British painter William Hogarth travelled around the streets and amongst the crowds of 18th Century London and painted what he saw. London at this time - what we now call Hogarthian London - was a highly dangerous place - police forces hadn't yet been invented so crime was rife, the city stank and the buildings were crumbling and condemned. This was a time when the "Gin Craze" hit Britain, particularly London, when gin became so cheap that it was consumed in vast amounts by the poor. A scene of drunken gin-drinkers - and called "Gin Lane" - was painted by Hogarth in 1751, a scene which includes a drunken woman dropping her baby over a balcony and a man in the background being placed into a coffin.
If you want to know what London was like in this period, then look at Hogarth's paintings....
Immerse yourself in Hogarth's London
17/02/2007
The dark sides of 18th century England
It is almost 250 years since the artist died but his vision of the city still resonates today.
One of William Hogarth's consummate skills as an artist was his ability to make you feel part of his world. Take his London street scenes. You don't stand back and observe the city from a safe distance as you would with, say, Canaletto. You are swept along the alleyways, jostled from each side, forced to dodge the contents of an emptied piss-pot or to step over an inebriated harlot.
"The Enraged Musician" by Hogarth (1741) 'Poking fun at an Italian violinist who cannot hear himself practise because of the din from the streets'. Notice the little boy urinating against the wall.
Hogarth's depictions of London low life in the early 18th century reveal the dark side of the Age of Enlightenment. This was a golden era for intellectual debate, artistic creativity and for amassing spectacular fortunes, but it was also a time of appalling poverty and suffering.
Hogarth had a deep insight into both worlds. One of the leading intellectuals of the time, he was a friend of Handel, Garrick and Henry Fielding, and well acquainted with Dr Johnson. But he grew up, the son of an educated but impoverished father, in the less than salubrious streets around Smithfield meat market and St Bart's Hospital.
Like Dickens, whose eye for character and for the detail of depravity he shares, Hogarth had a childhood blighted by the years his father spent in debtors' prison. He was also familiar with the dark bulk of Newgate Prison, now demolished, then just up the road from Smithfield. From here, every six weeks or so, condemned prisoners would be carted along what is now Oxford Street to the communal gallows at Tyburn - opposite present-day Speakers' Corner.
You can get a sense of the ribald chaos of the crowds of Londoners attending these events in Hogarth's etching The Idle Apprentice. It is currently on display at Tate Britain, along with virtually all his most important paintings and etchings, in what is the best overview of his work for more than 30 years.
But how much of Hogarth's portrayal of London is caricature, and how much is a true reflection of the city of the time?
Obviously Hogarth worked for effect. He laid on ironies with a shovel, and manipulated his images according to the corruption, hypocrisy or poor taste he wanted to expose.
A scene such as Gin Lane is his essay on the evils he attributed to the drink that had become a panacea for London's underclass. It has the air of a grotesque exaggeration. A drunken woman sprawls on the steps while her child falls into a cellar, another feeds gin to her baby, a man fights with a dog for its bone, another hangs himself in a garret. In the background a house collapses, while the only buildings that are in good repair are the pawnbroker's, the undertaker's and the distillery.
But, for all the exaggeration, the image is built on facts. Hogarth used news stories as well as his direct impressions of the street.
One story, dating from the 1730s, tells of Judith Dufour, who reclaimed her two-year-old child from the workhouse and strangled the infant so that she could sell the clothes to buy gin. Another mother was accused of deliberately blinding a child, the better to elicit sympathy when begging.
The amount of gin that was consumed was extraordinary. In 1751, the year that Hogarth produced the etching, more than 9,000 children died of alcohol poisoning, every fourth house in St Giles sold the stuff and more than 11 million gallons were consumed in a city with a population of much less than a million.
The collapsing house seen in the background of Gin Lane was also a relatively common sight. Much of Hogarth's London was relatively new, rebuilt after the fire of 1666. The stonework of Wren's cathedral and his city churches must still have gleamed. But many of the houses had been hastily reconstructed and often jerry-built. Collapses - in which the occupants and passers-by often died - were commonplace. In 1738, Dr Johnson described London as a city "where falling houses thunder on your head".
Prostitution was another issue. The Strand was one of many streets lined not just with fashionable coffee shops, but with brothels.
Even Casanova was impressed. "It makes a magnificent debauch," he wrote in his memoirs of London. And is there a note of enthusiasm in Boswell's description of the choices available to an interested gentleman - from the "splendid madame at fifty guineas a night" to the "civil nymph" who could be "had for a pint of wine and a shilling"?
Many of these prostitutes were country girls who had been drawn into a city that, in some ways, was flourishing like never before (the population doubled between 1700 and 1800), but few prospered. Hogarth appears to have been accutely sensitive to this, seeming to echo Dr Johnson's edict that a society must be judged by the way it treats its poor.
He traced the fate of the young prostitutes in A Harlot's Progress. Innocent Moll Hackett arrives from the country in the first plate, and steps straight off the coach into the arms of a brothel-keeper. By plate six, aged 23, she is dead, having suffered prison, syphilis and abject poverty. It is not a simplistic narrative - at times Moll appears complicit in the corruption - but she is clearly its principal victim.
Perhaps my favourite evocation of the day to day chaos of the city is The Enraged Musician. Here Hogarth, ever the patriot, is poking fun at an Italian violinist who cannot hear himself practise because of the din from the streets.
Street musicians, bawling babies, a knife-grinder, the cries of itinerant salesmen, barking dogs, a drummer boy and a little girl with a rattle comprise the city orchestra. It is London in its richest variety - and variety, just as much as elegance, was critical to Hogarth's ideas of artistic beauty.
Walking around London today, it is easy to draw parallels between now and then - the traffic-jammed streets, the noise and the crime. Might Gin Lane - as the political commentator Andrew Marr has pointed out - be seen as a prophetic depiction of Heroin Alley?
But what physically remains of Hogarth's London? One or two scenes in the Tate exhibition have a familiar ring. The prospect of Covent Garden in early morning in the Four Times of the Day series has barely altered. Some of the landmarks in the backgrounds of his etchings are also recognisable: church towers such as that of St Martin-in-the-Field, for instance; the dome of St Paul's and the equestrian statue of Charles I at the top of Whitehall.
But much of the city has been rebuilt more than once in the past 250 years. Gin Lane - had it really existed - was set roughly where Centrepoint is now. Ironically, the areas Hogarth would probably recognise most easily were he to return today are the smarter parts of Mayfair - such as Grosvenor Square. These districts were being laid out by entrepreneurial aristocrats on greenfield sites in the 1720s and 1730s, but while many of his interior scenes might have been set inside grand houses such as these, he chose not to paint or etch the elegant pavements and garden courts outside.
Hogarth preferred to explore deeper under the city's skin. Perhaps, in today's London, he would be drawn to the variety and vibrancy of streets such as Brick Lane. But there are still some shadows and echoes of his own London that you can explore - houses, museums, squares and streets where his spirit presides.
-------------------------------------------
HOGARTH'S WORKS
"Gin Lane" (1751) portrays drunken gin-drinkers, victims of the "Gin Craze" that hit Britain at that time. A woman drops her baby, a man is plaes in a coffin - and a collapsing building shows how poorly-built some of the buildings were. This is a real street that can be visited in London, although it has a different name.
----------------------
A self-portrait of Hogarth and his pug (1745). A new exhibition of works by the eighteenth-century painter William Hogarth will open on February 7 at Tate Britain, claimed to be the most comprehensive display of his art for more than 30 years.
-----------------
Hogarth, Marriage A-la-Mode: The Tête à Tête, 1735
Incorporating more than 200 works, the exhibition will cover every aspect of Hogarth's artisitic output, from paintings to drawings and sketches, including numerous engraved works.
-------------
Hogarth, O the Roast Beef of Old England (‘The Gate of Calais’), 1748
As a chronicler of his times Hogarth depicted both the rich and the poor: his works range from elegant conversation pieces to scenes of salacious brothels. Hogarth hated France and this portrait was drawn whilst he was in Calais and records what he saw. The French soldier is a symbol that whereas France is like some sort of state governed by the army, the English on the other hand are freest people on Earth. The roast beef also symbolises England - a land of freedon and of plenty - and Hogarth even set up his own roast beef club - The Beefsteak Club. On the left you can just see Hogarth himself painting the scene.
[[In 1748, William Hogarth painted The Gate Of Calais, better known since as The Roast Beef Of Old England, after his friend Fielding’s song. The picture shows a huge rib of raw beef (so not roast, in fact) being delivered to Madam Grandsire’s, an English hotel in the French channel port of Calais. Surrounding the porter as he staggers towards the door with it is a cast of unappetising French characters: a trio of cackling fishwives clutching a skate, a pair of miserable soldiers strutting with their pikes, a portly friar who takes a faintly dIsgusting interest in the English meat, a couple of emaciated cooks with their bowl of nameless slop, an undernourished wretch (a Scotsman) in the tattered tartan uniform of the failed Jacobite rebellion, who has nothing to eat but an onion… All are in contrast with the anticipated plenty represented by the weighty hunk of ENGLISH meat at the centre of the scene.]]
---------------------
Hogarth, Heads of Six of Hogarth's Servants, c.1750-55
The exhibition examines the whole of Hogarth's output, from juvenalia in the 1720s all the way to the more controversial pieces of the 1750s and early 1760s.
------------------
Hogarth, The Shrimp Girl c. 1740-50
By featuring the work of other artists who draw an influence from Hogarth, it goes on to suggest that he was in fact Britain's first truly modern artist, addressing themes which still preoccupy us today.
--------------
"Beer Street" (1751) Revellers outside a London tavern
telegraph.co.uk
If you want to know what London was like in this period, then look at Hogarth's paintings....
Immerse yourself in Hogarth's London
17/02/2007
The dark sides of 18th century England
It is almost 250 years since the artist died but his vision of the city still resonates today.
One of William Hogarth's consummate skills as an artist was his ability to make you feel part of his world. Take his London street scenes. You don't stand back and observe the city from a safe distance as you would with, say, Canaletto. You are swept along the alleyways, jostled from each side, forced to dodge the contents of an emptied piss-pot or to step over an inebriated harlot.
"The Enraged Musician" by Hogarth (1741) 'Poking fun at an Italian violinist who cannot hear himself practise because of the din from the streets'. Notice the little boy urinating against the wall.
Hogarth's depictions of London low life in the early 18th century reveal the dark side of the Age of Enlightenment. This was a golden era for intellectual debate, artistic creativity and for amassing spectacular fortunes, but it was also a time of appalling poverty and suffering.
Hogarth had a deep insight into both worlds. One of the leading intellectuals of the time, he was a friend of Handel, Garrick and Henry Fielding, and well acquainted with Dr Johnson. But he grew up, the son of an educated but impoverished father, in the less than salubrious streets around Smithfield meat market and St Bart's Hospital.
Like Dickens, whose eye for character and for the detail of depravity he shares, Hogarth had a childhood blighted by the years his father spent in debtors' prison. He was also familiar with the dark bulk of Newgate Prison, now demolished, then just up the road from Smithfield. From here, every six weeks or so, condemned prisoners would be carted along what is now Oxford Street to the communal gallows at Tyburn - opposite present-day Speakers' Corner.
You can get a sense of the ribald chaos of the crowds of Londoners attending these events in Hogarth's etching The Idle Apprentice. It is currently on display at Tate Britain, along with virtually all his most important paintings and etchings, in what is the best overview of his work for more than 30 years.
But how much of Hogarth's portrayal of London is caricature, and how much is a true reflection of the city of the time?
Obviously Hogarth worked for effect. He laid on ironies with a shovel, and manipulated his images according to the corruption, hypocrisy or poor taste he wanted to expose.
A scene such as Gin Lane is his essay on the evils he attributed to the drink that had become a panacea for London's underclass. It has the air of a grotesque exaggeration. A drunken woman sprawls on the steps while her child falls into a cellar, another feeds gin to her baby, a man fights with a dog for its bone, another hangs himself in a garret. In the background a house collapses, while the only buildings that are in good repair are the pawnbroker's, the undertaker's and the distillery.
But, for all the exaggeration, the image is built on facts. Hogarth used news stories as well as his direct impressions of the street.
One story, dating from the 1730s, tells of Judith Dufour, who reclaimed her two-year-old child from the workhouse and strangled the infant so that she could sell the clothes to buy gin. Another mother was accused of deliberately blinding a child, the better to elicit sympathy when begging.
The amount of gin that was consumed was extraordinary. In 1751, the year that Hogarth produced the etching, more than 9,000 children died of alcohol poisoning, every fourth house in St Giles sold the stuff and more than 11 million gallons were consumed in a city with a population of much less than a million.
The collapsing house seen in the background of Gin Lane was also a relatively common sight. Much of Hogarth's London was relatively new, rebuilt after the fire of 1666. The stonework of Wren's cathedral and his city churches must still have gleamed. But many of the houses had been hastily reconstructed and often jerry-built. Collapses - in which the occupants and passers-by often died - were commonplace. In 1738, Dr Johnson described London as a city "where falling houses thunder on your head".
Prostitution was another issue. The Strand was one of many streets lined not just with fashionable coffee shops, but with brothels.
Even Casanova was impressed. "It makes a magnificent debauch," he wrote in his memoirs of London. And is there a note of enthusiasm in Boswell's description of the choices available to an interested gentleman - from the "splendid madame at fifty guineas a night" to the "civil nymph" who could be "had for a pint of wine and a shilling"?
Many of these prostitutes were country girls who had been drawn into a city that, in some ways, was flourishing like never before (the population doubled between 1700 and 1800), but few prospered. Hogarth appears to have been accutely sensitive to this, seeming to echo Dr Johnson's edict that a society must be judged by the way it treats its poor.
He traced the fate of the young prostitutes in A Harlot's Progress. Innocent Moll Hackett arrives from the country in the first plate, and steps straight off the coach into the arms of a brothel-keeper. By plate six, aged 23, she is dead, having suffered prison, syphilis and abject poverty. It is not a simplistic narrative - at times Moll appears complicit in the corruption - but she is clearly its principal victim.
Perhaps my favourite evocation of the day to day chaos of the city is The Enraged Musician. Here Hogarth, ever the patriot, is poking fun at an Italian violinist who cannot hear himself practise because of the din from the streets.
Street musicians, bawling babies, a knife-grinder, the cries of itinerant salesmen, barking dogs, a drummer boy and a little girl with a rattle comprise the city orchestra. It is London in its richest variety - and variety, just as much as elegance, was critical to Hogarth's ideas of artistic beauty.
Walking around London today, it is easy to draw parallels between now and then - the traffic-jammed streets, the noise and the crime. Might Gin Lane - as the political commentator Andrew Marr has pointed out - be seen as a prophetic depiction of Heroin Alley?
But what physically remains of Hogarth's London? One or two scenes in the Tate exhibition have a familiar ring. The prospect of Covent Garden in early morning in the Four Times of the Day series has barely altered. Some of the landmarks in the backgrounds of his etchings are also recognisable: church towers such as that of St Martin-in-the-Field, for instance; the dome of St Paul's and the equestrian statue of Charles I at the top of Whitehall.
But much of the city has been rebuilt more than once in the past 250 years. Gin Lane - had it really existed - was set roughly where Centrepoint is now. Ironically, the areas Hogarth would probably recognise most easily were he to return today are the smarter parts of Mayfair - such as Grosvenor Square. These districts were being laid out by entrepreneurial aristocrats on greenfield sites in the 1720s and 1730s, but while many of his interior scenes might have been set inside grand houses such as these, he chose not to paint or etch the elegant pavements and garden courts outside.
Hogarth preferred to explore deeper under the city's skin. Perhaps, in today's London, he would be drawn to the variety and vibrancy of streets such as Brick Lane. But there are still some shadows and echoes of his own London that you can explore - houses, museums, squares and streets where his spirit presides.
-------------------------------------------
HOGARTH'S WORKS
"Gin Lane" (1751) portrays drunken gin-drinkers, victims of the "Gin Craze" that hit Britain at that time. A woman drops her baby, a man is plaes in a coffin - and a collapsing building shows how poorly-built some of the buildings were. This is a real street that can be visited in London, although it has a different name.
----------------------
A self-portrait of Hogarth and his pug (1745). A new exhibition of works by the eighteenth-century painter William Hogarth will open on February 7 at Tate Britain, claimed to be the most comprehensive display of his art for more than 30 years.
-----------------
Hogarth, Marriage A-la-Mode: The Tête à Tête, 1735
Incorporating more than 200 works, the exhibition will cover every aspect of Hogarth's artisitic output, from paintings to drawings and sketches, including numerous engraved works.
-------------
Hogarth, O the Roast Beef of Old England (‘The Gate of Calais’), 1748
As a chronicler of his times Hogarth depicted both the rich and the poor: his works range from elegant conversation pieces to scenes of salacious brothels. Hogarth hated France and this portrait was drawn whilst he was in Calais and records what he saw. The French soldier is a symbol that whereas France is like some sort of state governed by the army, the English on the other hand are freest people on Earth. The roast beef also symbolises England - a land of freedon and of plenty - and Hogarth even set up his own roast beef club - The Beefsteak Club. On the left you can just see Hogarth himself painting the scene.
[[In 1748, William Hogarth painted The Gate Of Calais, better known since as The Roast Beef Of Old England, after his friend Fielding’s song. The picture shows a huge rib of raw beef (so not roast, in fact) being delivered to Madam Grandsire’s, an English hotel in the French channel port of Calais. Surrounding the porter as he staggers towards the door with it is a cast of unappetising French characters: a trio of cackling fishwives clutching a skate, a pair of miserable soldiers strutting with their pikes, a portly friar who takes a faintly dIsgusting interest in the English meat, a couple of emaciated cooks with their bowl of nameless slop, an undernourished wretch (a Scotsman) in the tattered tartan uniform of the failed Jacobite rebellion, who has nothing to eat but an onion… All are in contrast with the anticipated plenty represented by the weighty hunk of ENGLISH meat at the centre of the scene.]]
---------------------
Hogarth, Heads of Six of Hogarth's Servants, c.1750-55
The exhibition examines the whole of Hogarth's output, from juvenalia in the 1720s all the way to the more controversial pieces of the 1750s and early 1760s.
------------------
Hogarth, The Shrimp Girl c. 1740-50
By featuring the work of other artists who draw an influence from Hogarth, it goes on to suggest that he was in fact Britain's first truly modern artist, addressing themes which still preoccupy us today.
--------------
"Beer Street" (1751) Revellers outside a London tavern
telegraph.co.uk
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