Hogarth's London | Anne Roberts

Tate Britain’s exhibition of Hogarth’s paintings and prints (February 7 to April 29 2007) gives us a vivid depiction of the society in which Wesley, Whitefield and the 18th century evangelists ministered.

This was a period when the church was in a weakened state, still suffering from the silencing of many good ministers following the Great Ejection of 1662.

Hogarth’s images still have the power to shock. In choosing the streets of London as his subject matter, he broke through the 18th-century conventions where art was commissioned by (and thus required to flatter) a wealthy land-owning aristocracy. Instead, like a journalist, he reveals a cross-section of society teeming with pickpockets, gamblers, rakes and petty criminals; where the national addiction to gin was a major cause of poverty, sickness and neglect.

Such vivid realism was a complete contrast to the Italianate taste in art, music and architecture made fashionable by those returning from the Grand Tour of Europe. Far more important for Hogarth’s early work was John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, first performed in 1728, which deliberately used popular ballads to tell a tale of highwaymen and street crime.

Reality of prison

Born near Smithfield market in 1697, William Hogarth was just six years older than Wesley. His gift for narrative may well have been inherited from his father, who had literary ambitions, but died ‘disappointed in the promises of great men’. As a child of ten, Hogarth experienced the grim reality of the Fleet Prison, when his idealistic but impractical parent was jailed for debt. This not only left him with a deep distrust of false pretensions, but also fuelled his determination to succeed professionally on his own terms. By 1720 he had set up his own business as an engraver and printmaker. Within the next decade he had transferred his scenes of contemporary life into the more prestigious world of painting, and fine art.

Powerful moral message

His father had taught him to think in linguistic terms, and Hogarth himself had a strong sense of drama. By choosing a serial format he was able to pinpoint the most telling psychological moment as each act of the story unfolds — making his narrative series hugely popular.

As well as an element of caricature, each scene carries a powerful moral message. Hogarth presses home the consequences of greed, self-interest, cruelty and the cynical maltreatment of others. Those who make wrong choices meet appallingly bad ends — for example, in ‘The Rake’s Progress’, Tom Rakewell is like a type of the prodigal son on the road to self-destruction, determined to squander his inheritance — but for him there is no return or happy ending. In the last print of the series we see him stripped of all his finery, dying as a lunatic in the asylum.

Influence of revival

By the later years of Hogarth’s career, Wesley and Whitefield’s open air preaching ministry had become famous. In ‘Industry and Idleness’, the idle apprentice, having chosen a life of crime, is finally taken away to be executed at Tyburn. Facing him in the cart, a preacher with his Bible points heavenwards. But the accompanying text from Proverbs is ominous: ‘When fear cometh….they will call upon God, but he will not answer’.

Philanthropy

Having established a comfortable living, Hogarth was regularly involved with philanthropic work — especially with Thomas Coram’s Hospital for Foundling children. His sympathetic portrait of Captain Coram is the finest in the exhibition. The actor David Garrick wrote that his ‘pictured morals charm the mind, and through the eye correct the heart’ — yet he himself never seems to have been personally influenced by the 18th-century revival. Hogarth proved almost single-handedly that England could make its own distinctive contribution to international art — but he also brings alive for us the contrast between awareness of social evils, and the good news offered by the gospel of grace.