Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [43]
Bellini
Bosch
Botticelli
Bruegel
Canaletto
Caravaggio
Carracci
Claude
Correggio
Dürer
El Greco
Giorgione
Hals
Holbein
La Tour
Leonardo
Masaccio
Michelangelo
Poussin
Raphael
Rembrandt
Reni
Rubens
Tiepolo
Tintoretto
Titian
Van Dyck
Van Eyck
Velázquez
Vermeer
Veronese
Zurbarán
ENGLISH BAROQUE
The seventeenth century was a period of upheaval in England, with Charles I losing his head, Cromwell destroying church art, and Parliament seizing power. While in literature the 1600s was an era of extraordinary creativity (Shakespeare, Donne, Milton), the visual arts in England lagged far behind. Since religious art was forbidden in Puritan churches and the taste for mythological subjects never caught on, English art was limited almost exclusively to portraits. In the past, England had imported its painters (Holbein and van Dyck). Now, for the first time, it produced three important native artists: Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Reynolds.
HOGARTH: THE ARTIST AS SOCIAL CRITIC. “I have endeavored to treat my subjects as a dramatic writer; my picture is my stage,” wrote the painter/engraver William Hogarth (1697-1764). Influenced by contemporary satirists like Fielding and Swift, Hogarth invented a new genre — the comic strip — or a sequence of anecdotal pictures that poked fun at the foibles of the day. The masses bought engravings based on these paintings by the thousands as Hogarth became the first British artist to be widely admired abroad.
Hogarth’s lifelong crusade was to overcome England’s inferiority complex and worship of continental artists. He criticized the Old Masters as having been “smoked into worth” by time, and thereby rendered nearly indecipherable; he denounced fashionable portrait painters as “face painters.” In his portraits, he refused to prettify the subject, believing that irregularities revealed character. Commissions, as a result, were few, which led him to discover his true calling — satirical prints.
Hogarth, “Breakfast Scene,” from Marriage à la Mode, c.1745, NG, London. Hogarth is best known for satirical pictures poking fun at English society.
When Hogarth was still a boy, his schoolmaster father had been imprisoned for debt, an experience that permanently marked the painter. In his series The Rake’s Progess, Hogarth candidly shows the seamy side of life, exposing the deplorable conditions of debtors’ prison and Bedlam hospital for the insane. Hogarth could also be considered the first political cartoonist. He drew his targets from the whole range of society, satirizing with equal aplomb the idle aristocracy, drunken urban working class (a first in visual art), and corrupt politicians.
Hogarth’s series Marriage à la Mode ridiculed a nouveau riche bride wed to a dissolute viscount in a marriage arranged to improve the social standing of the former and bank account of the latter. As Hogarth’s friend, Henry Fielding, wrote in the comic novel Tom Jones, “His designs were strictly honorable, as the phrase is; that is, to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage.”
Hogarth used many small touches to suggest the storyline of his paintings. In “Breakfast Scene,” a bride coyly admires the groom her father’s dowry has purchased, while the dissheveled noble looks gloomy, hung over, or both. The clock, with its hands past noon, suggests a sleepless night of debauchery, further indicated by the cards on the floor, overturned chair, and broken sword. The lace cap in the aristocrat’s pocket hints at adultery.
Uncompromising honesty tinged with humor were the hallmarks of Hogarth’s art. He once said he would rather have “checked the progress of cruelty than been the author