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| WFU
92
William Hogarth The Four Times of Day: Night (1738) Etching and engraving 17.5 x 14.5 inches |
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| William
Hogarth was born on November 10, 1697 to an impoverished schoolmaster.
At his own request, he was apprenticed to a silver-plate engraver, subsequently
turning to copper-plate engraving. By 1720 he had his own business engraving
shop-bills and plates for booksellers. At this time Hogarth began attending
a private art school and printed A Harlot's Progress. Although this
series was an overwhelming success, Hogarth did not reap much benefit from
it due to the lack of strict copyright laws. He and a friend petitioned
Parliament to correct this lack of jurisdiction, and in 1735 an act was
passed stating that designers and engravers had an exclusive right to their
own works, thus restricting the multiplication of copies without their
consent.
In 1738, Hogarth created the series The Four Times of Day after four paintings commissioned by Jonathan Tyers in 1736 for the decoration of Vauxhall Gardens. The prints have been interpreted as a parody of the middle-class and of the vulgar entertainment in London at this time. Morning depicts Covent Gardens during winter where a spinster is on her way to St. Paul's Church, attended by a boy who carries her prayer book. She is horrified to see the behavior of two boastful men as they fawn over two young women in the market. It has been suggested that Hogarth is playing off the notions of age and winter, and youth and warmth. All the characters are warming themselves in different ways, whereas the spinster symbolized the bitter weather. In the background, two little boys are on their way to school, while at the same time, the fraudulent Dr. Rock advertises his cures, and a fight has started in Tom King's Coffeehouse. Noon is set in spring where the street is bordered by a restaurant, a chapel, and a tavern with the staple of St. Giles-in-the-Fields in the background. Huguenot refugees, who had prospered in English trade and commerce, are attending the chapel for Sunday morning service. The ways in which the Huguenots are dressed shows their status in England. For example, the older refugees are traditionally dressed as opposed to the younger refugees who are dressed in the height of fashion. The left side of the print is careless, exemplified by the boy dropping a dish and spilling the contents, the young girl allowing a black man to take improper sexual liberties with her, and a woman emptying a shoulder of mutton and vegetables from a window. The crying boy, taken from Poussin's Rape of the Sabines, does not even notice the disheveled girl helping herself to the food, which it is his job to deliver. The third print in the series is Evening. This print illustrates summer at Sadler's Wells, the bourgeois counterpart to the aristocratic Vauxhall. A citizen and his wife and family promenade outside the Sadler's Wells Theater and the Sir Hugh Middleton Tavern, named after the philanthropist who brought water from the north into London by channels leading out of the Islington reservoir. In this print, a woman is presented as a annoyance, rather than a blessing to man. The masterful, sensual and pregnant wife has controlled her docile husband; the cow's horns behind her husband's head suggest that the wife had been adulterous. The daughter scolds her younger brother, who has been using his father's walking stick as a hobbyhorse, and points accusingly at the gingerbread cake in the shape of a king. The last print in the series, Night, is a scene of a street leading to Charing Cross. Dominating the street is a statue of Charles I by Le Sueur. This scene takes place on Restoration Day, May 29, which is indicated by the oak boughs that decorate the barber's sign and the hats of the people passing by. The moonlit scene takes place between Rummer Tavern and the Cardigan's Head, two well-known venues in the narrowest part of the street where congestion is at its worst. The Salisbury Flying Coach has overturned in a bonfire in the middle of the road while its frightened passengers struggle to get out. As this is going on an intoxicated mason (indicated by the emblem of his craft) is being led home by a maid of sorts from his lodge as a chamber pot is being emptied on his head from the window above. The mason has been identified as Sir Thomas de Veil, Fielding's predecessor at Bow Street, a judge whose indulgences demanded close attention to the profits of office, and who, though intelligent and able, was consequently unpopular. Hogarth was working in a time where George II ruled England, and his prints reflect the crudity and prosperity of the age. War was welcomed amongst English merchants who saw it as an opportunity to seize wealth and trade with the world. In Hogarth's prints we see a mixture of grandeur and unpleasantness that made up eighteenth century London. Hogarth's works now serve as a printed history of what was going on and the attitude toward it during his lifetime. Morgan Edwards (2001) References
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