as the great satirist. And he then invents these, what he calls his modern moral subjects, these great narrative sequences. And we were talking about one starring the sex worker Mole Hackabout, A Harlot's Progress. And I think that's sort of where we ended up.

9:22 We left him flushed with that success and something I really enjoyed, rampaging around Kent on a sort of mock grand tour slash piss-up with a bunch of his male friends all on the lash. And I seem to remember, James, you described... This rather indelible image of Hogarth defecating in a churchyard on a grave.

9:40 That's how we ended. That's how we ended. Can we talk that charming vignette today? We can only try, James. So this is the second in our two-part miniseries about the rambustious life, work and times of the 18th century father of English art, William Hogarth. So look, something we haven't touched on yet at all, actually, is Hogarth's career as a portraitist.

10:09 I think we need to talk about it. But before we do get stuck into it, maybe you can give us a sense, James, of Hogarth's wider situation beyond just his bowel movements. post-harlot in the mid-1730s. Yeah, in the mid-1730s, fresh off the back of a harlot's progress and the follow-up, a rake's progress.

10:28 He's very wealthy. He's very famous. He's probably the most famous artist in England at this point. And with that money, he acquires a very substantial building, a house, four or five-storey house, on the southeast corner of what is today Leicester Square. He has servants. Yeah. And it's not just his home, it's also a workshop, a studio, it's a showroom.

10:49 And the thing that I find really interesting about this moment in the mid-1730s is he makes a sign for that house. And so what he does, he gets some cork, he carves a likeness of the great 17th century artist Anthony van Dyck, he gilds it, he puts it above the front door, outside the house, and from that point onwards, and actually Hogarth lives in that house for the rest of his life, the house is called the Golden Head.

11:13 Now, the reason I think this is really interesting, actually, there are three reasons. First of all, we have Hogarth, the great artist, making signs. And signs will be important later in this episode. Yep. Second, to go back to the conversation we had a few moments ago, he talks about foreign artists coming over here and stealing our jobs.

11:32 Yep. Well, no one did it better than Anthony van Dijk, because Anthony van Dijk was Flemish. He got all the best commissions in the 17th century. So that's interesting in terms of Hogarth's relationship to European artists. And the final thing is, of course, Anthony van Dijk was a portrait painter. Yeah.

11:48 And I think this shows, to go back to what you said a moment ago, that though Hogarth has made his fortune from prints, he still probably, part of him, aspires to be a portrait painter. Yes. And actually, the phrase he uses, you know what he uses to describe? Ah, I think I might do. It's brilliant. Yeah, go on.

12:04 He calls portrait painting fizzmongering. Yes, it's so good. It's such a Hogarthian phrase for it. But can you talk us through some of Hogarth's fizzmongering? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He becomes a fizzmonger himself. So I think it is worth saying that he does seem to pivot, that's the point you're really making, at this moment in the 1730s, into portraiture.

12:27 And you're so right. Van Dyke is known for his gorgeous, subtle, sophisticated, very glamorous portraiture of the elite. Yeah. under Charles I in the 17th century. But there are also in the 1730s other non-native, non-English portraitists who are coming over to London and suddenly having great success.

12:52 They become very, very fashionable. And it's clear that there's some streak to Hogarth of his competitive nature. He's thinking, I'm not going to have any of that. Yeah. So he does start shifting into portraiture, but it's a really competitive field. And before we talk about, there is one picture in particular that he was always very proud of, that in a way was the real calling card for him as a portraitist, as a fizzmonger, which we will discuss in some depth in a moment.

13:20 But I thought it's maybe worth just giving a bit of an overview about what he achieves. in portraiture because i think it's really fascinating and it's also a major part of why he's important as an artist because as i say van dyke for example is known for portraiture of royalty nobility the elite hogarth's patrons the people he is painting and depicting come from a slightly different stratum of society don't they they're probably really non-aristocratic, a new mercantile, professional, maybe ecclesiastical elite.

13:54 And as a result, you see a slightly different mode. You don't have the same glamorous flattery you might find in a Van Dyke picture. You might find some of the same devices, but you have a new spirit and you have a new spirit. which seems to be about expressing a newly emerging self-confident bourgeois class.

14:14 And that is pictorially quite plain speaking. So there are some pictures, there's a brilliant portrait he does, for example, of a merchant called George Arnold, which George Arnold commissioned for his country seat in Northamptonshire. And you might think, if you're thinking about that, that it's in the tradition of grand country houses.

14:32 But when you look at the picture itself, I mean, this guy looks like he's squaring up to the viewer. He just isn't flattered at all. He's quite squat and stocky in terms of his body type instead of a more aristocratic ideal of how you might appear. And there is something about that picture which projects plain-speaking, no-nonsense qualities which have subsequently come to be seen as quintessentially Hogarthian and quintessentially English.

15:01 There's a sort of national character. There's another rather wonderful, comes from later in his career, so we're skipping about a bit, but a famous work by Hogarth called The Heads of Six of His Servants. And this is amazing itself because you are seeing really affectionate, sensitive, beautiful likenesses of people who work in his household who are loyal.

15:22 And they are presented as though they're clustered all together together. But clearly it's not a realistic scene. But, you know, maybe it's an advertisement for people who come to Hogarth's studio of his talents at achieving a likeness. But there's something significant about portraying people from essentially a lower socioeconomic background and bringing them into the tradition now of British portraiture, that Hogarth is really pioneering.

15:45 But there is this one picture, as I say, that he makes his... It becomes his calling card, if you like, as a portraitist, which is the portrait of Thomas Coram that he creates around 1740. Now, he's quite an interesting figure in his own right, Thomas Coram, isn't he? Coram is one of my heroes, actually.

16:01 Right. Remarkable man, born in Dorset. Very ordinary person, doesn't get a full education. He goes to sea at the age of 10 or 11 and he becomes a captain. He becomes a shipwright, a merchant. He spends much of his career across the Atlantic in the American colonies. And later on, he returns to London.

16:20 He gets a house in Rotherhithe, where the shipyards are. And legend has it that on his long journeys from Rotherhithe in the East into central London for meetings, he is horrified to discover an enormous number of abandoned children, orphans. As in dead? Some of them dead, some of them just wandering the street.

16:40 He finds babies and things in the gutters, dead. And he is just truly horrified by the state of these, what he calls foundlings, these children who've been found in the street. Why is this happening? I think it's part of, we'll come to it in greater detail later, but it's obviously, we sketched this out in the very first episode, how precarious the economic situation in London is.

17:01 There's so many social problems, and so many people are resorting to crime, drinking, alcoholism, drugs, all these other kinds of things, and children are left for dead sometimes. And so Coram decides he wants to do something about it. And in fact, he spends the next, I think, 17 years campaigning to create a charity, to create a hospital and a care home, if you like, to look after these foundlings.

17:26 And I mean, it's pretty amazing, really, when you think about it, because he didn't have to do this. He could have retired peacefully, quietly. I think there might have been similar institutions in other cities in Europe, but there was nothing in England. Nothing in England. And he had nothing to gain from this.

17:40 In fact, poor old Thomas Corham ends up dying in In 1739, he finally gets his way and he receives a royal charter from George II to establish what is called the Foundling Hospital. Now, Hogarth loved Coram. Coram stood for everything Hogarth loved. He was, as we say, plain speaking. He was no nonsense.

18:05 He was self-made. So Hogarth becomes very good friends with Coram and actually he becomes very involved in the Foundling Hospital. He's one of the first governors. He donates money and pictures, as we'll see, to the charity. He even fosters some children himself. And actually, it's one of the things that's quite interesting.

18:21 We're speculating here. But one of the things that connects Coram with Hogarth is neither of them had their own children. And I wonder if that was a motivating force, perhaps, behind their involvement in the Foundling Project. But all of his behaviour and seeming loutishness, if you like, if that's a word, maybe there's actually a real heart to William Hogan.

18:40 Oh, definitely there is. Definitely there is. He's a real sentimentalist, I think, in some ways. But anyway, he ends up producing, as a result of this friendship and this project, this... remarkable portrait of Thomas Coram, which many consider to be not just his finest portrait, but one of the finest portraits of the 18th century.

18:58 Yeah, it's a fascinating work of art. And when you look at it, you can see Thomas Coram seated wearing a sort of black suit, big heavy red overcoat. He's holding some objects. There are more things on the table next to him. Behind him, there's a large column and a big swag of green drapery. And in a sense, when you first look at it, it feels grand.

19:19 It feels like it's the pictorial language of one of those portraits of Van Dyck. But there are so many details here which suggest a much more modern, down-to-earth, non-elite sensibility and spirit at work in the picture. So Coram himself is not wearing an 18th century wig, as you might imagine. That's his own fine head of silver hair.

19:45 Got to respect it. And he's holding his gloves. You should grow yours out like Coram, actually. I should. Over the course of the next few episodes, I'll get myself one of those coats. I mean, it's a strong look. I think it looks good. He looks great. He's holding his gloves. His hat, he's got one of those triangular black hats, and it's seemingly just tossed down at his feet.

20:08 And I mention his feet. His right leg is barely touching the stone parapet underneath the... chair and his left leg seems to be sort of swinging about dangling beneath him and i think what's going on is a sensation of it's almost as if coram is a busy man yeah he's just come in he doesn't quite know how he's meant to be posing in that supposedly pseudo aristocratic fashion and he hasn't got much time so let's just get on with it and he sits down quite sort of brisk straightforward and hogarth's giving a sense of that that energy which he's emitting.

20:40 And I think that's a wonderful capturing of some of his spirit. I mean, there are various aspects that throw to his shipping fortune. Originally in the background, you can see the sea. I think some ships were originally painted there. It's faded now. You can see... an allegorical figure of charity would once have been partly in the background.

20:59 There's a globe to the left of him, which is swivelled round the West Atlantic, because that's where he derived a lot of his wealth from. But there is this new spirit there, which is both throwback to Van Dyke-style portraiture, but something that speaks about the spirit of 18th century England, don't you think?

21:18 Totally. But the throwback is important. In fact, Hogarth himself describes the genesis of this painting. And he says that he's at his academy, but by this stage, we haven't even mentioned it, Hogarth has set up an artist's academy called St Martins Lane Academy. And he's in the room and he says to the other artist, he said, do you think there's anyone around today who can produce a painting as good as Van Dyke?

21:38 and they say, well, maybe you could. So that's why he made this picture. And you know, I actually went to see it a couple of days ago. Did you? Yeah, in preparation for the episode. I was nearby in Bloomsbury. The Foundling Museum is still there. And I thought I'd pop in and spend 10 minutes with K. Captain Coram.

21:54 Can anyone just go in then? I could go in. I was the only person there. It was a rainy morning. And I spent 10 minutes in front of the painting. And it's a bloody good picture. You know, I think I may have mentioned in the previous episode, I'm not always a fan of Hogarth's actual paintings. Yeah. because sometimes the surfaces, they're not that enjoyable.

22:12 This is absolutely beautiful. And you can see when you stand in front of it, I think it's perhaps his only full-length portrait he ever made, you can see how much effort he's put into it. It's beautifully painted. It's much broader brushwork than lots of his other paintings. And also there are these wonderful highlights of metal and jewellery and reflections that shimmer across the surface of the canvas.

22:33 It's really, really good. And Hogarth was extremely proud of this painting. He said... If I am so wretched an artist, as my enemies assert, it is somewhat strange that this, which was one of the first I painted the size of life, should stand the test of 20 years' competition and be generally thought the best portrait in the place, notwithstanding the first painters in the kingdom exerted all their talents to vie with it.

22:56 I think it is fascinating because is there a sense of almost, is it defensiveness? Oh, yeah. You know, I mentioned that Portrait, I mean, we've both been talking about this, was a really competitive field at this moment. I mean, one of the places where he speaks about the fizzmongers, I think he refers to, I don't know if I'm going to do the same accent.

23:12 Maybe I should. The whole nest of fizzmongers were upon my back, every one of whom has his friends, and all were turned to run them down. So he's saying, you know... He's feeling, towards the end of his life, and we are jumping around a little bit, but he's looking back and he's remembering a sense of animosity towards him.

23:31 And those fizzmongers didn't want their trade to be taken away from them by William Hogarth. And they could probably sense that in a painting like his portrait of Thomas Coram that there was someone to contend with who was in the field. But yeah, like I say, I mean, the hospital itself becomes quite important.

23:49 It's so, so important to the history of British art. So what Hogarth does is he gifts this painting to the Foundling Hospital, but he also encourages other artists to donate pictures to the hospital. And his idea is that if they had great paintings on the walls inside the hospital, that this will encourage the public to pay an admission fee, which will, of course, go to support the hospital's work, in order to see the pictures, while also showcasing the best of contemporary British art.

24:20 Now, that might not sound radical to us. It is so radical, because back in the 1740s, there is no National Gallery. There is no Royal Academy. There is no Tate. There is no Courtauld. There is no British Museum. There are no public art galleries, really, in the whole of England. And so what we are seeing here is the emergence of an institution for art for really the first proper time.

24:45 So, I mean, is it fair to call this the first gallery of modern art in Britain? Many people call it the first public art gallery in England. And so, you know, this is really, really the ground zero of British art as we know it. We are seeing a British art world. We are seeing a school of British painting emerging before our eyes in the 1740s with Hogarth right at the heart of it.

25:06 And that is why many people consider Hogarth to be the father of British art. Yeah, absolutely fascinating. But still, his masterpiece lay ahead. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the 1740s, he actually returns to that sequential pictorial narrative format, which had really made him famous and rich with the Rake's Progress, the Harlot's Progress.

25:26 And he creates, yeah, I mean, probably, is this his great masterpiece? I mean, it's called Marriage a la Mode. Marriage a la Mode. And he does it between 1743 and 1745. It's a set of paintings and a set of prints. And it's quite interesting to think about this in terms of, you know, what is the cardinal primary artwork?

25:50 He has a conceit, he has a story, he tells that story, he tells it in a series of paintings and... And then he tells it in a series of, I think are they engravings made from the paintings? French engravers. With the French engravers. I think in the end, he doesn't actually, he said he was going to go and find the best masters of Paris.

26:06 But he actually does use Frenchmen who are based in London. You know, it's worth saying as well in London, big Huguenot community. Yeah. Protestants from France who'd fled French society and come to England. And he's mixing, he, Hogarth, is mixing with these people, a lot of artisans amongst that community.

26:22 So he is once again imbibing European ideas. He does use Frenchmen to engrave these pictures. And it makes you think, is part of the radical nature of Hogarth's art that he sort of diffuses what the artwork is in a sense? Yeah, so the age of mass reproduction, isn't it? Yeah. So, you know, when we discussed A Harlot's Progress last time, we discussed the engravings because the original paintings had been lost.

26:49 They were destroyed in a fire in his lifetime. But with this series, Marriage a la Mode, the paintings do still exist. They're in the National Gallery. And we are going to base our discussion on those paintings. And the premise of this series, Marriage a la Mode, is... beautifully simple. It is that essentially we have two families.

27:08 We have an aristocratic family with lots of pedigree but no money and we have a city merchant's family who has lots of money but no pedigree. And they decide to marry their children in order to swap and exchange those values. And he uses this as a mechanism to create this enormous satire on modish behaviour in England.

27:30 So I think in the spring of 1743, he's already advertising publication of these six prints for his series and saying that they will represent a variety of modern occurrences in high life, which is called marriage à la mode. And it's probably worth saying that even that title is hugely satirical in the sense of à la mode, modishness, things that are fashionable...

27:51 you know, ephemeral trends is really what he's about to lampoon. Marriage isn't really meant to be an ephemeral trend. It's meant to be enduring, everlasting. For us, it certainly is. And for us, indeed, it is, James. Well, look, let's begin, because it's a really great story. There are six images, as there were, with A Harlot's Progress.

28:10 We'll talk our listeners and our viewers through them. So we begin in painting number one. We're in a grand room surrounded by expensive paintings. It's the bedroom of the aptly named Earl of Squander. Yes. He's an aristocrat with a noble lineage. Actually, we can see him pointing quite arrogantly to a family tree that goes all the way back to William the Conqueror.

28:33 But he's in terrible shape. He's got gout. We can see it from the bandage on his foot. He's almost bankrupted himself as well by constructing this grand mansion. And through the window, we can see the mansion and the workers sitting idle because he doesn't have the money to pay their wages. He's run out of funds.

28:49 He's run out of money. But opposite him, we have a very different man. This is a rich but actually quite mean-spirited city merchant, an alderman. and he's studying a marriage document surrounded by pots of money and these two men as i said earlier they have agreed to marry their children so the impoverished aristocrat gets some much needed cash yeah and the aspirational alderman gets his much wanted title and if we move slightly left of the picture we can see the bride and groom to be they don't look that happy do they don't seem very happy.

29:23 They are facing in opposite directions. He's looking at his own reflection. I know. With great admiration. With great... The son, Lord Squanderfield. Viscount Squanderfield. Yeah, he's staring in a mirror. Now, notice, listeners will remember from last time, what's the mark on his neck? Oh, has he got a black spot?

29:37 He's got a black spot. Wow, poor lad. He's got... He's got the pox, he's got syphilis. The French pox, as it was known. The French pox, exactly. Always brain the French for everything. So while the bride on the side, she is looking pretty miserable, she is involved in a private conversation with a lawyer called Silvertongue.

29:54 Another brilliant name. Yeah. And Silver Tongue will play a very important role later on in the series. You know, I have read that he is... Because there seems to be an intimacy, certainly on his part, with her. Oh, yeah. And he is sharpening his quill. And so, initially, you might think he's just trying to say to her, look...

30:11 there really are some material advantages to entering this marriage, even though you look totally miserable. But the sharpening the quill may be sexually suggestive and their relationship will blossom over the course of the series and become quite important. Yes, he does end up getting his quill away later on.

30:26 I mean, there are these two dogs, which are just right next to the young couple in chains, clearly a bad sign, a sort of bad omen, a symbol, if you like, of why this marriage should not go ahead. And there will be a dog at the very end of the series as well. So Hogarth... We spoke about this a bit last time.

30:43 He really is now operating at a sophisticated level in terms of the way he's organising these series with back references, throwing forward. So into the second scene, I think this may be my favourite, this or the fourth. But in this scene, things have moved on. So they've got married, the young couple, and we see them both sitting on either side of a grand fireplace.

31:04 We're in a grand, probably... West End townhouse, maybe that mansion we saw out the window in the first image, and they seem to be leading totally separate lives. There's a very elaborate, ornate, slightly, well, not just slightly, ridiculously over-ornate clock on the wall on the right, which says it's past midday.

31:23 And it appears that they've both basically been carousing all night. So Lord Squanderfield, in he comes. This time he's looking totally, I mean, he looks unbelievably hungover. or having the worst comedown of his life. He's slumped on this chair right next to the mantelpiece. There's a small dog at his side that's sniffing at a woman's cap.

31:43 He's obviously been having some dalliance. Whether it went well, I don't know overnight because his sword is by his foot and it's broken. I don't think that's a good sign in terms of performance in the bedroom. And then on the other side of the mantelpiece... It's like Vincent van Gaustam. Yes, exactly.

31:59 And then you have his young wife... Now, she seems to be quite content. Yes. It looks like what's been going on is, if you look through to the room on the far side, they've been gaming all night. Not him, but she with her friends. There's a servant who's yawning, wonderful Hogarthian touch. And amongst the old masters, there's a bedroom scene hanging up on the wall, which is hidden, half hidden by a green curtain that's semi-pulled back, just suggesting perhaps...

32:28 Perhaps the hint of sexual intrigue. A little foot sticking out. A little foot. And when you look at her, she is leaning back and stretching and has this satisfying... Post-coital? She has a post-coital glow. In fact, I wanted to quote and acknowledge my brilliant predecessor at The Telegraph as art critic, a man called Richard Dorman, when he reviewed The Great Hogarth Show at the Tate in 2007.

32:51 His phrase to describe her in this picture, which I think is wonderful, is satiated sex kitten. So she's gone from someone who's totally miserable at the prospect of marriage in the first image to someone who seems to be enjoying things now. And if you look around, it's possible that she's actually signalling with a little pocket mirror to her lover who's running away.

33:10 The overturned chair and the violin cases which are on top of each other may be suggestive of her lovemaking in the front left foreground. And then there's this semi-balding figure who is rolling his eyes at them And he's the steward who's leaving with a big wodge of unpaid bills. And if you look at the top of the mantelpiece, you have all of these amazing details of all this crap, essentially, that they've, you know, very expensive, but that they've...

33:35 collected, which is cluttering the mantelpiece. There's an ancient bust with significantly a broken nose. You have, I think, sort of like Eastern figurines, maybe some snuff bottles. Some Buddhas. Some Buddhas. Some of them with, again, I mean, I love these sort of shocked jazz hands, which are on either side to give a great sense of energy.

33:54 So it is the beginnings of their marriage and already they are essentially leading separate lives. They are. Well, look, let's move to image three. So this is, I think, the most mysterious of the paintings. And I don't think scholars are entirely sure about what is actually happening. But we know that we're now in a doctor's surgery, a clinic.

34:12 Viscount Squanderfield is there. He's holding some pills, which is no doubt treatment for syphilis. And one of the pots, in fact, of the pills is very suggestively placed by his groin. So it could be a kind of Viagra, actually, if we go with the broken sword theory. And some think he's gone there to complain that the syphilis treatment isn't working.

34:34 I wonder, actually, if something slightly darker is going on here. Because next to him, there's a very young girl. Mm-hmm. She's barely even a teenager. She seems unwell. At least she's touching her mouth. And on the other side, there's a formidable woman, also covered in pox, holding a knife. So I think there's a possibility, perhaps, that she is the brothel manager.

34:57 The girl on the right is probably a young sex worker. And it's possible, Alistair, that the Viscount is actually being set up here. that the brothel manager has told him he's infected the girl and has blackmailed him into bringing her to the doctor to receive treatment. To underline that idea, if you look at her left sleeve, it has a patterned fabric which matches the fabric that the young girl is wearing to the right of the picture, which does establish a link between those two characters, which I think supports your theory.

35:27 I think I find this one probably the most... and actually darkest image of the whole series, because she is this young figure, clearly meant to be the Lord Squanderfield's mistress. And it's quite grim as an unstinting... frank portrayal of this part of society in 18th century London, don't you think?

35:52 And on the left, there's actually a skull with holes through it, significant of having had syphilis. It feels quite bleak, I think, this picture. Yeah. And again, it's another critique. We saw it in A Harlot's Progress of the medical profession. Yes. Hogarth's very, very sceptical of doctors. He's quite anti-quack, isn't he?

36:09 He's very anti-quack. So anyway, things aren't going well. What does Image 4 look like? This is another of your favourites. I mean, this one, you're back to high life, as he promised, high society. And we're in now probably the countesses, the wife's elevation to a countess. Probably the old Earl of Squanderfield by now has died.

36:30 And she's in her bedroom. performing, enacting this ritual that was very common in French society and shown in French art amongst French aristocrats known as the toilette, where essentially a highborn woman is receiving visitors in her bedroom as she gets ready and prepares to go about her business for the day.

36:49 And this scene, like all of them, is intensely theatrical. It feels like a great set piece here where she is having her hair done by a French hairdresser. Next to her, you can see that lawyer, Silver Tongue. Oh, Silver Tongue. He's back. He's lounging in an over-familiar fashion on a sofa. He's pointing at a painted screen which depicts a masked ball.

37:12 And it seems he's saying to her, hey, do you want to come to a masked ball? Perfect place in disguise for an assignation. This will prove to be their downfall. It will prove to be their downfall. Just to really underline it, you have beneath them, there's a non-white turbaned pageboy slash servant, an example of one of those modish exoticising features and things that modish people at the time had in their houses, if you like.

37:38 It's slightly unsettling. And he is plucking out of a basket a figure of a mythological character called Actaeon, who, if you recall, James, was the man who came across Diana, the goddess of hunting, bathing naked. And for that transgression, she turned him into a stag and he was destroyed by his own hounds.

37:58 One of Titian's greatest paintings. Indeed. And in this context, I think it may throw forward to what happens to some of the male characters in the story. But also, someone with horns is the classic sign of a cuckold. So we're being reminded here that Silver Tongue and the Countess are essentially getting it on.

38:17 A silver tongue even has his portrait on a wall on the other side of the picture. You then have this brilliant arrangement of other characters, almost like a frieze, where you have an Italian castrata who's singing, you have a very effeminate French dancing master who's sipping chocolate, you've got someone playing a flute, there's this woman who's swooning rapturously to the music, and behind her a black servant serving her a drink, who seems quite amused at her very exaggerated response to the music.

38:44 So this is Hogarth in full flow, creating an image which is satirising all of the affectations, lavish continental affectations that people in high society at this moment were into. So then we move to painting five. This is when comedy, if you like, turns to tragedy. The Countess and Silvertongue have gone to the masquerade.

39:06 And then afterwards, they've gone to a private chamber in a brothel. It's night. It's night. The room is lit by fire. The bed is rumpled. Her clothes are scattered across the floor. But while they're, if you like, in flagrante, her husband, the Earl, has burst into the room, confronted the lovers, and Silvertongue has stabbed him.

39:28 And he's wounded. You can see the blood. And we can see the sword lying on the ground. Again, there's a motif of the sword being on the floor. And the Countess is on her knees, crying, begging for forgiveness, nightshirt, climbs out the window. It's not very dignified. You can practically see his arse as he's leaving.

39:46 And he runs away. And at the doorway, we can see the proprietor, a constable, a night watchman arriving. This is not going to go well for any of them. This is pure melodrama. There's a little detail of the night watchman who's coming in, holding that lantern, that I love this, where it's casting a shadow onto the door of a cross, which is obviously noting the fact that Squanderfield is about to die.

40:08 And it also seems to be casting these, if you notice these strange spots... on the ceiling. Yes, I know. And some people try and make the case that maybe it's another reminder of, you know, those black spots, those syphilitic spots that are appearing throughout the series. Maybe it is suggesting that the entire world milieu is infected, if you like.

40:27 But it's not going to end well for Silver Tongue. What happens next, Alistair? Well, this is what we find in the final image of the series. We've changed scene again. The pure melodrama of the preceding scene that you've just described gives way to something that ostensibly is quite tragic, where the Countess has returned home to the Alderman's house in the City of London.

40:49 If you look through the window, you can see the old London Bridge for the buildings running along it. And... Compared with the house of the Isle of Squanderfield in the first image, this is really very, very plain. And it's a reminder, there's a lot of jokes being made here at the expense of the alderman for his parsimonious nature.

41:07 It's quite a bare, sparsely furnished room. There's just his meal on the table of a boiled egg on a mound of rice. And you can see that the countess is... She's probably killed herself by taking an overdose of laudanum. opiates, and she's swooning in a death swoon on a chair. A grieving nurse is bringing her child to her for a final embrace, but the child has got the black spot, the child has syphilis, the child's not going to stick around.

41:39 And her dad, the alderman, who's standing in front of a probably Dutch picture on the wall showing a man urinating, another classic Yo'Garthian Dutch, he doesn't seem that bad. bothered, in a sense, by the fact his daughter's about to die. Instead, he's seen what he can salvage from the wreckage, and he is pulling her golden ring off her hand.

41:59 That's the most awful part of the whole series in some ways. It's really grim. His daughter is dying, and what does he do as she draws her final breaths? he reaches forward to take the gold ring from her finger. I mean, the last valuable possession she has left. It's totally venal. And then to their side of this group, you have probably an apothecary, another quack, who seems to be telling off this...

42:22 idiotic looking servant who seems to not have all of his wits together he can't button his coat up properly and perhaps the implication is that the quack is trying to blame the the servant for having not given the right pills or something like that to the countess and then as part of that still life with the boiled egg and the rice you can also see as i mentioned at the start of this little section there's the dog There's a dog which is totally scrawny, half-starved, another emblem of the parsimonious nature of the alderman, and he's leaping up onto the table and biting at the ear of a pig's head.

42:59 And what's that famous proverb? You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. I think there's perhaps a recognition that maybe these two families from different stations, it was never really going to work out well. Yeah. It's so good, this series, isn't it? It is wonderful. It's wonderful because there's so much in it that provides a real panorama of London, of English society, of high life.

43:26 There's a lot of wit in it. There's a lot of tragedy, some moments, as I say, of melodrama. One of the weird things about this series is that, though I think it is an advance on A Harlot's Progress, I think it's far more complex. We've got multiple characters, multiple families all coming to the fore, rather than just following that one individual through.

43:44 It doesn't quite do as well, because actually a few years later in the 1750s, Hogarth decides to sell the paintings, and he is convinced that he's going to make an absolute fortune. So he does this timed auction of sealed bids. And the night before the deadline, he has only one bid from a man called John Lane.

44:05 It's a very low bid, I think 120 guineas or something like that. So Hogarth presumes there's going to be a stampede the following morning in the lead up to the deadline. And so the next morning he wakes up in his house in Leicester Square and he puts on his clothes, puts on his wig, and he stands by the window waiting for the crowds to form.

44:21 And no one comes. No one comes. So he only gets one bid. It's 120 guineas, which really isn't very much from John Lane. John Lane can see that Hogarth is so miserable. He offers to actually up the offer to try and cheer him up. But it's a kind of strange situation, really. And it's a sign, I think, that as we move into the 1750s, as we'll do after the break, Hogarth's...

44:44 power begins to wane a little bit. I think it does. I mean, what's interesting is that he is at this moment, he's now at the height of his artistic powers, and he is to an extent enjoying the material trappings of that success. You know, we should say that in 1749, he buys a country retreat in Chiswick.

45:00 As you move into the 1750s, he has real ostensible success where he's appointed sergeant painter to the king. But there's a sense maybe of estrangement, alienation, and you could argue that this might be an occupational hazard for a satirist, but I think there's just something about his personality, his pugnacious personality, that rubs people up the wrong way.

45:22 So I guess it's maybe worth asking, were his final years plain sailing? And I think the answer is, I mean, as if. So join us after the break as we chart their choppy waters. A reminder that if you want to see the artworks we're discussing, you can switch to video in your podcast app at any time. You can now find us on Instagram at storiesofart.henny.

45:48 So please do follow us, comment, and by all means, suggest topics for future episodes. Welcome back to Stories of Art. It's round about 1750. William Hogarth is approaching the latter stages of his long career. And it is at this point that he produces one of his most famous and I think most shocking and hard hitting images, which we're going to discuss in a moment.

46:17 Now, it is related, James, to this larger troubling social phenomenon, which is known as the gin craze or gin epidemic. Yes. I mean, I think today we often think of gin as a genteel drink, don't we? It has a nice spirit that you dilute with tonic and you have it with a wedge of lime or, as I prefer, a slice of cucumber, lots of ice.

46:37 But, of course, in Hogarth's day... Gin was a serious social problem. It was, I suppose, the equivalent of the opioid crisis or something today. Because in Hogarth's lifetime, and in fact slightly earlier in the 17th century, in fact, gin had emerged as this great rival to the other British drink, beer and so gin is originally obviously continental drink it's continental i think it's from the netherlands maybe originally and um gin became uh embraced particularly by the poorer members of society for the simple reason it was so much stronger and you could get drunk much more quickly and therefore much more cheaply yeah on it than on beer it's also worth saying that probably the upper levels of society they're not

47:21 strangers to drunkenness, but suddenly there's this great fear and moralising about this sort of so-called crisis, this gin craze, this epidemic amongst the lower order. Well, yes, the upper and middle classes, they actually believed that gin was at the heart of all the social problems facing London and England.

47:36 They thought it was behind... unemployment and prostitution and crime and the abandonment of children that Thomas Coram indeed was trying to rectify. And so lots of people were trying to campaign against gin. The government had tried over the 18th century, the first half of the 18th century, to implement laws to control the supply of gin.

47:57 They had failed. Can I give you a stat in terms of what people... This is what I've read in terms of what people were drinking and why maybe there was this fear. There's one estimate I came across that by 1743, so almost a decade before this next image and set of images we're going to discuss was produced, England was drinking 2.2 gallons, or 10 litres of gin, per person per year.

48:19 Wow. That is quite a lot. That is quite a lot. That is quite a lot. And Hogarth was one of those people who really had a problem with gin. And so he becomes part of this larger campaign to try to get the government to change the law. And, of course, he'd had success changing the law, as we discussed in the previous episode.

48:38 In the 1730s, he'd changed the copyright law. And so he does this with a friend of his, a friend called Henry Fielding, pioneering novelist who wrote Tom Jones, I think. Mm-hmm. Fielding writes a pamphlet arguing for the control of gin. And around the same time, in the early 1750s, Hogarth makes this image actually a pair of images that we're going to discuss to try to change the law.

49:03 So one of them in particular is really, really well known, which is called Gin Lane. And it's worth saying at the outset that this is an occasion where it's Hogarth in that pictorial, satirical mode, but he isn't this time creating paintings and producing prints from them. He's just producing the prints.

49:24 And he's evolved a slightly bolder, more graphic pictorial style, which I guess is about trying to connect with a wider public. He wants his prints to actually have a social impact. Yeah. And Gin Lane is one of those totally terrifying, nightmarish hellscapes that only Hogarth can really conceive. It's a part of London which was a slum, the slum of St Giles, and you see in the centre of it this probably sex worker, a woman who's taking snuff totally off her face, addled with gin, if you can be addled with gin, sitting on a load of steps.

50:09 She has syphilitic sores on her legs. She's wretched. She's half naked. And she's completely oblivious to the fact that her child, a baby, is tumbling off next to her by the side of the stairs and is going to tumble to its death in this basement cellar where you can also go into another establishment to get more gin at the bottom of the image.

50:31 And that's the focal point. We mentioned, actually, in the previous part that one of the things that Hogarth often does with his prints is he tries to refer to contemporary figures, real figures who his audience might have known from the newspapers and things like that. And this woman, I think, is supposed to remind us of a real person.

50:51 A woman called Judith DeFore, who was addicted to gin. She was an alcoholic. And she had a two-year-old child. And she took her child, her daughter, to the Bethnal Green workhouse in order to get some new clothes for her daughter. And then she left the workhouse and she strangled her child to death, took the clothes off her and then sold the clothes to raise money to buy some more gin.

51:14 So, of course, that's not exactly what is happening here. But I think it's meant to remind viewers of how this is destroying the most innate human maternal instincts that people could have. I think the selling the clothes thing is very interesting because if you look in the background of this print, you can see some businesses which actually are doing quite well out of all of this depravity and the breakdown of civilisation.

51:37 There's a distillery that's doing well, undertakers, but also a pawnbroker. And you can see there's, I think it's a carpenter trying to flog his tools, a saw, and a housewife with some pots and pans. They're trying to fund their habit. Beneath them, you've got this boy and a dog who's... competing to gnaw on a bone.

51:55 And really in that middle ground, there's just a sense of mayhem, of riot. I mean, there's one little detail that makes me think almost of the Spanish artist Goya in terms of his nightmarishness, where there's just this man, he seems to be dancing a jig... I think he's smashing his head with some bellows and he's holding a massive spike on which a child is impaled.

52:18 And above him, you can see some buildings, one of which is totally derelict to the point that it's falling down, toppling. I said in the last episode, those toppling structures, such a characteristic motif in Hogarth's art. And in the barbershop on the first floor, there's a man who's killed himself, who's hanged himself, who is visible.

52:35 And surveying all of the scene is a statue in the distance of the king. That's George II right there. You can see down at the bottom there's an emblem which says Gin Royal. So we are reminded that this is a vision of what's going on in British society and it's wilder and more ferocious and more pessimistic than anything that would be printed today in the Daily Mail.

52:59 You can see in the bottom right there's this emaciated ballad seller who's probably probably dead, who's just sitting at the feet of that figure, the woman with the lack of maternal instincts, and next to him, the black dog of despair. So it's a really grim, nightmarish picture. Yes. Do you know something?

53:17 Last night, in preparation for this episode, I went onto YouTube and I typed in Hogarth Gin Lane. And you know the first video that came up? It was you. No, really? Did I talk about this one? It was a young Alastair Souk talking brilliantly, as you've just done, about Gin Lane. And you had a great line.

53:33 You said that for an image about Gin, this is a very sobering image. Ah, yes. God, I mean, that really is genius. He's had it back then. Yeah. What's happening? It's a terrible decline. If any of you had known, we could have just played that in. I could have just sat back for the last five minutes. But anyway, the thing about, the interesting thing about Gin Lane is obviously part of a pair, because there is a counterpart image called Beer Street.

53:55 And if Gin Lane is a kind of Hieronymus Bosch hell, Hogarth's Companion Street, Beer Street, it's a paradise. It's a veritable paradise. Everyone is prosperous, they're well-fed, they're industrious, they're sociable, the butchers are brawny, the fish wives are healthy. There's a sign writer up on the left.

54:14 He's smiling as he paints. Everyone is drinking enormous quantities of beer. But importantly, this isn't stopping them working. There's lots going on. So men are mending the roads. They're re-roofing the buildings. And the produce is abundant. We can see, once again, that enormous hunk of beef. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

54:31 See the butcher holding the beef. And we know, of course, how much Hogarth liked his beef. So in this, this is his vision, I suppose, Alistair, of a perfect English society lubricated by the quintessential English drink. And he has a little poem at the bottom of it. Can I just read a little bit of the poem?

54:51 Yeah. which sounds like the kind of thing that would be sung at a kind of England football game now. It says, Beer, happy produce of our isle, Consinuey strength in part, And wearied with fatigue and toil, Can cheer each manly heart. Labour and art upheld by thee successfully advance, We craft thy balmy juice with glee, And water, leave to France.

55:14 I never know how sort of tongue-in-cheek, you know, we should imagine Hogarth is being. Because you are right, there is something here about, it seems ostensibly like a national idyll. And it's predicated on the magic elixir that is beer as the native drink. And we don't think of Hogarth as a very pastoral artist.

55:32 I mean, later he actually does set a whole series of political paintings called The Election Series, which are in this fictional rural village of brilliantly named Guzzledown. I was adamant I wanted to introduce him to this podcast. But here, even though it's set in a city, the pub sign is the Barley Moe.

55:48 And there is almost... a kind of sense of this being Hogarth doing pastoral in that it's quite beautiful. I love as well the way that the prints interact. So the pawnbroker's doing really well in Gin Lane, but it's the pawnbroker that's derelict and not doing very well in Beer Street, which is in a different part of the city altogether, in Westminster.

56:06 On the butcher, did you know, to bring this back to this question of nationalism, the butcher who's holding this enormous piece of beef, do you know what he was originally holding in an earlier state of the image? I do not. He was holding a Frenchman. He was actually throwing a Frenchman into the street.

56:21 So there you go. The nationalism, the xenophobia continues throughout this. But one of the interesting things about this series is obviously it was part of a campaign to change the law. And this series was published in February 1751. By June, the law had been changed to make it harder to sell gin. And very soon, Alistair...

56:43 The gin craze did come to an end with individual gin consumption. I've got my own statistic here. Oh, wonderful. Gin consumption fell by three quarters over the next few years. Now, whether Hogarth's image made a difference or not, I don't know. It must have had some impact. It must have played a role.

56:59 But what we see is, again, Hogarth... acting not just as an artist but as a campaigner now i wanted to have a really a brief interlude and i think is worth if you just bear with me for a second because we're now moving into a slightly different field in which hogarth made a significant contribution which is that of art theory if that hasn't made everyone turn off i don't know what will But just a couple of years later, 1753, he publishes this treatise, an aesthetic treatise, which is called The Analysis of Beauty.

57:31 And he's wanting to talk about beauty, its characteristics, its nature, and create this handbook, this theoretical treatise for people who are interested in aesthetics. And one of the things that I've always been quite puzzled by is what he's really going on about in it. Because, you know, we started last time with that famous self-portrait where he presents himself with his pug, the painter and the pug.

58:01 Now that dates from a few years earlier. I think that was painted in the mid-1740s, wasn't it? And so it's 1753 when the Analysis of Beauty is published. In that self-portrait, he's already establishing a central tenet of his theories, which is the so-called line of beauty, or as he called it originally, line of beauty and grace, which is this snake-like serpentine form.

58:23 Now, you see it almost 3D on the palette in the self-portrait of the painter with the puck. You then see it returning on the title page of the analysis of beauty in a slightly different form where there's a snake which is inside this triangle of glass which is on a plinth which has got the single word underneath it, variety.

58:44 And clearly variety is very important to Hogarth as an artist. He's nothing if not various. What's the obsession? Do you have a sense at all of why he is obsessed with this snake-like serpentine line as an emblem, if you like, for his entire practice? Well, I think the book he writes, Analysis of Beauty, is a very important document for the simple reason that it is a serious, serious challenge to academic theory.

59:13 And what it's telling its readers is it's saying... Don't listen to the experts. When you're talking about beauty, when you're thinking about beauty, when you're trying to make beautiful things, don't talk, don't think about the experts. Don't think, don't listen to the connoisseurs. Don't try to do things that some random Italian guy did in the Renaissance.

59:29 Look at the natural world around you. Look at the physical things that you see every single day. So in that sense, it's a classic piece of... British empiricism of democratising aesthetics. The problem is, when he comes to his idea of what that beauty is, it's the line... I keep calling it the line of duty.

59:46 But it's that television series. The line of beauty. He believes that all of beauty is contained within this serpentine S. And when you actually, and you've already referred to this, when you look back through his career, you can see it everywhere. You see it in that portrait. You see it in the shape of that sign writer whose body is curving in that particular way.

1:00:06 I think that's where he runs into trouble, because I think it's patently not true that that line is the only way you can achieve beauty. You see, I wonder whether it's indicative of a different side of his character, which is the showman slash entrepreneur slash provocateur. Because he does actually look back and write about that moment where he incorporated the line of beauty into his self-portrait.

1:00:27 He says, in the year 1745, I published a frontispiece to my engraved works because he produced a print version of the painting. in which I drew a serpentine line lying on a painter's palette with these words under it, the line of beauty. As we discussed, it goes on to say, "'The bait soon took, and no Egyptian hieroglyphic ever amused more than it did for a time.

1:00:50 Painters and sculptors came to me to know the meaning of it, being as much puzzled with it as other people, till it came to have some explanation.' So I think he knows that you come up with this kind of great universal theory or emblem. And it is interesting to people. They're like, well, what is that line of beauty?

1:01:08 You know, coming up and talking to him. But I think also it's a sign perhaps of how he starts to really irritate people. Yes. Because they're puzzled, but they're also a bit like... Kind of just, is it bullshit? I mean, I don't know. And what you find happening in the last years of his life, and you alluded to this earlier, you find that he is slowly becoming slightly alienated and estranged from his own artistic community.

1:01:35 And the final years of his life are governed by a lot of scandal, a lot of ridicule, quite a great deal of controversy, where he, the great satirist, becomes the butt of other people's satire. Totally. There is one really emblematic moment for me where you feel that things start to fall apart, where he gets a commission, a really beautiful carte blanche commission from an aristocrat called Sir Richard Grosvenor, who says...

1:02:05 effectively, paint me whatever you like and I'll pay whatever you ask for it. And he decides to paint. He decides not to produce the kind of thing that probably Grosvenor was after, which is one of those more satirical contemporary society modern scenes. But he wants to go back to the genre, the grand genre of history painting, prove his worth, and he asks for £400 for a painting of a character called Sigismunda, who's mourning over the heart of her lover.

1:02:34 Long story short, it's a scene, poet John Dryden does a version of Boccaccio's Decameron, in which this character Sigismunda falls in love with a servant or attendant of her father, a prince. And when the dad gets wind of this, he has this person killed and he has his heart presented to her. And in her upset and despair about this, she kills herself.

1:02:58 So it's a real heart-hugging moment. Hogarth presents it in a picture where you see Sigismund with all of these tears falling down her face. And it's not that well-known compared to many of the other works that we've discussed in this miniseries about Hogarth. But I find it very, very interesting as an image.

1:03:17 Because in it, she is clutching the heart itself of that lover in like a golden vessel-cum-chalice towards her breast... And her fingertip is touching this organ, this bodily organ, in a way that reminds me of that fat fryer we spoke about at the beginning, touching that beef. There's something really visceral, corporeal, possibly even obscene, where there's this kind of swollen organ that she's handling.

1:03:46 And perhaps unsurprisingly, this aristocrat Grosvenor looks at the painting and is like, I don't want that. I'm not going to pay that money for this. I don't want it at all. So it's a terrible humiliation for Hogarth. He has to allow him to leave their arrangement. And he decides to include this picture in an important exhibition, along with six other works, which takes place in 1761, which is organised with other artists by something called the Society of Artists.

1:04:16 Can I just give you a little bit of backstory there? Because this is really important. I mentioned earlier on that in, say, the 1740s, when the Foundling Museum opens, when the Foundling Hospital opens, there is no art world whatsoever, really. There is no public art world in London and in England. But because of the work that Hogarth had done, partly with the Foundling Hospital, partly with his St. Martins Lane Academy, which we haven't had time to discuss yet, we begin to see in the 1750s and into the 1760s, the first proper art institutions emerging in England, partly as a result of what Hogarth has done.

1:04:54 And one of those, I mean, it's a very complicated scheme. There are quite a number of these organisations that have all got slightly different names, but they all sound a bit like themselves. But the first major exhibition that Hogarth is actually behind comes in 1760s. This is the following year. So this is 1761.

1:05:12 And as I say, he submits seven different pictures. One of them is Sigismund. And so this is a big moment of art on public display. And he's trying to show, I think he is submitted the most of anyone who's exhibiting at that show. What I find quite interesting, as you know, whenever there's a newspaper critic who can be quoted, I'd like to.

1:05:32 quote them. They were uniformly behind what Hogarth was showing. There was one writer who described Hogarth as the wonder of the world. I think it's known in the trade as a puff piece. It's possible that these people were somehow on Hogarth's payroll. I think I've even read as a suggestion. But what becomes quite clear is that just as Grosvenor did not like Sigismundur, The public who come to that show also find it really obscene, controversial, upsetting, frankly, disgusting.

1:06:03 And there's so much controversy around this painting that after a few days, Red 10, Red 12, after a period, Hogarth actually withdraws this picture of Sigismund altogether. And it's seen as this moment. It's a real humiliation, isn't it, for him? Serious humiliation. It's his attempt to do a big Italian-style history painting.

1:06:25 And he's literally laughed out the room because they actually have to take the painting out of the gallery. And I totally agree with you. What we see is Hogarth, who couldn't really get anything wrong, everything he did turned to gold in the 1730s and 1740s. By the time we get to the 1750s and 1760s, everything really sort of goes wrong for him.

1:06:43 And I think it's so down to what you said right at the start of this series that Hogarth could really annoy people. He really irritated people. He made lots of enemies. And this is coming back to bite him in the arse. And we see that his book, The Anatomy of Beauty, gets terrible reviews. This painting is withdrawn.

1:07:02 He becomes increasingly embattled, increasingly embittered. He begins to turn against the very art institutions that he has helped create. Well, we began with a picture which was a revenge picture, but he now gets his revenge, doesn't he, on that sort of public scene? This is the story I've been waiting to tell, Alistair.

1:07:19 Because the following year, in 1762, when that exhibition is about to open, around the same time, he opens up with a friend a parallel exhibition just across the road in the Strand. And this is an exhibition that is solely designed to ridicule the art exhibition that is happening at the same time. And this is the grand exhibition of the Society of Sign Painters.

1:07:44 Sign Painters Return. Which did not exist. There was no such thing as a Society of Sign Painters. It had all been invented. And in this exhibition, they gather 110 signs... from pubs and shops all over London. And at the time, of course, artists, part of their livelihood, would often be they are literally painting signs.

1:08:02 Exactly right. And we know that Hogarth painted signs himself. He did his own golden head. And all of them are by native British artists. In fact, the catalogue says, no foreigners, and Dutchmen in particular, will be invited at a place in the exhibition. And if you go through the catalogue of this exhibition, as I have done, you can see the kind of signs they have.

1:08:20 So there's a half moon, there's a black prince, there's a hen and chickens, a hog in armour, a buttock of beef, a bird in the hand, King Charles in an oak, a mitre, a nag's head. And Hogarth, as I said, had always loved signs. He makes his own sign, he paints that... S-shaped sign painter in Beer Street.

1:08:40 And we think he made nine signs for the show. Right. Under a different name, under the name Haggerty. Okay. Everyone, of course, knew who Haggerty really was. And the signs Hogarth makes for this show are so brilliant. So there's one... in which you see two idiots next to each other and the sign reads, we are three, implying that the person looking at the sign is the third idiot.

1:09:05 There's another one, absolutely brilliant. So you've got, we don't know for certain he painted these signs, but we think he probably did. You've got two signs, but they're covered in blue curtains. So the curtains are disguising them. And the catalogue actually says, ladies and gentlemen are requested not to finger them.

1:09:21 as the blue curtains are hung over on purpose to preserve them. And of course, everyone, they went up and they drew the curtains. And behind them, one sign read, ha, ha, and the other one read, he, he. So absolutely amazing. It's something that the contemporary artist Martin Creed might have done. It's totally true.

1:09:40 I mean, this is ready-made. We're dealing with found objects. We're dealing with an exhibition designed to ridicule and undermine the very nature of art. This is basically Dada. This is Marcel Duchamp 150 years earlier. And it's, again, proof of how astonishingly modern Hogarth could be. I think, I mean, it's fascinating to hear all of that.

1:10:00 I think, I'm just not sure how much solace him having this slightly hollow last laugh kind of really is, because we're approaching the end game. You know, he was devastated by the rejection of Sigismund. He had a great deal of anxiety. Supposedly he was ill for a year. he then has this really public spat with some politicians and journalists where he enters contemporary politics in a way we won't get into the weeds of it now.

1:10:25 But he falls out publicly with people who start to attack him. There are personal attacks on Hogarth as he's approaching the end of his life. And I think a lot of that sense of his... pessimism, the negativity of his spirit, his state of mind, is encapsulated by the last image that famously he supposedly makes, which is published on the 3rd of March, 1764, so shortly before he dies.

1:10:52 He dies that same year, and it has the title The Bathos, or The Manor of Sinking in Sublime Paintings, and it's an engraving. And it's a complex work. It seems to be taking aim at various different things, not least the new vogue. You know, he hates modishness in all sorts of ways, doesn't he? For the so-called sublime that's becoming an interesting concept within aesthetics.

1:11:15 But essentially in it, you also see something that feels like some personal expression of weariness at the end of his life. You see the figure of time. He's collapsed. There's a speech bubble coming out from his mouth which says Finis, Latin for the end. There's an inn sign that's collapsing and the inn is called The World's End.

1:11:34 There's a dead tree. You can see the sun is suffering an eclipse. There's the sun's chariot. Apollo's lying lifelessly. You have a pallet, a big emblem of his art, which is actually cracked here next to a cracked bell. There's a flame which is coming close to one of his own prints. And there's just a general feeling here that he's sort of had enough, don't you think?

1:11:56 Yeah, I think it's hard not to see this as a self-portrait. And, you know, Hogarth, this man who, with grit and guts and relentless determination, has dragged himself from essentially the debtor's prison to become the king's own painter. Yeah. And has fought so many battles on the way, some of them necessary, many of them totally unnecessary.

1:12:19 And now he just finds himself exhausted. He's spent. And that palette's really interesting. Do you remember at the very start of this series, we looked at the self-portrait and he had the palette with a line of beauty running across it? Yeah. Well, the line of beauty is now a crack. And so there is a real sense that he is coming to the end.

1:12:36 And indeed, you know, by this stage, by the time we get to 1764, Hogarth is really unwell. He's been complaining of inward pains. He makes his will in August of that year. And in October, on the 25th of October, he travels back from his country house in Chiswick to London, perhaps because he has better access to physicians there.

1:12:55 Do you know what he does on the final day? He receives a letter, American listeners will like this, he receives a letter from Benjamin Franklin, founding father of America, and he begins composing a response to it. Unfortunately, neither the letter nor the response have survived. But then that evening, he has dinner, his final evening.

1:13:14 Do you know what he has for dinner on his final night? I do not, no. What do you think? Beef, of course. Beef. washed down with a lot of beer. He has a pound of beefsteak for dinner. Yeah. He goes to bed. He wakes up vomiting. He's got a little bell on his bedside table. He rings the bell so hard that he breaks the bell.

1:13:30 The woman comes up, the maid comes up, and he dies a couple of hours later. We don't know exactly what he died from. Some people say an aneurysm. So that is the end of William Hogarth, age 67. Shall we just have a couple of minutes to discuss his legacy? I think it is pretty significant. It's hugely significant.

1:13:50 I mean, where do you start? He is the great champion of English art. You know, the central achievement of his career is that I think he raises the status of native indigenous artists in this country. He makes... so many contributions and creates so many innovations in different fields. I mean, I mentioned before this idea that variety is an essential part of his art, but, you know, even to art theory, as we've just established, but in terms of pictorial satire, those narrative series, you know, the emergence of middle-class portraiture, the first bourgeois portraits of Brits are really done by William Hogarth, even things we take for granted or think might not have been an invention, but scenes from Shakespeare.

1:14:35 And I think when you're looking at his work, he is creating, as we spoke about a bit with Maragela Mode, you have this panorama both of London as a city, but also of England. You know, he spoke when he was at the end of his life, I think it was at the end of his life, and he starts to put together some autobiographical notes that never actually become an autobiography.

1:14:56 But he's saying that what he's done is... his art is managed to be descriptive of the peculiar manners and characters of the English nation. And I don't think that's too grand a claim. I think that is why he gives his name to the whole era as Hogarthian. It really resonates. I said at the start of this series that I believe there is a very strong case to make that Hogarth was the first modern artist.

1:15:23 And I've just written down the reasons why I think that. Hopefully those will have come through our discussion over the last couple of hours. First of all, he chronicled modern life and modern subjects and current affairs in, I think, a totally new way. Second, he was a master of mass media and mass reproduction.

1:15:38 And what could be more modern than that? Third, I think that he is a genuine architect of the modern art world as we know it in this country, certainly. The institutions, the academies, the galleries. He's a founder of a self-consciously English school of painting. And he is the architect of modern artist copyright to some extent.

1:15:58 So I think all of those things, I think, prove the point that he is a very, very significant figure in shaping the modern art world. And I think that although sometimes his artworks look quite dated with their wigs and their frills, he is very much an artist for our own time as well, actually. Well, I was watching recently, I don't know if you saw the TV adaptation of Julie Cooper's Rivals.

1:16:20 But that sense of kind of surging animal spirits, that's what Hogarth conveys and encapsulates in a similar way in the 18th century. And everything we've just described is, I hope, a useful and fairly authoritative checklist of what he did as an artist. But the risk is that you come away thinking it's almost that's a bit too po-faced.

1:16:42 There are all these serious things. The great genius and the thing you cannot forget is his high spiritedness, that sense of hijinks, that sort of the ridiculous absurdity and fun. The energy which he manages to inject his pictures with is, I think, the real core of his success as an artist. Well, I hope we've captured that in our series.

1:17:04 I have to say, I think this one has been a bit of a blast. I've enjoyed it immensely. Thank you, James. But for now, goodbye. Laters. That wasn't me. That was Hogarth. Next week, we'll be having a day out on the banks of the River Seine, because we'll be focusing on Georges Surat's wonderful painting, Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884.