The Shopkeeper as Painter

...Hogarth (1697-1764) was a Londoner and by birth a member of the lower middle class...

...Because the relation between Hogarth the man and the Hogarthian environment was remarkably close, and because Hogarth early in life devised a system for making a shorthand record of things seen for later use, Quennell's abundant material on eighteenth-century London is in large measure an extended documentation of the details of Hogarth's engravings and canvases...

...A creative life well told always makes a good book...

...It is not at all surprising, but rather forcefully symbolic, that Hogarth not only hit on a way to make engravings popular by devising a progressive series that told a morally acceptable story, but also devised a way of selling them by subscription and, furthermore, got a law passed protecting the artist's rights in them, so that for many years their circulation brought important returns...

...Spiritually, he was clearly allied to Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett...

...Quennell's book is at once a portrait of the man, of the London of his time, and...

...Reviewed by C. Hartley Grattan Sir Herbert Read, in an essay on Hogarth printed as an appendix to Art and Society, expresses the view that, while Hogarth "is still perhaps the most familiar of English artists," he is nevertheless not an artist of high esthetic merit, though occasionally, as in The Shrimp Girl, his work "blazed forth in sensuous splendor...

...Peter Quennell's splendid book about him appears to ratify that notion...

...I mean as to personal spirit, not in relation to that "spirit of the age" which they all patently shared...

...Johnson wrote for Hogarth's gravestone: "The Hand of Art here torpid lies That traced the essential form of grace: Here Death has closed the curious eyes That saw the manners in the face...

...Quennell on Hogarth is a first-class example...

...The obverse of this positive prescription was his persistent campaign against the Italianate taste of the upper classes and their artist allies...

...Rarely has this kind of annotation been so skilfully done...

...He also reflected his personality and social situation in his insistence that an English artist should paint like an Englishman, something he conscientiously endeavored to do in his own work (with shocking lapses) all his life long...

...It is not for me to argue with Sir Herbert on esthetic judgments, but surely I am of a great majority when I say that Hogarth is perhaps the most interesting single personality in the history of English art...

...What a superb verse Dr...

...This says to me that Hogarth, in the queer and elusive way of artists, expressed esthetically the spirit that gave the English that quality Napoleon sought to define by calling them a nation of shopkeepers...

...Hogarth thus laid the foundations of his personal prosperity and made a notable contribution to the economics of art production, at once ingenious and fabulously in character...

...Hogarth came very near to believing the old tag that an Englishman Italianate is a devil incarnate...

...Hogarth even looked as one would expect the man he was to look...

...in a less precise fashion, of the lower-middle-class man of the eighteenth century as artist...

...Both Quennell and Read use George Lillo's famous play The London Merchant (a prime favorite of the sociologists of art in all its forms) to explain in literary terms the outlook Hogarth expressed in engravings and on canvasses...

...How unlucky that it was rejected for actual use in favor of the more ornate tribute of David Garrick...

...his self-portraits figure forth exactly the man one would logically expect, at once cocky and cockney, and blazing with the self-assurance of genius...