Those who have visited the Sir John Soane’s Museum before will have enjoyed the set times when Soane’s specially designed hinged panels in the Picture Room are ceremoniously opened for all to see. These display the usually hidden A Rake’s Progress paintings by Hogarth, but it is difficult to really appreciate them without closer examination. There has been speculation about why access to the concealed Rake paintings was regulated. One theory is that this protected the modest and/or female viewer from the scenes of debauchery. However, to devise a way to view the paintings in the current exhibition the curators have referred to an 1884 Graphic Magazine engraving which shows the Rake series removed from the panels and displayed in the museum on free-standing screens. In the print, it is a female visitor who studies the paintings intently, clearly fascinated and unperturbed by the content. A more convincing argument is made by artist Ed Gray whose own work centres on scenes of contemporary London life which draw on Hogarth for inspiration. For him, in the Picture Room, Soane proposed a ‘three-dimensional model of society’, a ‘dissection of the moral state of a nation’ through his arrangement of Hogarth’s work.[1] The current adoption of screens directs the ‘progress’ of the visitor through the works on show in the order of their creation and successfully allows real scrutiny, albeit in the cramped conditions which the popularity of this exhibition has created. Each series is teased apart and resists a deft abridged version of Hogarth’s view of society and its corruption. The visitor must work towards any conclusion through careful consideration of Hogarth’s detailed compositions. All Hogarth’s painted and engraved series are shown here together for the first time, a significant achievement when the 2007 Tate exhibition had seemed to represent a definitive exploration of the artist’s oeuvre. The focus is on the London locations in the series, on their ‘moral geography’, and the Sir John Soane’s Museum is the ideal place for this to be staged.
The ‘progress’ of Soane’s career, the accumulation of both original artefacts and copies and his intellectual engagement with history form the backdrop for Hogarth’s ‘Progress’ paintings. The exhibition takes us to different floors of the house so that the permanent collection interweaves a context for Hogarth: Soane’s real and fantastic architectural projects, his family and friends, his ‘shrine’ to Shakespeare. Through his Hogarth paintings Soane identified with a distinguished line of collectors such as William Beckford Senior (who had owned the Rake and Harlot series) and David Garrick, who celebrated the Englishness of Hogarth along with that of the newly cherished Shakespeare. The contents of the house reify an eighteenth-century model of the progress of man through the development of his art, from the ancient Egyptians to Neo-Classical order and proportion.
Soane’s own success allowed him to build his house in an ideal position, between the old merchant wealth of the City and the new impetus for display of the West End, both of which provided him with his clients. Did he see any similarity, we wonder, between the design of his own house in Lincoln’s Inn as well as the 1st Baron Archer’s house on the north side of Covent Garden and that of the smart new house seen under construction through the window in Plate 1 of Marriage A-La-Mode? This element of the plate is both an observation and a satirical comment about ‘progress’. Curator David Bindman observes in his catalogue essay that wealthy viewers of paintings such as Marriage A-La-Mode would not necessarily read criticism of their own affluent lifestyles per se but instead saw an admonition of those who failed to live up to the high standards expected of the privileged classes. Bindman refutes the notion that Hogarth can be simply characterised as a ‘man of the people’ opposed to the status quo. The exhibition introduction notes that the area between the City and the West End, encompassing the Covent Garden brothels, theatres and artists’ studios, was a pivotal point in Hogarth’s construction of the moral geography of London. Its back streets and cramped dwellings provide the stages upon which his dramas are played, and it was often in the asylums and prisons beyond the City walls that his unfortunates ended their journeys.
The museum context prompts anticipation of an overall narrative of progression throughout Hogarth’s series. The catalogue points to the different meanings of ‘progress’. In the eighteenth century it did not necessarily have our present association with forward momentum, a path towards achieving a goal. It defined, for example, the spiritual journey for a pilgrim, which was not always an easy one, or the grim journey taken by a condemned man to Tyburn with its stops along the way. Hogarth himself took part in a fairly delinquent romp around the Kent coast with four friends in May 1732, recounted in The Five Days Peregrination Around the Isle of Sheppey. It was a form of anti-Royal Progress, flouting all the rules of decorum and decency in ways that only a group of boisterous young men can contrive. Hogarth’s innovative series depict moral journeys which relate the geography of London to different states of strength or weakness, success or failure. Each painting offers a single snapshot to illustrate the result of a character’s choice. It does not illustrate the moment of decision, such as in the many artistic interpretations of the iconic ‘Choice of Hercules’, a moment in which Hercules contemplates at a crossroad whether to take the path to virtue or to vice. We are left to complete the gaps in each progress through our imagination. We enter the moral landscape and are drawn in to make predictions or judgements on salutary tales familiar in the mid-eighteenth century through a variety of different media such as the novel, drama and satirical verse or print. The temptations and choices resonate today. London is still a magnet for the dispossessed and the desperate.
The eight paintings of A Rake’s Progress (1734) occupy the central screen in the first room of the exhibition. It is a familiar series but here in the first painting we have the opportunity to note the splashes of gold and silver highlights, the contents of the dark unlocked cupboards and the spectacles and crutches by the fireplace, possessions of the young Tom Rakewell’s diseased miserly father. Tom moves from this dilapidated City house to a West End mansion and carouses in the Rose tavern in Drury Lane where his decline begins. The faces of painted portraits on the wall, possibly of the twelve Caesars described by Suetonius in the first century, have been ripped off and one lies at Tom’s feet. This is a more subtle motif of corruption and venery in Hogarth’s painting but, added to the rowdy activities surrounding Tom, it contributes to a many-layered commentary on the young man’s decline. Returning to his West End home, Tom is arrested in Piccadilly in sight of St James’s and is rescued by his faithful and abandoned girlfriend who has been reduced to selling ribbons on the street. Abandoning her once again, Tom marries an old widow in St. Marylebone Church, a church well-known for allowing illicit marriages, and falling into decay at that time until it was demolished in 1740. Hogarth includes a crack running through the twelve commandments and a spider’s web over the poor box, more as signs of moral than physical decline. Tom returns to Covent Garden to gamble away the widow’s funds, before moving north of the City to the Fleet debtors Prison and finally to Bethlehem hospital, the madhouse where he ends his days.
Tom’s move from east to west and finally north of London tracks success and hopelessness. Soane’s copy of A Harlot’s Progress (1732) remains only in prints following a fire in 1755 which destroyed the paintings. The museum displays the six prints round the walls in the first room. The idea for the series came, according to George Vertue, from ‘a small picture of a common harlot, supposed to dwell in drewry Lane […] this whore’s desabillé careless and a Pretty Countenance & air -this thought pleasd many.’ Hogarth realised the potential in paintings of a pretty young woman. The catalogue notes that as a result ‘the outwardly earnest morality of his ‘Modern Moral Subjects’ should not be taken completely at face value.’ (p.56). Moll Hackabout is an innocent country girl who arrives in Cheapside, progresses to a rich merchant’s house in Covent Garden but never arrives like Tom in the wealthy West End. Instead she lives as a prostitute upstairs in the Rose Tavern, where Tom caroused downstairs, and she beats hemp in the Bridewell before ending her days in a Barbican slum. Moll’s London gives her no choice other than sickness, poverty and decline.
The second room displays the Marriage A-La-Mode series of 1743-45, an introduction noting that the ‘couple symbolise the ethos of the West End and the City’. Unusually, an unfinished series The Happy Marriage (after 1745) has been assembled in its likely order and is juxtaposed to demonstrate Hogarth’s project to counter the doomed ill-suited London couple with an idealised pair, their country wedding and its consequent happy and fruitful married life. Hogarth recycled his sketch The Dance from this series for an illustration in his The Analysis of Beauty (1753). Bucolic charm and harmonious contentment are not themes we readily associate with Hogarth so we are not surprised that this series did not prosper. Equally, the decent, hard-working righteous life of the industrious apprentice, for all his charitable worthiness, is a less convincing portrait than the downright unredeemable idle apprentice who ends his days at Tyburn, in Industry and Idleness (1747). By the time we reach this series, we have moved down through the house into the basement, where the apprentices share panels with Gin Lane and Beer Street (1751). The consequences of moral weakness not only for individuals but for the nation play out in specific London locations.
The connections between ‘Place’ and the Modern Moral Subjects which formed Hogarth’s enduring themes have always featured in Hogarth scholarship but this exhibition maps and highlights the few square miles of eighteenth-century London where the inexorable progress of ruin and destruction overtakes so many of his characters. The location of the Sir John Soane Museum at the heart of Hogarth’s London adds rich context to the exhibition and invites fresh engagement with the much-loved series we all assumed we knew so well.
[1]See Ed Gray Art: http://www.edgrayart.com/blog/a-national-dissection-an-anatomical-anaysis-of-sir-john-soanes-picture-room-and-his-curation-of-the-work-of-william-hogarth/ [accessed 29 October 2019]
Hogarth: Place and Progress is at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London from 9 October 2019 to 5 January 2020.