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These words are quite in the spirit of Hogarth’s later “Time smoking a Picture.” As a matter of fact, they are reproduced almost textually from the writer’s letter of five years earlier on the “March to Finchley.” To return, however, to History Painting. According to Rouquet, its leading exponent[1] under George the Second was Francis Hayman of the “large noses and shambling legs,” now known chiefly as a crony of Hogarth, and a facile but ineffectual illustrator of Shakespeare and Cervantes. In 1754, however, his pictures of See-Saw, Hot Cockles, Blind Man’s Buff, and the like, for the supper-boxes at Vauxhall Gardens, with Sayer’s prints therefrom, had made his name familiar, although he had not yet painted those more elaborate compositions in the large room next the rotunda, over which Fanny Burney’s “Holborn Beau,” Mr, Smith, comes to such terrible grief in ch. xlvi. of Evelina. But he had contributed a “Finding of Moses” to the New Foundling Hospital, which is still to be seen in the Court Room there, in company with three other pictures executed concurrently for the remaining compartments, Joseph Highmore’s “Hagar and Ishmael,” James Wills’s “Suffer little Children,” and Hogarth’s “Moses brought to Pharaoh’s Daughter”–the best of the four, as well as the most successful of Hogarth’s historical pieces. All these, then recently installed, are mentioned by Rouquet.

[Note:

1: This is confirmed by Arthur Murphy: “Every Thing is put out of Hand by this excellent Artist with the utmost Grace and Delicacy, and his History-Pieces have, besides their beautiful Colouring, the most lively Expression of Character” ( Gray’s Inn Journal, February 9, 1754 ).]

It will be observed that he says nothing about Hogarth’s earlier and more ambitious efforts in the “Grand Style,” the “Pool of Bethesda” and the “Good Samaritan” at St. Bartholomew’s, nor of the “Paul before Felix,” also lately added to Lincoln’s Inn Hall–omissions which must have sadly exercised the “author” of those monumental works when he came to read his Swiss friend’s little treatise. Nor, for the matter of that, does M. Rouquet, when he treats of portrait, refer to Hogarth’s masterpiece in this kind, the full-length of Captain Coram at the Foundling. On the other hand, he says a great deal about Hogarth which has no very obvious connection with History Painting. He discusses the Analysis and the serpentine Line of Beauty with far more insight than many of its author’s contemporaries; refers feelingly to the Act by which in 1735 the painter had so effectively cornered the pirates; and finally defines his satirical pictures succinctly as follows:–“M. Hogarth has given to England a new class of pictures. They contain a great number of figures, usually seven or eight inches high. These remarkable performances are, strictly speaking, the history of certain vices, to a foreign eye often a little overcharged, but always full of wit and novelty. He understands in his compositions how to make pleasant pretext for satirising the ridiculous and the vicious, by firm and significant strokes, all of which are prompted by a lively, fertile and judicious imagination.”

From History Painting to Portrait in Oil, the title given by M. Rouquet to his next chapter, transition is easy. Some of the artists mentioned above were also portrait painters. Besides Captain Coram, for example, Hogarth had already executed that admirable likeness of himself which is now at Trafalgar Square, and which Rouquet must often have seen in its home at Leicester Fields. Highmore too had certainly at this date painted more than one successful portrait of Samuel Richardson, the novelist; and even Hayman had made essay in this direction with the picture of Lord Orford, now in the National Portrait Gallery. A good many of the painters of the last reign must also, during Rouquet’s residence in England, have been alive and active,
e.g. Jervas, Dahl, Aikman, Thornhill and Richardson. But M. Rouquet devotes most of his pages in this respect to Kneller, whose not altogether beneficent influence long survived him. Strangely enough, Rouquet does not mention that egregious and fashionable face-painter, Sir Joshua’s master, Thomas Hudson, whose “fair tied-wigs, blue velvet coats, and white satin waistcoats” (all executed by his assistants) reigned undisputed until he was eclipsed by his greater pupil. The two artists in portraiture selected by Rouquet for special notice are Allan Ramsay and the younger Vanloo (Jean Baptiste). Both were no doubt far above their predecessors; but Ramsay would specially appeal to Rouquet by his continental training, and Vanloo by his French manner and the superior variety of his attitudes.[2] The only other name Rouquet recalls is that of the drapery-painter Joseph Vanhaken; and we suspect it is to Rouquet that we owe the pleasant anecdote of the two painters who, for the sum of L800 a year, pre-empted his exclusive and inestimable services, to the wholesale discomfiture of their brethren of the brush. The rest shall be told in Rouquet’s words:–“The best [artists] were no longer able to paint a hand, a coat, a background; they were forced to learn, which meant additional labour–what a misfortune! Henceforth there arrived no more to Vanhaken from different quarters of London, nor by coach from the most remote towns of England, canvases of all sizes, where one or more heads were painted, under which the painter who forwarded them had been careful to add, pleasantly enough, the description of the figures, stout or slim, great or small, which were to be appended. Nothing could be more absurd than this arrangement; but it would exist still–if Vanhaken existed.”[3]