Self portrait The Painter and his Pug Tate Britain
Jeremy Prescott led a walk recently showing buildings and areas in London associated with William Hogarth and some of his works.
Did you miss this walk? The tickets sold out quickly and many were disappointed. Jeremy has kindly given DOV the detailed description of the walk so you can print it off and take the walk independently – note that some of the relevant museums are closed on Mondays, so Tuesdays to Saturdays are better days.
It comes in 2 parts, the first covering Smithfield to Leicester Square, and the second the Foundling Museum. Click here for part 2
King Henry VIII Gate, St Bartholomew’s Hospital
Hogarth was born in 1697 in Smithfield and baptised in St Bartholomew the Great’s church.
Smithfield was a rough area, where animals were butchered – half a million sheep a year at the time – and it’s the place to start, since it helps you understand Hogarth.
His father Richard was a Latin teacher and writer, and when William was six Richard opened a Latin-speaking Coffee house in St John’s Gate, where they moved to – now The Museum of the Order of St John (St John’s Ambulance). This was not a success and when Hogarth was 10 his father was imprisoned in the Fleet debtors’ prison for five years and the family moved to debtors’ lodgings in Old Bailey, where they lived until Hogarth was 15. Then there was then a change in the law and his father was released.
The Old Bailey, which you can see over there, is on the site of the old Newgate Prison, where criminals in London were held before their execution, and from where they set off every six weeks or so by cart, with their coffins (just like the Idle Apprentice) to Tyburn.
So, Hogarth would have been conscious from an early age of how things could go badly, and of how lives might come to a very sticky end if they did. I am sure that this coloured a lot of his paintings, particularly his “Progress” series. His experience as a child also gave him sympathy for the poor and disadvantaged, and an equal determination not to be one of them. You can also see in his pictures some of the contradictions that you can see here in Smithfield – with London’s greatest butchery and its greatest hospital, its great new cathedral in St Paul’s and its most dreadful old prison, all rubbing shoulders. These ghosts remained with him all his life – no other artist has painted so many prison scenes.
As a personality he was ambitious, energetic, pugnacious and a great fixer, networker and leader.
He was a versatile artist and a clever businessman, selling his paintings as engravings, engraving the pictures himself, selling direct to the public and by subscription, sometimes with tickets giving you a chance to win the painting. He made sure that his pictures, and those of fellow artists, were seen by polite society in the very best public places – such as at St Barts – in the days before art galleries, as a way of getting commissions. He also got a copyright act passed for engravers.
He was determined to raise the status of artists and in particular to create a British school of art that was superior to the foreigners who then dominated the London art scene.
Katie Ormerod, the archivist for the St Bart’s Museum showed his two massive paintings here (he painted them for nothing so that he could pip the Italian painter Amigoni to the commission). You can view the pictures from the St Bart’s Museum – its open Tuesday to Friday, 10am to 4pm; entrance is free.
58 St Bartholomew’s Close (to the right of Dominion House as you face it)
Born here in November 1697, where his parents were living with his maternal grandmother Widow Gibbons, in her lodging house. The area had missed the great fire, so you can imagine that these were then old Tudor buildings – as seen on 1676 map in the Guildhall.
After his father’s release from the Fleet prison, the family returned to live in Long Lane, (his two sisters had a frock shop on the corner with Smithfield). Here he started his engraving business in 1720 aged 23, after an apprenticeship as a silver engraver near Leicester Square. He started attending an art school in St Martin’s Lane the same year, and would have walked at least parts of the route that we are taking.
St Paul’s – Temple Bar
Temple Bar, which was the old gate in Fleet Street marking entry to the City, was the background to one of his early (1726) engravings. Traitors heads used to decorate it. In 1745 the officers of the Manchester Regiment ended up there, for failing to stop Bonnie Prince Charlie taking Manchester.
Lincoln’s Inn, Bell Yard entrance (route to the Soane Museum)
The buildings in Lincoln’s Inn date from the late 17th century and earlier as does Lincoln’s Inn Fields, so both would have familiar to Hogarth. (Although in the first part of the 18th century the fields were used as a rubbish tip, so even then it was slightly disreputable).
Hogarth painted Paul before Felix for the Great Hall in 1747, and its still here.
Sir John Soane’s Museum, Lincoln’s Inn Fields
The Rake’s Progress (1735), painted as a sequel to The Harlot’s Progress series really put Hogarth on the map and the An Election series (1755-8), painted much later in his life, one of my favourites. The paintings were bought by Sir John Soane in 1805.
The Soane Museum is open Tuesday – Saturday, 10am – 5pm; entrance is free.
Covent Garden
From 1724, aged 27, Hogarth started attending the free art school of Sir James Thornhill, which was behind the Thornhill house at 12 Great Piazza (which was immediately to the left of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden entrance as you face it).
Sir James was the Serjeant Painter to His Majesty, a hugely successful artist and one of the few English artists able to compete successfully with the French and Italian artists then in London. You can see his work in Greenwich’s Painted Hall. Sir James Thornhill had an enormous influence on Hogarth – he showed him that you could become socially and financially successful through art, and Hogarth started painting seriously in oils in 1727. It also raised his painting and his social ambitions.
From 1729 Hogarth had his studio above the Broadcloth Warehouse at the corner of Tavistock Court (probably where the left tower of the Jubilee Hall now is, as you look at it), and perhaps not surprisingly in March 1729 Hogarth eloped with and married Sir James’ daughter, Jane, to Sir James’ huge annoyance. However there was a reconciliation and the couple moved back into the Thornhill household in 1731.
Here he displayed his Harlot’s Progress series, which really launched his career.
The area was not totally respectable – near Tavistock Court there were a number of bagnios (the equivalent of massage parlours today), one run by a Betty Careless. Hogarth’s favourite pub was the Bedford Arms (now part of the Transport Museum).
Covent Garden formed the backdrop to Morning in the The Four Times of Day series (1736). Street artists now perform here, near the portico of St Paul’s church.
Everyone at the time tried to identify the people and places in Hogarth’s pictures. Some say that Thomas Arne (plaque at 31 King Street) was the Enraged Musician (Arne was the only English musician (he composed “Rule Britannia”) able to hold his own in a British music scene, dominated by foreigners such as Handel).
110-111 St Martin’s Lane
Hogarth was founder of the second St Martin’s Lane Academy of Art, in 1735, as a guild for artists and a school for young artists, lending them the contents from Sir James Thornhill’s school (Sir James died in 1734). The school was in the sculptor Roubiliac’s former studio at 110-111 St Martin’s Lane, and probably the same building where he had first studied art – Vanderbank’s Academy – in 1720.
The Academy thrived and was the leading British school of painting and the graphic arts for 30 years, helping develop a distinctive British style. Thomas Gainsborough studied and taught there. Many of the members worked closely together, and Hogarth promoted places for them to exhibit such as Vauxhall Gardens and the Foundling Hospital.
There were huge political fights amongst artists about which organisation should become the official British academy. The Royal Academy was eventually founded in 1769 as a breakaway group from the Society of Artists, which in turn was a breakaway group from the St Martin’s Lane Academy.
St Martin in the Fields has been wonderfully restored and forms the backdrop to Hogarth’s painting of the wedding of Stephen Beckingham, a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn, and Mary Cox (1729) – its well worth a visit. (see right)
Its also worth while seeing Hogarth’s Marriage a la Mode series (1743-5) in the National Gallery.
The National Gallery is open daily, 10am to 6pm (9pm on Fridays); entrance is free.
Leicester Square
Hogarth moved to Leicester Square, which was more genteel and fashionable than Covent Garden, in 1733, aged 36. He lived at number 31, “at the sign of the Golden Head”, putting a painted cork head of van Dyck (whom he regarded as an English painter) over the door and building a painting studio in the garden (now the right hand half of the Capital Radio building as you look at it). It was his home and gallery for over 30 years, until he died in 1764. Jane Hogarth continued to occupy it until her death in 1789.
To Hogarth’s annoyance, Reynolds – the leading mid 18th century British artist and first president of the Royal Academy – moved into a palatial house in the square in 1760, no 47, directly opposite Hogarth’s house. He would be even more annoyed that Reynolds has a blue plaque (actually its AA brown, since that used to be Fanum House the AA HQ) and he doesn’t!
For part 2 of the walk click here
