Shock, Horror: Hogarth 'Not Politically Correct'

Hogarth and Europe: It's an intriguing-sounding exhibition at Tate Britain; the chance to see that great chronicler of 18th-century London life, William Hogarth, compared with his contemporaries in Paris, Venice and Amsterdam. Hogarth "was not alone," the Tate tells us on its website. "Across Europe, artists were creating vivid images of contemporary life and social commentary." So we went along in the expectation that we were going to see Hogarth's story-telling and insight reflected in similar scenes from across the continent. 

Alas no. Somewhere between the conception and the execution, another idea seems to have taken hold. For one thing, few of the pictures on show here from French, Italian or Dutch artists are a patch on Hogarth, and they don't really live up to the billing of vivid social commentary. And there also appears to be a determined attempt to present Hogarth as an ingrained misogynist and racist, failing to live up to 21st-century values. "Works shown here often express a critical view of society, but they also reveal the entrenchment of racist, sexist and xenophobic stereotypes," we're told right at the start. An 18th-century white male, not politically correct? Well, there's a shock. 

More of that in a bit, but if you're already asking yourself, why go, the answer is: Hogarth and more Hogarth. Dozens of works by the creator of some of the most memorable images in British art, with loans from private collections and American museums providing the chance to appreciate pictures you've perhaps never seen before.  

Such as Southwark Fair, from the Cincinnati Art Museum, one of those panoramic Hogarth paintings in which a vast number of stories are all happening at the same time; comedy, tragedy, drama, suspense, featuring thieves, actors, fisticuffs, music, animals, children and a whole lot besides.

The woman selling earthenware goods in the right foreground is so engrossed in her game of dice that she's oblivious to the imminent destruction of her stock as the stage behind her gives way. And there are others on the point of falling to their doom, heightening the sense of collapse: rope-walkers and a monkey clinging to the top of a pole.

You really can make an entire exhibition out of one Hogarth painting, as the Foundling Museum very successfully showed a couple of years ago with an in-depth show deconstructing The March of the Guards to Finchley. 

That same painting opens the Tate exhibition, but visitors here are sadly given no hint of the multiplicity of themes it contains.

The curators seem keener to get you on to O the Roast Beef of Old England, Hogarth's allegory of British nationalism. It's full, they tell us in the wall caption, of xenophobic stereotypes, underfed French soldiers, the overweight Catholic friar and the exiled Scottish soldier. Well, you know what; it's a satirical image, and those caricatures point up the jokes. Satire, caricature, there's a fine tradition from Hogarth through Gillray and Rowlandson to Steve Bell and Martin Rowson. 

There are lots of painterly allusions in this picture, and the curators do point out an echo of Chardin. But rather ham-fistedly, instead of linking the face on the flat fish at the bottom left to Chardin's The Ray, which they were presumably unable to borrow from the Louvre, they ask us to compare Hogarth's rendering of the beef to a Chardin still-life of a kitchen table with some eggs and salmon, borrowed from the Scottish National Galleries. 

The wall texts ("written by a number of commentators invited to share their perspectives and expertise") are sometimes enlightening, sometimes wearisomely full of wokeism and sheer speculation. We're certainly not the first to highlight the ludicrousness of the suggestion by visual artist Sonia E. Barrett on Hogarth's Self-Portrait Painting the Comic Muse, that the chair on which the painter is sitting, "made from timbers shipped from the colonies, via routes which also shipped enslaved people", might "also stand-in for all those unnamed black and brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity."  

The first room introduces us to Hogarth; the second section of the show takes us round the four major cities that are featured, irritatingly referred to repeatedly throughout on the wall captions as London, England; Paris, France; Venice, Italy; and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. 

A huge 1746 map of London sets the scene; the landmarks of the Tower of London, St Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey can easily be discerned and, in Southwark, we find the wonderfully named Dirty Lane; what could be more Hogarthian? 

To the left of the map are two Canalettos, depicting the Vauxhall and Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens, those 18th-century attractions that were the places to go in London. They're in rather sharp contrast to Hogarth's crowded views of the city: the architecture and trees loom large and the people in the bright clothes are small and carefully placed and spaced about just as if they were the barges and gondolas of the Venetian painter's usual works.

Canaletto's London seems prettified and sterile, and a lot less than colourful, when you look at the Hogarth scenes nearby, even if they are just black-and-white prints. There's the squalor of Gin Lane, of course, where you could get drunk for a penny and dead drunk for tuppence, contrasted with the much healthier delights of Beer Street. How much life there is in the story of The Enraged Musician, driven to distraction by the clamour of Europe's biggest city right outside his window. It's always a delight to discover some new subplot in these multilayered narratives, and we were intrigued to find at the bottom edge of the Noon scene from The Times of Day a squashed cat lying in the road, apparently the victim of a passing cart or coach. 

Paris wasn't that much smaller than London in the mid-18th century. The wall map shows us a lot more highly formal gardens than on this side of the Channel, echoing those at Versailles or Villandry on the Loire. But what we're really looking for is the Rue du vin rouge or indeed the Musicien en colère. Where is the Parisian Hogarth? Could it be Etienne Jeaurat?

Well, possibly. There's plenty going on in this Scene in the Streets of Paris, one of a set of five paintings by Jeaurat presented to us. There's an awful lot of finger-pointing from the women left of centre. What is that in the kidney-shaped basin on legs on the left; could it be some sort of bassinet? The woman in the yellow skirt appears to be at the centre of the drama. Our minds turned to some sort of story about disputed paternity, perhaps, but that's a wild surmise; we could be barking up the completely wrong tree. There's no elucidation of this or any of the other four paintings, which is a shame. However, the caption introducing the five works makes very clear these urban scenes were not held in high regard in France, unlike history paintings. Doesn't this tend to rather undermine the Tate's exhibition premise?

A little further on, there's another Hogarth-like series, from a different artist, Nicolas Lancret. But Lancret's Four Times of Day are full of unexplained details and fail to give us the narratives of a Hogarth box set. 

While London and Paris were inexorably on an upward path in the age of Hogarth, Venice and Amsterdam had perhaps already seen their best days. There's not really a lot of Venetian art to detain us long in this show, and the Amsterdam focus is very much on Cornelis Troost. 

Troost is certainly an artist with a sense of Hogarthian observational humour, but there's not really an air of Hogarthian moral judgement about his work. The most striking of his pictures in this show depicts the sort of practical joke a few tanked-up Ajax supporters might play (and circulate on social media) in a more modern era. The Ambassador of the Rascals has had a face painted on his bottom and is exposing it from the top-floor window of an inn to the amusement or bemusement of those outside. Compounding the joke, a couple of Bible-wielding Quakers sit by the door of the inn, blissfully unaware of the proceedings, or perhaps just steadfastly ignoring them. 

The performance is accompanied by a fanfare from two (ahem) blacked-up trumpeters. Artist Raimi Gbadamosi tells us on the wall that "in the painting blackface is used as a device to separate people. Troost allows a moment for black face and white-bottom to meet, or Racism and White supremacy." Right. 

There's more of this stuff in a section entitled Questioning Hogarth. The painting Taste in High Life (later turned into a print) certainly shows a fashionable woman fondling the chin of a small black boy dressed as a page, treating him as a pet rather than a fellow human. The boy "displays the woman's sexual depravity," social-work academic Janet Couloute tells us. Really? He's only about six. "The figures' powdered white complexions mimic the whiteness of porcelain, and are contrasted with the ornamentalised Black skin of the page," she goes on. "It is as if Hogarth's worst fears are being realised, with the figures corseted into the objects of their enslavement."

But this attempt to paint Hogarth as a racist surely ignores a lot of evidence from his paintings and prints which depict black characters pointing out the follies of Georgian society. What about the two black boys looking gleefully on from their vantage point atop a wall at the post-electoral chaos in Chairing the Member, or the grinning young black servant sitting in front of the adulterous lawyer Silvertongue and pointing at the horns on a statue, highlighting the cuckoldry in the fourth scene of Marriage A-la-mode? 

Luckily, Marriage A-la-Mode is here in this show, so you can make up your own mind, as are also The Rake's Progress and A Harlot's Progress. If you missed the fantastic show of all Hogarth's series at Sir John Soane's Museum a couple of years ago, or even if you didn't, this is a fine opportunity to see a large number in one place. Alas, though, the Tate is rather skimpy with detailed explanations of the individual scenes.

Other parts of this show, meanwhile, are a real shambles. One room is devoted to French paintings including some by Watteau that seem to have little to do with the vivid social commentary we're promised. And what is the point of The Hunting Lunch, by an unknown artist, the largest painting in this show, which must have been transported at some expense from Orleans, if the Tate isn't going to tell us anything about it? 

But to get back to the point: There are Hogarth paintings in this exhibition that we've rarely had the privilege to see, and some of them are in the final room of this infuriating show.

Such as Miss Mary Edwards, from the Frick Collection, one of Hogarth's most important patrons and the owner of Southwark Fair, the painting we started off with. It's a stunning portrait, one of Hogarth's best, and contains a number of attributes normally associated with male portraiture and testifying to Edwards's right to be seen as an independent woman on her own terms, rather than a mere appendage of her husband. 

To sum up: some superb Hogarth paintings; not that much of interest from the other artists represented; and the curation of this show is really poor. If you go, do remember this: "The past is a foreign country: They do things differently there."

Practicalities

Hogarth and Europe is on at Tate Britain until March 20 and is open daily from 1000 to 1800. Full-price tickets cost £18 and are available online here. We actually spent more than three hours in this show, but we do tend to be more assiduous than the average exhibition-goer. The nearest London Underground station is Pimlico on the Victoria Line, about five minutes' walk away.

Images

William Hogarth, Southwark Fair, 1733, Cincinnati Art Museum
William Hogarth, The March of the Guards to Finchley, 1750. © The Foundling Museum, London
William Hogarth, O the Roast Beef of Old England ('The Gate of Calais'), 1748, Tate
Canaletto, The Grand Walk, Vauxhall Gardens, c. 1751, Compton Verney Art Gallery & Park, Warwickshire
Etienne Jeaurat, Scene in the Streets of Paris, 1757, Madresfield Estate, Worcestershire
Nicolas Lancret, The Four Times of Day: Morning, by 1739, National Gallery, London
Cornelis Troost, Misled: The Ambassador of the Rascals Exposes Himself from the Window of 't Bokki Tavern in the Haarlemmerhout, c. 1739-50, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
William Hogarth, Miss Mary Edwards, 1742, The Frick Collection, New York. Photo: Joe Coscia Jr.