A CATALOGUE OF ENGRAVERS WHO HAVE BEEN BORN OR RESIDED IN ENGLAND. COLLECTED BY THE LATE GEORGE VERTUE; DIGESTED AND PUBLISHED FROM HIS ORIGINAL MSS. BY HORACE WALPOLE; WITH ADDITIONS BY THE REV. JAMES DALLAWAY. A NEW EDITION, REVISED, WITH ADDITIONAL NOTES. BY RALPH N. WORNUM. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. III. LONDON: HENRY G. BOHN, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN. CONTENTS TO VOL. III. CHAP. XX.-PAINTERS IN THE REIGN OF GEORGE II.. XXI.-PAINTERS IN ENAMEL AND MINIATURE, STATUARIES, AND PAGE CHAPTER XX. PAINTERS IN THE REIGN OF GEORGE II. WILLIAM HOGARTH.' HAVING despatched the herd of our painters in oil, I reserved to a class by himself that great and original genius, Hogarth; considering him rather as a writer of comedy with a pencil, than as a painter. If catching the manners and follies of an age living as they rise, if general satire on vices and ridicules, familiarized by strokes of nature, and heightened by wit, and the whole animated by proper and just expressions of the passions, be comedy, Hogarth composed comedies as much as Moliere: in his Marriage à-lamode there is even an intrigue carried on throughout the piece. He is more true to character than Congreve; each personage is distinct from the rest, acts in his sphere, and cannot be confounded with any other of the dramatis personæ. The alderman's footboy, in the last print of the set I have mentioned, is an ignorant rustic; and if wit is struck out from the characters in which it is not expected, it is from their acting conformably to their situation and from the mode of their passions, not from their having the wit of fine gentlemen. Thus there is wit in the figure of the alderman, who, when his daughter is expiring in the agonies of poison, wears a face of solicitude, but it is to save her gold ring, which he is drawing gently from her finger. The thought is parallel to Moliere's, where the miser puts 'Since the first edition of this work, a much ampler account of Hogarth and his works has been given by Mr. Nichols, which is not only more accurate, but much more satisfactory than mine; omitting nothing that a collector would wish to know, either with regard to the history of the painter himself, or to the circumstances, different editions and variations of his prints. I have completed my list of Hogarth's works from that source of information. [Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth, and a Catalogue of his Works, &c. London, 1781 and 82. See also Ireland, Hogarth Illustrated, London, Boydell, 1791.-W.] |