Cheers to Hogarth – an artist for all time
Playwright Nick Dear on a career-long passion for the great outsider of British art
Hogarth’s English are often dimwitted, usually drunk, regularly battering each other, hypocritical, venal and vain - yet he loves them
Igrew up believing that art was for others: posh and fancy people, those who knew their way around an avocado. I wasn’t marginalised or impoverished, but I lived in a dull town. The first man on the moon seemed closer than any artist. Then one day 30 years ago, in Covent Garden, I ran into William Hogarth. He was somewhat less than sober, fiercely masculine, and spoiling for a fight. We struck up a friendship.
Hogarth died in 1764, of course. What I’d made friends with was his spirit, his shade. I was researching the popular history of the early 18th century, and like many another researcher, the first thing I turned to was The Harlot’s Progress.
This sequence of pictures of the sad decline of a young prostitute seemed vivid, fresh, and full of the detail that suggested William Hogarth knew what he was talking about.
How, I wondered, did he know so much about the street girls of his day? As I went on to look at more of his art, I saw them there, over and over again.
There seemed to be a double standard. On the one hand, the artist invites pity for the working conditions of prostitutes. On the other, to have painted these pictures, he must have had first-hand experience – presumably by exploiting the women himself.
A glance at something like Boswell’s London Journal suggests that it would have been an unusual young-man-about-town who didn’t take advantage of the sex for sale on every corner.
This double-standard quickly suggested a play. I thought I had found a genuine anti-hero – flawed, difficult, guilty of who knows what, but at the same time highly moralistic, a champion of basic human rights, a campaigner for a better world.
But there was more to it than just this contradiction. Hogarth’s teeming, raunchy, disrespectful satires merged seamlessly with the swagger and greed of London in the Eighties. His outrage struck a chord with my dim view of the changes taking place at the time.
I wanted to use the aggression, chaos and sexual energy of Hogarth’s time to comment on my own. And so I wrote about a frighteningly ambitious, overworked, overstressed young artist in The Art of Success.
Thirty years later I have returned to him for The Taste of the Town. It seems to me that the famously pugnacious painter still has something to say, as he rages against the dying of the light in the dog-days of his career.
The more I looked at his pictures
– A Rake’s Progress, in which a young man inherits enough money to destroy his life quickly; Marriage A-la Mode, in which an arranged marriage for financial gain leads to the breakdown of every moral code; and The Humours
of an Election, a satire of our vapid, self-serving politicians (no change there) – the more he seemed to be my contemporary. It was as if I’d stumbled on art that I understood, felt entitled to, and wasn’t excluded from. Here was an English painter showing us English people, arguing, fighting, flirting, cheating, going about their daily business. We’re not in mansions or manicured gardens, we’re in Soho, Southwark, Seven Dials, among hoi polloi, and there’s invariably something going on in the corner of the frame, and it isn’t always pretty.
The pictures contain their own noise. Few of them give any hint of inner peace. They’re not demure. Nor are they triumphal, like Reynolds or Gainsborough. They want to have a scrap, to engage with their view, and to argue the toss with their author.
Satirical prints were not new in the 1730s. But rarely were they this good. Hogarth’s apprenticeship as an engraver, followed by years of hard experience, allowed him to push the boundaries of etching a plate. There is a confidence in his prints, a facility with detail, that persuades one to overlook the lack of depth, and the curiously over-freighted composition.
And he has inspired countless artists over the generations – from Gillray and Rowlandson in the 1800s to Hockney and Grayson Perry now.
Perhaps Hogarth’s closest artistic relation now is the photographer Martin Parr. Parr also invites an argument with his pictures; they take a position, and challenge the viewer to approve or disapprove of fat people eating chips, or whatever. And Parr’s composition is equally busy, deliberately “clumsy”, resisting the moment decisif of Cartier-bresson – the elegant image – in favour of something that looks more “real”.
However, when in 1986 I set to work on my first play about Hogarth, it was not Parr who sprang to mind, but a more unlikely lensman: David Bailey. Like Hogarth, Bailey was and is the great outsider, the party-crasher, the leather-jacketed, potty-mouthed talent who will not be kept at bay.
Had there been any tracks in 1697, Hogarth would have come from the wrong side of them. He was born in Bartholomew Close, just south of Smithfield Market. His father was a failed scholar and coffee-shop owner, who spent time in debtors’ jail when William was a boy. So his childhood was tainted by poverty and disgrace.
He was determined this wasn’t going to happen to him. He burst in from the gutter with arrogance and verve, revolutionised the business model of British art by succeeding without a patron, and then wondered why the establishment never quite seemed to accept him. That’s what the second play’s about.
The Taste of the Town revisits Hogarth at the end of his life. It’s fair to say, I think, that he died a bitter man. He attempted a painting in the “Sublime” style – Sigismunda – and it was generally perceived as a disaster.
Actually, it is a disaster. It’s a completely horrible picture. But that in itself is not the point.
In these two plays I’m trying to show the course of a life, and how perceptions change, and ambitions, and values. I’m different, no doubt, to how I was 30 years ago, and so is my William Hogarth. I call him “mine” deliberately, because of course he’s a construct, fiction, a raft of ideas based on research – not the man himself.
This notion is emphasised by the fact that we have two actors playing him: the young Bryan Dick in The Art of Success, and the very slightly older Keith Allen in The Taste of the Town. They’re not the same person, nor are they trying to replicate each other’s physical or vocal mannerisms. But onstage they share Hogarth’s thinskinned jealousy, his bouts of blazing fury, his delight in drink, and his oddly touching moments of tenderness.
In the new play I take him on one last bender, out of his country house at Chiswick, and down the winding Thames. He’s spoiling for a fight, but he’s also got to have his afternoon nap. So what do we owe Hogarth? We remember him primarily for his satires, of course, but throughout his life he was active in the wider world. He belonged to an age in which charitable works were seen as a responsibility of those who had made money. He was one of the originators of the Foundling Hospital, and was instrumental in the establishment of the Royal Academy of Arts.
I look to him, though, for another quality: his particular and peculiar Englishness. Time and again he delineates our national characteristics, and he doesn’t spare our blushes. His English are often dim-witted, usually drunk, regularly battering each other, hypocritical, venal and vain – yet he loves them, he’s one of them, and he believes them capable of great things. Everyone is just a step away from debt, disgrace, disease and disaster – much like now – but that’s not going to spoil the party. Whose round is it, Will?