Famous Houses and Literary Shrines of London. Arthur St. John Adcock
In 1730 he was engaged with Sir James Thornhill on their famous picture of “The House of Commons”; and a year later, when he was engraving his series of prints “The Harlot’s Progress,” he and his wife had apparently taken up quarters with Sir James in the Piazza.
SIR JAMES THORNHILL. 75 DEAN STREET.
“The Harlot’s Progress,” and the issue of “The Rake’s Progress” shortly afterwards, lifted Hogarth into fame. He began to move in better society, and was to be met with at the fashionable as well as at the Bohemian clubs of the day. He and Thornhill founded the Arts Club at the Turk’s Head, in Gerrard Street; and, after the latter’s death, he took over Thornhill’s art school, and transferred it to Peter’s Court, St. Martin’s Lane. Occasionally he visited Richardson, the novelist, in Salisbury Court; and it was here he first made the acquaintance of Dr. Johnson. He struck up a friendship with Garrick, too, and painted several portraits of him, for one of which he received two hundred pounds; and with Fielding, of whom he has given us the only portrait we possess.
By 1733 Hogarth was prosperous enough to take the house in Leicester Square that was pulled down, in 1870, to furnish a site for the Archbishop Tenison School that has replaced it; and in 1749, “having sacrificed enough to his fame and fortune,” he purchased the villa at Chiswick as a summer holiday home, and became a familiar figure about the Chiswick lanes from time to time—“a blue-eyed, intelligent little man, with a scar over his right eye, and wearing a fur cap.” Allan Cunningham furnishes a more vivid description of his personal appearance in his Lives of the Painters, where he says he was “rather below the middle height; his eye was peculiarly bright and piercing; his look shrewd, sarcastic, and intelligent; the forehead high and round. He was active in person, bustling in manner, and fond of affecting a little state and importance. He was of a temper cheerful, joyous, and companionable, fond of mirth and good-fellowship.” Benjamin West called him a strutting, consequential little man; and, one way and another, we know that he was sturdy, obstinate, pugnacious, and that once he thrashed a ruffian whom he found maltreating the beautiful drummeress that he sketched in his picture of Southwark Fair. Possibly that scar over his right eye was a record of this chivalrous deed.
There are very few records of his home life, and these are of the homeliest, most ordinary sort. He was fond of smoking, and the arm-chair, in which he was wont to sit with his pipe, is still preserved at Chiswick. He had a favourite dog, a pet cat, and a bullfinch, which he buried in his Chiswick garden, commemorating them with tablets that have now vanished from the wall, the bird’s epitaph being “Alas, poor Dick!” and the dog’s, “Life to the last enjoyed, here Pompey lies”—which parodies a line in the Candidate, by that dissipated, brilliant satirist, Charles Churchill: “Life to the last enjoyed, here Churchill lies.”
HOGARTH’S HOUSE. CHISWICK.
The Candidate was published at the beginning of 1764, and on the 25th October of that year Hogarth died. Churchill had been a warm friend of his, but before the end had become one of his bitterest enemies—that enmity arising in this wise. In 1762 Hogarth published a political print called the Times, in which he supported the policy of Lord Bute, and ridiculed Pitt, Temple, and Wilkes. By way of retaliation, Wilkes wrote a scathing attack upon Hogarth in his paper, the North Briton, in which he made a sneering reference to Mrs. Hogarth. This stirred Hogarth to anger; and when Wilkes was presently arrested on a charge of high treason, he sat in court and sketched the prisoner, immortalising his villainous squint, and accentuating all the worst qualities in his features. On this print making its appearance, Churchill, a staunch friend and partisan of Wilkes, took up the cudgels, and scarified Hogarth without mercy in An Epistle to William Hogarth (1763), praising his art, but pouring contempt upon his envy and self-esteem, and affecting to believe that he was in his dotage. He can laud the genius, he says, but not the man.
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