At the Golden Head, Leicester Fields

William Hogarth’s home and business premises, outdoors and indoors

 

 

 

Robert LS Cowley

 

 

Sometime late in the year 1733, a married couple – call them Billy and Jenny – came into the money that they had earned through their hard work, skill, originality, and by being in the right place at the right time.^[1] They were the ‘eminent’ engraver – and painter – as William Hogarth (‘Billy’, 1697–1764) was termed in the press at the time of his marriage to Jane (‘Jenny’) Thornhill (1709–1789) in 1729. With success, they did what couples often do, which was to stop living with Billy’s in-laws on the edge of a noisy market-place – however posh it was to have an address in the Covent Garden Piazza – and set up their own business in a quieter, upmarket London square, three streets away (Pl 1, Pl 1a, Pl 1b, Pl 1c, Pl 1d).

 

 

1 Engraving of Leicester Square, drawn and engraved by Thomas Bowles
and printed for Carrington Bowles in St Paul’s Churchyard, 1753.
Part of Hogarth’s house and the bust over the door are in heavy shadow close to the margin on the right (see Pl 1c)

 

 

 

1a Map of Leicester Square [or Fields], from the Plan of London, c1799, by Richard Horwood,
surveyor and cartographer (c1758–1803). Detail showing Hogarth’s house as No. 30 in the terrace running SSW/NNE,
close to the bottom of the map on the east (right-hand) side of the Square.
‘Leicester Co[ur]t’ may have been a mews, giving access to the back of Hogarth’s house.
Hogarth reportedly kept his coach in stabling at the Old Nag’s Head in Orange Street, seen to the south (bottom)

 

 

 

1b Leicester Square in 1754. English School. Engraving.
This gives an idea of how the houses were disposed behind the facades and of the spaces behind them

 

 

 

1c Hogarth’s house, detail of Pl 1

 

 

There they lived for the rest of their professional lives, and it was where Jenny continued to live and work as a businesswoman during her long widowhood. After her death, their house became absorbed into the Hotel de la Sabloniere (Pl 1d).

 

 

1d ‘Hotel de la Sabloniere, Leicester Square London’, announcement of the opening of Louis Jaquier’s hotel.
Etching by Peter Mazell after Samuel Rawle, late 1790.
Hogarth’s house, No. 30, is the part of the façade covered by the name ‘Sabloniere’. Note statue of George I

 

 

The couple had made their money from the sale of the prints of the popular A Harlot’s Progress (published 1732), A Midnight Modern Conversation published in the same year, and Hogarth’s earlier satires, as well as from commissioned paintings (family-pieces among them).^[2] The profits enabled the couple to lease a roomy house, four storeys or floors high, with a basement, in Leicester Square, still popularly known at the time as Leicester Fields. They set up the house, which came into the category of the larger standard size of Georgian house (a ‘first rate’), as their business premises and home (Pl 1e, Pl 1f, Pl 1g).

 

 

1e Exploded diagram of Georgian town house, showing vaults under the pavement.
From the website Jane Austen’s World, ‘Characteristics of the Georgian Town House’

 

 

 

1f Cut-away of Georgian town house.
From the website Jane Austen’s World, ‘Characteristics of the Georgian Town House’

 

 

 

1g Georgian house ratings

 

 

This essay is divided into halves, the first is about the outside of the house and then the second is about the inside and backyard. The outside section is particularly concerned with the façade and the bust of a golden head which surmounted the lintel. The inside section represents a description of the interior of the building, its occupants, and what occurred there at the height of its owners’ careers. This second half is largely speculation since little is known about the interior before the building was demolished in the 19th century. The hope is that the descriptions are fairly close to what the house and its occupants might have been like. Speculation is there to be shot at: it is worth it if it brings followers of Hogarth a step closer to an understanding of what his household was like.

This second section concentrates on events around 1745, because the moment represents the height of Hogarth’s career as an artist, successful businessman, and prosperous family man.^[3] The 1740s were also a time when Hogarth’s fortunes and those of Leicester Fields itself began to turn, the latter from an exclusive, aristocratic London square into a dingy commercial district.^[4]

No. 30 Leicester Fields was a terraced house with three bays and a lintel above the door.^[5] It is not known exactly when the houses in Leicester Square were numbered, and Hogarth never referred to his property as other than as at the Golden Head – and the numbering on Horwood’s plan (Pl 1a) is eccentric. Samuel Phillips engraved Hogarth’s Taste in High Life for John Boydell in 1798 when his own address in the by-line is ‘5 Leicester Square’. By that date, the Hogarths’ house had become part of the Sablonière Hotel which spread over what had been three houses during the late 1780s and early 1790s (see Pl 1d). I refer to the house as ‘No. 30’ for convenience. Hogarth took up a sublease from Lady Howard with a rateable value of £55 around April 1733.^[6] My guestimate is that the house was around 20–22 feet wide (the contractors’ minimum was 18 feet) and as much as 48 feet in depth. If this were so, it gave No. 30 a ground floor of at least 1,000 square feet. The number of its bays, three (see Pl 1d, Pl 1g) identify it as a first-tier house according to the later Buildings Act of 1744.^[7] It was by no means a modest dwelling.

Although such details do not appear in the prints of the time, it is probable that that there was a tradesman’s entrance to the basement down some steps behind and below the front railings and that there was also an entry at the back of the house, perhaps with access to and from Castle Street which ran parallel to the eastern side of the Square.^[8] The frontage probably had a coal-hole with a cast-iron lid set in the pavement.^[9]

William mounted a bust of a famous painter above the door of his house. An account of his making of it has survived: ‘Hogarth made one essay of sculpture. He wanted a sign to distinguish his house in Leicester Fields, and thinking none more proper than the “Golden Head”, he, out of a mass of cork made up of several thicknesses compacted together, carved a bust of Van Dyck, which he gilt and placed over his door’ (see Pl 1c).^[10]

It is not surprising that Hogarth chose to gild the bust, although he could have soaked it in layers of varnish which would have been absorbed by the cork and so better protect it. But gilt with its associations of prestige, prosperity, kingship and the sacred was often associated with business activity and Hogarth would have preferred to associate himself with a splendiferous tint rather than humble shellac.

His choice of a colour, therefore, was part of a wider commercial culture. Inns were called the Golden Lion or the Golden Fleece, a popular sign harking back not only to the classical story, but also to the riches of the medieval wool-trade. A Thomas Taylor sold prints from the Golden Lion and a James Ward from the Golden Spur. Later in 1758, John Tinney took over Taylor’s shop-sign, which was to be at a carved Golden Lion. Edward Cooper sold foreign pictures from the Two Golden Balls.^[11] Robert Sayer worked from Philip Overton’s old shop at the sign of the Golden Buck. Hogarth himself had been apprenticed to a silver and gold-smith who worked from The Golden Angel in ‘Cranbourn Street’, not far from his new home. His satire, Masquerades and Operas (c1720), was printed by James Regnier at the sign of the nearby Golden Ball. Giles King, who ran off cheaper copies of A Harlot’s Progress with Hogarth’s permission, worked from the sign of a Golden Head in Brownlow Street, Covent Garden).^[12] How could Hogarth not make use of this heraldic tincture, an incorruptible metal, or how could he avoid borrowing Giles King’s shop name since there were so many encouraging precedents?

Bowles’s view (Pl 1) includes the equestrian statue of George I in the garden (as did other views of the square such as Pl 1d). The statue had belonged to an establishment figure, the Duke of Chandos. After his death, it was bought by donations from the inhabitants of the square, in 1743, probably on the initiative of the Prince of Wales, who moved in that year into an aristocratic mansion on the north side of the square (top of Pl 1), Leicester House.^[13] The statue was described as ‘finely gilt’ and it became a sight of the town, although it was occasionally abused by vandals hostile to the Hanoverian dynasty. Leicester Square was something of a Hanoverian enclave and Hogarth, by association, was confirmed as a Hanoverian rather than a Stuart supporter. On sunny days, the statue and the bust would glitter as if they were linked. Together with Hogarth’s Golden Head it made a pair of golden landmarks.

It was not uncommon for booksellers and print-sellers to work under the signs of famous people. Jacob Tonson was a bookseller at Shakespeare’s Head. James Round sold books and prints at Seneca’s Head and David Mortier sold books, maps, and prints from Erasmus’s Head. Two booksellers of Flemish origin sold works from Horace’s Head and, later in the century, a John Smith sold prints from the sign of Hogarth’s own head, using a likeness borrowed from his print of The Gate of Calais. Hogarth’s contemporary, Gerard Vandergucht, who was to engrave for him, announced in his trade-card of 1758 that he was moving from the Golden Head in Hanover Square to Van Dyck’s Head in Grosvenor Square. Did he regard himself as a successor of both Van Dyck and Hogarth? Hogarth’s personal twist was to turn the popular image of a golden head into that of an artist of high status with whom he could identify.

Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641) was the foremost court painter in England in the 17th century (Pl 2). His distinctive portraits influenced other painters, including Hogarth, for many years to follow.

 

 

2 Self-portrait by Anthony van Dyck (1699–1741), c1640. Oil on canvas, 56 x 46 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London

 

 

It is less well-remembered that Van Dyck was a man of talents other than portrait-painting. The sketchbook of his stay in Italy shows him to have been a master draughtsman. He painted classical and religious subjects in the Grand Manner, including altarpieces. He composed and gathered together a collection of grisaille portraits of well-known people that, in the form of etchings, was published under the title ‘Iconography’ (posthumously, 1645). The series shaped the way that portrait-prints were to be treated subsequently. Van Dyck was also interested in paint technology and was credited with inventing a natural dye from walnut husks, which resulted in a characteristic brown colour. The crystals were named after him.

Hogarth was already a multi-tasker by 1733. At the end of his unfinished apprenticeship in 1720, he was an experienced, if unhappy, engraver on silver, preferring to work on the more sympathetic copper-plate. He was an illustrator of some repute. He designed book plates, benefit tickets, trade cards, and letter-heads. He was noted for his popular satires, of which Masquerades and Operas was one. He took drawing classes to help him become a better engraver and a painter. He painted theatrical and political conversations and assemblies, and he was known as an ingenious painter of family-groups. He was beginning to find commissions for single portraits. He brought himself lasting fame with his original picture-stories, A Harlot’s Progress (1732) and its successors. He was on course to become a more varied artist and designer than Van Dyck himself. Certainly, to work from the sign of the Golden Head (of Van Dyck) was to declare that Hogarth aspired to be a court-painter and to be recognised as a painter of serious biblical and classical subjects. One difference in their approach to the latter is that Van Dyck preferred only one or two figures in his histories (Samson and Delilah and Cupid and Psyche come to mind), whereas Hogarth invariably liked busier situations, as in The Pool at Bethesda (1734–1737, St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London), or Paul before Felix (1748, 1751, Lincoln’s Inn, London).

Art historians are agreed that Van Dyck influenced Hogarth during his working life and that he also consciously tried to emulate him. In 1757, to take a telling example, Hogarth painted a likeness of Inigo Jones (Pl 3) from a print made by Robert van der Voerst after Van Dyck’s drawing of the architect. Robin Simon has discussed the resulting portrait of Jones in terms of Hogarth indulging in an ‘imitation’, in the Augustan sense, of Van Dyck, the imitation extending to the handling of the paint.^[14] He points out that the drawing itself was in the Devonshire collection and that Hogarth could well have known it, since in 1741 he had painted the heir to this collection, Lord Hartington. Moreover, Hartington became 4th Duke of Devonshire in 1755 and from 1749 Hogarth had a house (which still exists) in Chiswick, close to the Duke’s Chiswick Villa.

There are many other details that point to Van Dyck’s influence upon Hogarth, and a few will have to suffice. A portable altar to the right of Hogarth’s portrait of his friend, David Garrick, posing as Richard III (1745) includes a possible allusion to a Van Dyck altarpiece that Hogarth might have seen on his visits to France. Einberg sees the example of Van Dyck in Hogarth’s treatment of Mary Blackwood’s costume in her portrait of around 1750–51. Werner Busch drew an analogy between Van Dyck’s Christ in his Ecce Homo (1620) and the figure of the arrested Tom Nero in Hogarth’s print, Cruelty in Perfection (1751). Hogarth’s controversial portrait of Archbishop Herring (1744–47, Tate Britain) owed a debt to Van Dyck, while his distribution of the children of Daniel Graham across the frontal plane in that marvellous group portrait (1742, National Gallery) is indebted to Van Dyck’s portrait of the five eldest children of Charles I (1637, Royal Collection), and indeed Uglow believes that the echoes were deliberate.^[15] The sun-flower that is the centre-piece of The Mackinen Children (1742–3, National Gallery of Ireland) may well be a glance at Van Dyck’s Self-portrait with sunflower of 1632 (Collection of the Duke of Westminster).

Hogarth could be touchy about the comparison between himself and Van Dyck, much as he invited it: a conversation among doctors has survived in which Hogarth was complimented by John Freke, the oculist, for being as good a portrait painter as Van Dyck. Hogarth’s boastful reply was ‘so by God I am, give me my time, and let me choose my subject’.^[16] The artist Allan Ramsay declared on one occasion when Hogarth was present that Van Dyck was too great a portrait painter to be emulated by anyone. Hogarth replied, ‘If I did do the thing [paint as well as Van Dyck], I would affirm I had done it.’^[17] In talking of a projected commission to paint Henry Fox, Hogarth declared that if ‘Mr Fox would sit as he liked, [I would] make as good a picture as Vandycke [sic] and Rubens could’. His biographers report an argument with Horace Walpole which took place in Hogarth’s painting room where he made a similar claim. At the time, Walpole was criticising Hogarth’s unfortunate painting Sigismunda, portraying the tragic heroine of Boccaccio’s tale mourning over the heart of her dead lover. Hogarth was distressed, especially because of a rumour that his wife Jane modelled for Sigismunda. A golden head was not merely an advertisement: it had emotional associations.

Hogarth was not, however, afraid to criticise ‘Vandyke [sic]’. In his treatise The Analysis of Beauty (1753) he acknowledged that Van Dyck was one of the best portrait painters in most respects ever known, but asserted that he plainly appeared not to have had a sense of flowing lines. His pictures lacked ‘grace’ other than what ‘life chanced to bring’.^[18] As an example, he reproduced a portrait, possibly of the Duchess of Wharton, as seen in a print by Van Gunst, which was ‘thoroughly divested of every elegance’. Hogarth’s example is figure 52 on the back-wall of the main picture in Plate 2 of The Analysis of Beauty (Pl 4, Pl 4a).^[19]

 

 

 

4, 4a The Analysis of Beauty by William Hogarth (1753), Plate 2, with detail showing the ‘duchess’ (numbered ‘52’)

 

 

Along the way, the Golden Head came to represent to Hogarth the symbol of a deeper pain. According to George Vertue’s diary, Hogarth was upset by the disastrous sale of his paintings of Marriage A-la-mode in the late spring of 1751. He had proposed a complicated system of closed bids to be deposited as ‘Notes’ in a locked cabinet. He received only one bid which was so modest that the bidder increased the sum twice so that the remarkable set of six pictures eventually sold for a measly 120 guineas. Hogarth was so shocked and angered by the lack of interest in what was, for him, the pinnacle of his modern art that he took down his Golden Head and never forgot the hurt.^[20] Vertue wrote ‘that day following in a pet, he took down the Golden head that staid over his door’.^[21] It was rumoured that Hogarth replaced the bust with one of Sir Isaac Newton. A bust of the scientist was sold in the catalogue of Jane’s effects in 1790.^[22] It was made of terra-cotta and so it could have survived out of doors. Hogarth was as much a disciple of Newton as he was of Van Dyck. Perhaps the change signalled that Hogarth was forced to prefer an icon dedicated to rationalism and freedom of thought in contrast to his disappointed ambition to be the successor of Van Dyck.

From late 1733 Hogarth, in one advertisement after another, informed his potential subscribers that his pictures and prints were to be ‘had’ (my italics) at his House at the Golden Head.^[23] Sometimes he referred to it without an accompanying address, confident that his readers would know where it was. An example is the much-quoted passage in The Daily Post and General Advertiser for 2 April 1743 referring to Marriage A-la-Mode. ‘Subscriptions’, he announced, ‘are taken in at Mr. Hogarth’s, the Golden-Head in Leicester Fields; where may be had, all his engrav’d works.’^[24] The choice of ‘had’, instead of ‘bought’, is revealing. He tended to avoid the words ‘shop’ or ‘sold’, although his sisters had kept a haberdashery shop for many years.

There were exceptions: his bidder’s ticket for the sale of his paintings in 1744/5 announced that they were to be ‘sold’ from his house. He could not so easily have avoided the word in proposals for an auction. According to its title page, The Analysis of Beauty was printed in 1753 ‘by J. REEVES for the AUTHOR, and sold by him at his House in Leicester-Fields [my italics]’.^[25] The Golden Head was no longer mentioned as a landmark and sales were permitted after the débacle of Marriage A-la-mode. It may have been that Hogarth thought that selling a book rather than paintings was different. Contemporary sellers of books called themselves stationers as well as booksellers in their trade-cards, and so perhaps their customary nomenclature was an influence.

There is a risk of over-ascribing motives to Hogarth, but nevertheless customers were wary of the way shop-keepers sold perishable goods. They were believed to adulterate food and drink, give short measure, and to over-charge. They were disliked for standing outside shops touting for custom or employing staff to harass passers-by. Some members of the aristocratic and professional classes despised business and commercial matters generally and ignored shopkeepers, especially if they were in debt to them: debts of honour came first, if at all.^[26] Shopkeepers were thought of as greedy, petty, and narrow-minded. Hogarth would have been unwilling to have associated himself with a retail occupation which was disliked by some of the very people who might subscribe to his modern moral subjects and his comic histories or who might ask him to paint their portraits. His ambitious were too high for him to regard himself as a shopkeeper.^[27]

Hogarth was concerned about his social status from early in his career. He recalled strutting about the town wearing a sword in the manner of a gentleman.^[28] Jane and he were to buy a retreat in Chiswick in 1749, replacing their summer lodgings in South Lambeth. Like members of the gentry, he could pass the season in London and then go to the country in high summer. He bought a coach at about the same time to aid the commute. Its doors were embellished with a crest, a confection of serpentine lines. He employed Charles Catton Senior, coach-painter to the King, to paint the doors.^[29] Hogarth’s coachman was painted by his master in 1757.^[30]

Van Dyck was knighted by Charles I in 1632 and entitled Principal Painter in Ordinary to the King and the royal family. Hogarth never achieved this status; he had hoped to dedicate the print of his patriotic and military painting, The March of the Guards to Finchley (1749–50). to George I, and so find favour. The story goes that the King so disliked a picture which showed his soldiery as unruly and ill-disciplined that he refused to accept it. Instead, Hogarth dedicated the picture to the King of Prussia in a petty act of revenge. Might not envy or a desire for status be added as a reason why Hogarth chose to work underneath the head of Anthony Van Dyck, a royal favourite? I suspect that Hogarth’s eventual appointment as Serjeant-Painter to the king, an inferior position to that of Painter in Ordinary, did not assuage his disappointment.

As Hogarth grew older, more bitter, and more disillusioned, he found himself part of the past rather than the present. Leicester Fields itself deteriorated with him almost as a matter of sympathetic background: there were awful murders of women close to Hogarth’s doorstep, as Hannah Regnier has explained.^[31] There was general dilapidation in the Square. The side-streets were noisy and full of dubious commercial activity. The area thronged with people of the street.

was to write of the ‘Leicester Fields slums’ in his essay on Hogarth as Ellis Gamble’s apprentice.^[32] After her husband’s death in 1764, Jane took in lodgers to make ends meet.^[33] It is understandable that she decided to move to Chiswick in her retirement; she may have found the stairs at No. 30 too much for her as she is known to have been wheeled to church in a chair at Chiswick (below).

Only we, today, have the consolation of knowing that Hogarth’s legacy is more memorable than that of his admired predecessor, but we also have the regret that No. 30 Leicester Fields has long since been demolished.

 

 

Inside William Hogarth’s business premises and home

The interior of No. 30 is less well-known than its facade because no contemporary or near-contemporary images have survived.^[34] In this half of the essay, I consider the business that took up the ground floor and the yard at the back, and the people who lived and worked there, using the scraps of knowledge that have survived and a wider knowledge of Georgian houses and households.^[35]

 

The basement

Basements could be extensive in Georgian houses, extending from vaults under the street at the front as far as the backyard.^[36] Thus, they were often more spacious than the floors above. At the beginning of the 18th century, the kitchens used wood-burning fires for cooking with turning spits for roasting meat. By the 1740s more generally, they were being replaced with wood-burning stoves and coal-ranges, supplied with coal via holes in the pavements. The kitchen was supplemented by pantries, sculleries, laundries, and still-rooms. The larder would have been carefully insulated against rodents and flies. A chandlery or candle-store was a necessity in a big mixed-use household such as Hogarth’s, which had to have the strongest lighting possible (below). His business also required unusually large quantities of rag for cleaning and dusting, especially in the engraving workshop where cleanliness was paramount. An efficient laundry was an essential facility.^[37]

A fresh-water supply was a necessity. Thames water was brackish, and so it was used only for general cleaning and washing. It could have been brought up from the river by horse-drawn tanker or drawn up from a basement well. Rainwater may have been collected from the roof, piped into a cistern and used for cooking and family washing. Fresh water was also brought in from springs and streams in the hills north of the city in purpose-built canals. The ‘New River’ carried water down to Islington fields and it was distributed to households in London by a network of elm-pipes. Hogarth showed the canal running away from the New River Head in the foreground of ‘Evening’ in Four Times of the Day series (Pl 5).

 

 

5 The Four Times of the Day by William Hogarth (painted by 1736, published 1738).
Plate III, ‘Evening’, with the New River Head in foreground

 

 

His reference to these waterworks can be read in several ways: that No. 30 was already connected and so he was recognising the fact in his picture. It could have been that he had yet to be connected and lived in hope and so his picture was meant as a kind of encouragement to the suppliers of fresh water. It could be that he was not connected and believed that a fairly empty fresh-water canal was an appropriate symbol of drought on a hot summer’s evening. Leicester Square was occupied by rich, aristocratic people who expected the best out of life and so it was as likely to have had fresh running water as any. The household probably drank small-beer rather than water, which would have been brought in from the London breweries situated down by the river. Without doubt, the family drank punch with friends, since punch features prominently in several of Hogarth’s pictures (Pl 6). Gin is likely to have been forbidden throughout the household.

 

 

6 Hogarth’s punchbowl, English blue and white delftware (c1720),
bequeathed to the Foundling Hospital. Foundling Museum, London

 

 

Some Georgian houses included a personal room or space for the cook, but because of the pressure on space in No. 30, I suspect that the Hogarth family’s cooks lived out. They may have employed ‘professed’ cooks or at least ‘plain cooks’.^[38] Professed cooks were women who had learnt to cook as apprentices and who were capable of sophisticated cookery. Plain cooks usually learnt on the job beginning as kitchen maids. They were expected to be able to roast meat, make simple sauces such as white sauce or oyster sauce and make puddings, such as apple pie. I guess that the Hogarth family’s cook was somewhere in between.

Well-to-do families employed (male) master cooks, often of foreign origin, but Hogarth famously preferred robust English cookery to French cuisine, with an emphasis on roast meat and sauces and few fruit and vegetables. As a founder-member of the Sublime Society of Beef Steaks, he sang jingoistic songs in favour of English beef. He was to ridicule French cuisine in Calais Gate (1748/9) where a huge rib of beef is preferred to a diet of meagre soup. He laughed again at French cuisine in the Invasion prints of 1756, where a French soldier roasts whole frogs on his sword as a substitute for a spit.^[39] Because No. 30 was part-business, part-home, the kitchen was something of a refectory, a canteen in today’s terms, since the staff as well as the family had to be fed. Hogarth’s cook, I suspect, had more assistants than was usual in family homes, including part-timers brought in for special occasions.

A number of occupations in the kitchen are identifiable: a scullery-maid would have been responsible for washing crockery, storing it, and replacing it, for scouring pots and pans, and keeping the kitchen more or less clean. In well-to-do houses, the cleaning and sharpening of cutlery was the province of the butler, whose primary role was to look after the cellar, but I have no sense of a butler as such in No. 30. His chores, I suspect, were left to the scullery-maid and the above-stairs servants (below). A laundry-maid was indispensable, not only for washing and mending the family clothes, but also those used for dusting the rest of the house (the outside doors were often open, and dust rises). Dusting was an onerous task, especially in the colder months when there were open fires throughout the building. Did each of the principal floors have a chamber-maid responsible for keeping it clean? The original contractors were required to connect the houses to the main sewer with brick-lined individual sewers leading from a cesspit housed in the basement where slops of all kinds were emptied by the chambermaids and kitchen staff.

Female under-servants earned as little as £6 pa, whereas young males earned twice as much. The upper servants, including a valet for William (assuming that he had a personal servant) and attendants for Jane and her mother, could be paid up to and above 50 guineas pa. Hogarth is known to have forbidden his staff to accept tips, implying that he was a generous employer who kept his staff satisfied, and so he probably paid his upper servants towards the top end.^[40] Samuel and Sarah Adams have calculated that someone with an income of £3,000 pa could afford a staff of around 20 servants.^[41] John Hunter’s later establishment, built between Leicester Square and Castle Street, amounted to 29 people (family, pupils, and employees). Hogarth’s establishment was smaller, around 20 occupants, including maids-of-all-work. In addition, his business needed messenger boys to deliver prints to subscribers, deliver letters and invitations, to take texts to newspaper houses, collect lightweight materials from suppliers, and communicate with other engravers. A reliable, trustworthy boy was not easy to find and hire since he had to be at least semi-literate in order to find his way to addresses about the city (below).

Given that several of Hogarth’s employees may have been semi-specialists and so relatively expensive to hire and, allowing for variations in the value of the pound sterling between 1745 and today, I would guestimate that Hogarth’s wages-bill could have been around £750 pa in money of the day.^[42]

 

Ground floor

The ground-floor space in terraced houses was used, variously, as parlours, dining rooms, [with] drawing rooms and even bedchambers. The larger, wealthier households would have had, as they still do, generous foyers. The sales list of Jane’s effects in 1790 distributed the lots for sale between a front and a back parlour.^[43] I suspect that Hogarth modified the ground-floor space to allow for two main activities: first, the reception of a stream of visitors and tradesmen. A certain logic would suggest that these activities took place in the entryway and the front parlour. Secondly, I identify the back parlour as the engraving and proof-taking workshop. It would give the engravers good morning light and would allow Hogarth himself to move unobtrusively between the workshop and his painting room in the backyard without his having to go through reception (below). This proposal assumes that he had access to the yard at ground level.

I believe that whatever space there was immediately behind the front door and the front parlour was adapted for the receiving of visitors, the taking of subscriptions, and the selling of the back-catalogue of prints.^[44] Above all, the space was concerned with welcoming sitters and conducting them to the painting room of the leading modern artist of his day. None of Hogarth’s extensive publicity mentioned opening hours. Was it taken for granted that the business had an open-door policy, accepting visitors from dawn to dusk? I suspect that the business employed a doorman as a general factotum to open the door to visitors, summon chairs and coaches, direct tradesmen, sign for packages, clean the frontage and ground-floor windows of a business where good light was so important.^[45] A doorman would also have provided security (especially if considerable sums of money were held in the reception area at subscription times).^[46] I guess that he had an unobtrusive post just inside the front door, and that he would have been furnished with a chair and a closet, with a cudgel, brooms, shovels, and window-cleaning equipment. He would also have accompanied William and the takings to the bank and may have escorted the family to church on Sundays, presumably at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, as it is a short walk from Leicester Square. William, an admirer of Isaac Newton, was probably an Anglican in name only, but he included a largely accurate view of the interior of St Martin’s in The Beckingham Wedding of 1729–30 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

I used to assume that Hogarth’s prints were on display in the reception area, cramming the walls, as was the case in the print-selling shops (Pl 7).

 

 

7 Spectators at a Print-Shop in St Paul’s Churchyard by John Raphael Smith (1766–1833, 1777.
Mezzotint, 35 x 25 cm

 

 

I now think that his display may well have consisted only of carefully selected examples from his back catalogue, including, for example, the ‘Four Groups of Heads’, which consisted of previously published works put together and sold together as a novelty (from 1737).^[47] The prints of current subscriptions would have been withheld so that their details could neither be learnt about in advance nor copied.

The furniture in the reception area would have included at least one generous counter on which the larger prints could be spread out. There would also have been cabinets with deep drawers to house prints (interlaced with tissues). The sale of possessions after Jane’s death included a large press with glazed doors and sliding shelves, which could well have been part of the furniture in the reception area. At times, there would have been quantities of wrappings, tissues, and thin board used for parcelling prints for subscribers. I suspect that this area was the province of William’s sister, Anne, who had sales-experience of handling delicate materials before she came to live with the family in No. 30.

Somewhere at the back of the reception area was a bureau, perhaps with a sloping fall-front, where subscriptions were taken, and deposits and petty cash kept in a lockable drawer. Alternatively, there could have been a safe or strong-box with hidden keyholes perhaps kept in the engraving room as far from the front door as possible – because daily takings at peak-times could be worth hundreds of pounds sterling.^[48] The bureau may have had shelves on which to house the day-book, sealing wax, subscription ticket blanks, and the subscription-lists themselves. I imagine a corner not dissimilar to that to the right of Industry and Idleness, (Pl 8).^[49]

 

 

8 Industry and Idleness by William Hogarth, 1747.
Plate IV, ‘The Industrious ’Prentice a Favourite, and entrusted by his Master’. Engraving. Note bureau at right

 

 

Hogarth announced in his publicity that the two prints of The Analysis were ‘fit to frame [that is suitable] for furniture’, a remark which suggests that he did not offer a framing service himself. But after his death, around 70 glazed and framed prints were items in the sale. ^[50] They imply that some simple in-house framing did take place. Did Hogarth do it himself, or did Anne with her handwork skills, or did an apprentice-assistant (below)? Elaborate framing was sub-contracted to specialists. Hogarth was anxious that his patrons should return their pictures to him for cleaning. Did he offer what amounted to a cleaning service to his patrons for paintings by artists other than himself?

I like to think that Hogarth employed an assistant to keep the parlour-workshop clean, attend to the fires, prepare copperplates, etching baths and so on. He may have been allowed to engrave monotonous detail such brick walls or pavements, under his master’s supervision. One important visitor was an expert in reverse-writing (Hogarth himself was not especially good at it). There were times when such a specialist would be in No. 30 on a full-time basis, particularly over the wording of the current subscription-ticket and captions, which could be several verses or explanations long.^[51]

Illustrations in the textbooks on engravers at work give some idea of what went on in Hogarth’s parlour-workshop. Possibly the best-known of these is from Denis Diderot’s famous encyclopedia (Pl 9).^[52]

 

 

9 Engravers at work (‘Gravure en Taille Douce’).
Engraving by Antonio Baratta (1724–1787) after A-J de Fehrt (1723–1774),
from Denis Diderot et Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 40 vols, Paris 1751–1772, XXI, fig. 1 bis

 

 

A feature of this picture is the set of distinctive screens that provides the even, diffused light, without shadowing, needed for the close work of inscribing fine lines and dots. These chassis, as Diderot called them, consisted of large wooden frames, covered in paper, oiled to make them opaque, and supported by a criss-cross of wires. The illustration has a woman at a copying desk, transferring an image from a painting to a copper plate. A man to the left inscribes a plate on a leather pouch with a burin, one of the standard engraving tools. On the far right, a man inks a plate, warmed over a brazier. Behind him, a journeyman smooths another plate with a burnishing hammer; perhaps he is erasing an error. Three boys are involved in etching, dipping, washing, and watching the etching mordaunt at work.

In Hogarth’s case, I would claim that etching took place in a pavilion-like outhouse in the back-yard, although the ‘resist’ and scratching of the plates could have been prepared indoors.^[53] Not only were the fumes toxic and harmful to paper, but people were hyper-sensitive to fire risk in the aftermath of the great fire of London, and Hogarth’s mother had died of a ‘fright’ brought about by a fire in a brandy shop in 1735. A mixture of oils, turpentine, varnish, paper and candles and a small charcoal-burning brazier for warming plates and the ‘resist’ were potentially incendiary. Hogarth may well have been insured against the risk of fire with Sun Alliance.^[54]

Diderot’s illustration does not include the mirrors that master engravers used to help them transfer the reverse of an image onto a plate so that it appeared the right way round in the print. Hogarth himself disliked the mirror and as a result his prints often show details the wrong way round. His left-handed figures and their wrongly buttoned coats might have been meant as a reminder that his customers were buying a copy of a painting. He may have feared that he could not easily allow for the distortions characteristic of mirror-images in his fictional works. On occasion, he did reverse his images, as in the print of his 1745 self-portrait where his scar on his forehead is in its rightful place, but this adjustment was rare.

The illustration from the Encyclopédie also does not show Hogarth’s preferred method of reducing an image from the size of a painting to that of a copperplate.^[55] He described it: ‘The known method, many years made use of, for the more exactly and expeditiously reducing drawings from large pictures, for engravings; or for enlarging designs, for painting ceilings and cupolas, (by striking lines perpendicular to each other, so as to make an equal number of squares on the paper design’d for the copy, that hath been first made on the original; by which means, the situation of every part of the picture is mechanically seen, and easily transferred) may truly be said to be somewhat of the same kind with what has been here proposed.’

Pictures of engravers’ workshops, including those for silver-engraving, usually show screens unaccompanied by grids. However, a cruel satire on Hogarth by Paul Sandby shows how they may have looked.^[56] His Burlesque sur le Burlesque (Pl 10) has a diffusing screen with its supporting wires and a grid combined. The squares look larger than they would have been in reality.^[57]

 

 

10 Burlesque sur le Burlesque by Paul Sandby (1731–1809), 1753. Etching (1753), 36 x 26 cm.
Note the squared screen

 

 

Sandby also drew a lady copying at a drawing table c1765 (Pl 10a). She works freehand in red chalk, a medium that Hogarth himself preferred.

 

 

10a A lady copying at a drawing table by Paul Sandby, c1756. Red and black chalk, 19.4 x 15.2 cm.
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. She does not appear to use a lamp and a mirror to re-direct light

 

 

Other necessities were tracing tables and the means of illuminating them from beneath, probably with candle-lamps and mirrors to re-direct the light. Hogarth’s enterprise required extensive stationery: paper for screens, notebooks and letter-writing paper, French printing paper for drawings and proofs, and so on – and storage space for items that needed to be kept clean.^[58]

Artists could not paint by the artificial light of the time, but work could continue in the engraving parlour. Hogarth required innumerable quantities of tallow candles and by 1745 he was buying them in bulk, perhaps from the Chiswick candle-makers, a well-known cottage-industry. In addition, he may have used the purer and more expensive beeswax or whale-oil in candle-lamps and sconces to extend working hours during the winter.^[59]

Diderot’s illustration does not include a printing press since the two processes were normally incompatible. Engraving – and etching – required absolute cleanliness. Plates had regularly to be wiped and the swarf removed, otherwise the dirt might mark the prints. The printing process was a separate specialism. Printing paper made from rag created a lot of dust. The use of volatile liquids such as ink and turpentine meant that the residues could only too easily be transferred to where they were not wanted.

Hogarth may have begun his unwilling career as a copperplate engraver with a cheap, second-hand Gutenberg screw-press for his bookplates and tickets, where runs were relatively short and less demanding to print than finer artwork (Pl 11).

 

 

11 ‘A common screw press’, replica constructed by Early Printing Presses, Birkenhead, 1976
(Science Museum Group). Note the implied weight of the machine

 

 

He farmed out the printing of his more elaborate pictures to specialists, as Vertue’s account of the genesis of A Harlot’s Progress indicates. I suspect Hogarth kept his unwieldy screw-press only for proofs at No. 30. By 1745, when in the money and doing a lot more fine engraving, I suspect that he may have bought a more up-to-date rolling press for longer home-run as well as proofs.^[60] Because presses were heavy and needed bolting down and perhaps braced as well, the solid ground floor of a parlour would have been the most practical place for the installation of a press. (They were not the sort of machine to transport to higher floors. William Blake’s ground floor at 13 Hercules Buildings in Lambeth was marked as the workshop containing a rolling press.)^[61] A back parlour, used as a printing room and as an engraver’s workshop, would have given Hogarth and his assistant the best of the morning light. The illustrations do not usually include the minutiae of tools, accessories, and cupboards of an engraver’s workshop, which Hogarth was bound to have used. Since engraving and printing had to be undertaken in the same room in Hogarth’s case, his parlour was a crowded one.

 

The First Floor

A front chamber on the first floor would have been large enough to contain, let us say, a refectory table with balusters, and chairs for eight or ten people. If Hogarth wished to entertain more diners, then the servants may have opened folding doors between the front room and the quieter back room. The staff may have pushed a smaller, round or oval table into the dining room to create a longer dining table. I base this ambitious assumption on the arrangement of tables in the later Election Entertainment (1758, Pl 12).

 

 

12 The Humours of an Election by William Hogarth, 1755. Plate I, ‘An Election Entertainment’.  Engraving

 

 

The back room may have been used as the family [with]drawing room (where Jane played quadrille with friends and William carved some ‘fish’, which were later reproduced as a print).

An oval or round table was a favoured device in Hogarth’s art as a means of displaying groups spread out around it. There are around half a dozen such tables, more, if you include minor details, such as the gate-legged folding tables in the background to Marriage A-la-mode, plate V or the ‘Banquet of the Gods’ in The Battle of the Pictures (below). Hogarth showed only the ends of meals and his oval tables performed several functions other than eating: playing cards, carousing, dirty dancing, even as an anatomist’s table. They could have been modelled on his own withdrawing-room table!

In the pictures, food is served by adults and, rather unexpectedly, by young boys. In Sancho’s Feast, the meal is served by ebullient boy-waiters (Pl 12a).

 

 

12a ‘Sancho at the Magnificent Feast’ by William Hogarth, c1725–1734. Etching and engraving

 

 

In ‘Noon’ from the Four Times of the Day series, food is transported from one inn to another by a distracted cook-maid and a careless pot-boy (published 1738).

The carrying of food from the basement to the first floor of a London house could be a trek and it would have been inappropriate to carry food through the reception area at No. 30. I wonder, therefore, whether Hogarth installed a back staircase rising from the basement or the ground floor to the upper floors. He was fond of technology and it is also possible that he had a dumb-waiter installed so that food could be raised relatively quickly to the floors above.^[62]

 

Second floor

The second floor of a London terraced house usually consisted of bedchambers and children’s rooms, the latter unnecessary in the Hogarth’s case. In 1745, the second floor of No. 30 accommodated the sleeping quarters of at least five adults. William and Jane may have shared a bedchamber, although husbands and wives frequently slept separately and William was so often out late at night. Jane’s mother, because of her rank and because she was in her early seventies, would have had a room or cubicle to herself. Because of the pressure on space, there would have been some communal sleeping.^[63] Anne Hogarth, Mary Lewis, and visitors probably shared a room.

Pictures of curtained beds were commonplace in the popular prints of the time and Hogarth’s variously shows around fourteen of them, of which the knotted curtain in A Harlot’s Progress, III, is the most remembered (Pl 13).

 

 

13 A Harlot’s Progress, III, by William Hogarth, 1732. Engraving and etching. Note the knotted bed-curtain

 

 

There can be little doubt that there were curtained beds in No. 30, each with its attendant commode, wash-basin and pitcher. The floor would have been looked after by at least one housemaid who was responsible for lighting fires and tending to lamps and candles, as well as cleaning, bed-making and, in this house especially, dusting. In spite of the fact that that Hogarth was a generous employer, it did not mean that his lower staff were not on-call at all hours of the day.

 

The Attic/Third Floor

The servants usually slept in the attic of Georgian houses. In the case of No. 30, the original cock-loft or roof-garret had been transformed into a full floor in about 1727. The upper-servants probably had partitioned or curtained cubicles, each around 8 feet by 10 feet. Some cubicles may have had fixed beds with mattresses of wool, horsehair or straw, and a chair and small table. People slept three in a bed in the cock-loft in Honey Lane Market.^[64] The lesser servants probably slept in shared space, perhaps on folding beds with space for small boxes of possessions. More generally, in Georgian houses servants are known to have slept on the floor in basement-kitchens to be near the stoves in winter.

 

Outhouses, the painting room^[65]

It was a surprise to me to discover that the hub of Hogarth’s business enterprise was not in the house, but out in the backyard. In June 1801, an admirer of Hogarth’s was reported in The European Magazine and London Review as recalling that the billiards room of the Sablonière Hotel (of which Hogarth’s house had by now become a part) was set up ‘in the very room my old friend built to paint in’.^[66] Painting was not a practical activity inside this particular house because its north to south alignment meant that its windows would not give a painter the best light possible. Direct sunlight might interfere with his choice and use of colours and shadow would have made them difficult to read.^[67] I believe that Hogarth built his painting room at a distance from the house in order to take advantage of the gentle northern light falling over the terrace roof. (Something similar in fact survives at the back of what was briefly the house of the landscape artist Richard Wilson (1714–1782) at what is now No. 8 Charlotte Street (presently a restaurant), which was, as so often, subsequently the house of other artists. That studio was and still is top lit.)^[68]

The dimensions of Hogarth’s painting room are unknown, but it must at the very least have been sufficiently roomy to house one billiards table along with sufficient space for the players to manoeuvre themselves and their cues around it. He was later to write in The Analysis of Beauty, ‘The best light for seeing the shadows truly, is that which comes in at a common-sized window.’^[69] The painting room had a high ceiling, as we can tell, since the light in Hogarth’s later Self-portrait painting the Comic Muse falls into the room at an angle of around 60 degrees (Pl 14).

 

 

14 Self-portrait painting the Comic Muse by William Hogarth (1758), final state 1764.
Etching and engraving. Note the angle made by the falling light and the bottom line of the wall behind the artist

 

 

I suspect that he was content to have one or two common-sized windows high up to benefit from the light coming over the roofs of the houses in the terrace, to prevent from people peering in, and to allow him to work on large canvases.

It is to be wondered whether we get a glimpse of the painting room in Hogarth’s bidder’s ticket, The Battle of the Pictures (Pl 15). The edifice to the right of the print looks like an exploded view of the corner of a painting room with an extraordinarily high ceiling.^[70]

 

 

15 Battle of the Pictures by William Hogarth, 1745. Bidder’s ticket. Etching and engraving

 

 

It exposes part of the back wall of a room and a decorative ceiling. A picture hangs on the wall, possibly the outline of a three-quarter length portrait.^[71] A reproduction of the ‘Tête-a-Tête’, the second picture of Marriage A-la-mode, sits on an easel within the diagrammatic space. There are no dust covers to be seen of course nor are the other five pictures in the series present.

Of the accessories to be found in a painting room, Hogarth’s palette is the most important as a symbol of his trade. It appears in all his self-portraits – a familiar oval or kidney-shaped piece of wood with a thumb-hole. It also reveals his modest range of colours.^[72] In his print Mask and Palette (1745) the palette has six colours, far short of the 50 or so referred to in the sales list. The Royal Academy of Arts has a cheese-board shaped palette adorned with a plaque to state that it had belonged to Hogarth. It was subsequently acquired by the portrait painter, John Jackson, and later, JMW Turner. I suspect that it was a presentation object rather than a working tool.^[73]

I would expect Hogarth to have had assistance in the painting room as well as the engraving workshop: a pupil or protégé of some kind, perhaps (below). He would have been responsible for preparing the room, including the positioning of a sitter’s chair on a dais, arranging draperies, and other props.^[74] He would have been responsible for stoking a stove or a fire during the winter months, since oil-paints spread badly in the cold and an artist needed to keep his hands warm, as is implied in a French depiction of an artist’s studio (below). He would have looked after the paintings and canvases in their racks and kept the cabinet stocked with colours. Richard Campbell in his descriptions of London tradesmen (1757) recommended a Mr Kateing [Keating] at the White-Hart in Longacre as a particularly resourceful colour-man, and so Hogarth could have bought-in his colours from someone like him.^[75] Keating was succeeded by Nathaniel Drake, from 1763 (Pl 16).

 

 

16 Trade-card of Nathaniel Drake, ‘Colour Man’,
successor to Robert Keating, at the White Hart, Long Acre, London.
He also sold ‘Prim’d Cloths’, crayons, and varnish

 

 

Campbell’s list of popular canvas sizes suggests that Hogarth’s preferred picture-cloth for his moral subjects up to and including Marriage A-la-mode was a modest ‘THREE-QUARTERS 2 feet 6 high [+/- 76.2 cm], by 2 feet 1 wide [+/- 63.5 cm].

Hogarth regarded himself firstly as a painter, although he did not regard etching and engraving as an absolute chore. Did he distance himself from the commercial and industrial enterprise that was No. 30 by retreating to the privacy of his painting room and closing the door behind him? This is not to say that he did not have visitors, David Garrick and Horace Walpole, among them (above). Painting rooms were notable for their social gatherings and those of Reynolds and Gainsborough come to mind. Hogarth’s was more of a special case in that his comic history paintings were the preliminaries to prints of the same subjects and he was fearful of revealing too much of their contents even to well-wishers. John Hoadly, who wrote the verses for A Rake`s Progress, sent a letter to Hogarth informing him that he was going to send the picture of his father (Benjamin Hoadly, Bishop of Winchester, Tate Britain) to Leicester Fields for touching up.^[76] He added that he would like to spend up to three hours with Hogarth in his painting room! He was of course, a special friend.

Because he continuously changed details in both his paintings and his prints, it is likely that Hogarth’s suites of six or eight canvases were aligned on display-easels in his painting-room so that he could contemplate the whole story as it emerged, while moving from one canvas to another, adding or subtracting detail as he went along. This suggestion implies that the painting room was long enough to house a row of easels side by side. The later landscape artist and etcher Alfred Dawson (1843–1931) recalled that Hogarth’s painting chair ran on wheels. He was correct, as Robin Simon tells me that the very chair appeared in the Chelsea Antiques Fair in 1966, at Stand 10, occupied by Anthony James of Fulham Road (Pl 17).^[77]

 

 

17 William Hogarth’s painting chair. Bought in 1866 by Lord Lonsdale for Lowther Castle.
Private collection
Note the rolling wheels that moved forwards and backwards

 

 

The chair bears an inscription (Pl 17):

Hogarth’s Chair.

From the studio of that Celebrated Painter presented by him to a member of the family in whose possession the relic has always remained till bought by Ld. Lonsdale [Lowther Castle], Sept. 1866

In this old chair great Hogarth sat
And pondered in his mind,
The wondrous works of Art he left
To instruct and amuse mankind.

His was the task to satirize,
Licentiousness and crime,
And lash with an unsparing hand
The follies of his time.

 

 

17a Inscription on Hogarth’s painting chair

 

 

Robin Simon comments:

The ‘wheels’ that Dawson referred to appear to be rollers made of wood, a material that would ensure they would be relatively quiet. They were evidently added to a robust ‘country’ chair of a fairly standard Georgian splay-back design and on the front legs at least the wheels are secured by metal brackets extending rigidly upwards an inch or two. That implies that the chair could only be moved forwards and back, which increases the likelihood that this is indeed Hogarth’s ‘painting chair’ referred to by Dawson – rather than a sitter’s chair – with the wheels designed to enable him to move closer or further away from the canvas as he worked.

Visitors would not have been allowed to study the paintings in the studio, in order to reduce the risk of information being spread by word-of-mouth before the publication of the prints. In spite of the Engraving Copyright Act (1735, act 8 Geo.11, cap.13) protecting engravers against piracy, that remained a possibility, as Jane was to encounter in her widowhood, because she had to petition the government to extend the Act to protection her possessions. I suspect that the paintings were hidden behind dust-covers when visitors were due and that the assistant revealed them one at a time, briefly, while Hogarth talked.

Hogarth’s concern for privacy is preserved in one of Mrs Chapel’s recollections. She explained that when William was at work in his painting room, any interruption gave him ‘great annoyance’. One day, Jane daringly approached the painting room with a query about a fishmonger’s bill. On being surprised at being allowed in, she exclaimed ‘I may come in, then, may I?’ Mrs Chapel also felt that the pair of them lived together in ‘great harmony’ and Thomas Morell, the librettist, who knew Jane and William well, regarded them as an unemotional, but happy, couple.^[78]

The picture of a painting room by Etienne Jeaurat, member of the Académie Royale, adds to an understanding of the equipment in Hogarth’s painting room (1755, Pl 18). It has a cast-iron stove with a huge chimney at which an assistant warms his hands – and roasts chestnuts. Hogarth probably had a similar stove before 1755.

 

 

18 Interior of an artist’s Studio by Etienne Jeaurat (1699–1789), 1755.
Oil on canvas, 117.5 x 88.7 cm. Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston upon Hull, UK

 

 

Canvases are scattered throughout Jeaurat’s room whereas, I suspect, Hogarth’s was tidier because of the need for security. A step-ladder stands beside a huge canvas with a collapsible table for painting materials attached to its steps near the top. An assistant traces a paper on a window (not a very professional way of doing it). Almost inevitably, there are spectators.

Two 19th-century pictures provide further evidence about Hogarth’s painting room and the house: in 1817, John Thomas Smith (1766–1833) pictured Hogarth at work on a portrait in a drawing, known as ‘Hogarth Painting his Picture of Captain Coram for the Foundling Hospital’ (Pl 19).^[79]

 

 

19 Hogarth painting his picture of Captain Coram for the Foundling Hospital
by John Thomas Smith (1766–1833), 1817. Drawing, 32.9 x 24.6 cm.
No. 13 in Drawings to Illustrate the Life of Hogarth. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

 

 

Coram sits at a distance in a sitter’s chair on a dais. The artist is dwarfed by the large canvas, so that he would have needed Jeaurat’s stepladder to reach the top half. Hogarth’s empty chair stands beside him with what looks like a carrying-case leaning against it. Is it a travelling case for prints or drawings or for transporting painting materials? Hogarth must have owned a portable easel and seat for working outside and on commissions to be executed beyond his house.

In 1863, Edward Matthew Wood painted a fanciful view of the ground floor of No. 30, ‘Hogarth’s Studio in 1739’ (Pl 19a). It shows orphans from the Foundling Hospital who have come to see Hogarth’s portrait of the founder of the Hospital. Likenesses of Captain Coram and Hogarth look on in the background, while Jane, improbably, serves tea, in the place of a servant.

 

 

19a Hogarth’s studio in 1739 by Edward Matthew Ward (1816–1879), 1863.
Oil on canvas, 120.6 x 165.1 cm. York Art Gallery

 

 

In spite of its romanticism, it shows two parlours divided by an archway. A window in the background leads to a garden instead of a back yard. Hogarth’s painting room had to be high enough to cope with canvases such as the Coram: he would have had to borrow Jeaurat’s stepladder once more.

 

A yardman, and other outhouses

No information about a yardman has survived, but there is a rationale for such a role. I surmise that Hogarth added a covered way connecting the house and the painting room to shelter his visitors. A pavilion with a roof, supported by pillars, and with open walls, may have housed a work-bench, an etching bath, and the inflammable liquids needed in engraving and printing, such as mordant, turpentine, and lamp-oil.^[80]

Concepts of health and safety did not exist in the 18th century, but Londoners were wary of fire and took more care of inflammable materials and liquids than might be expected. Hogarth’s establishment would have needed quantities of good-quality linen-rag for cleaning, particularly in the engraving room. The washing of used rags required a washtub or a purpose-built washhouse as well as washing-lines in the ‘drying grounds’. The back yards of terraced houses in many of the London squares housed stables, and outhouses were connected to the back-streets by mews-alleys. The bulk-deliveries of goods, materials, and liquids may have arrived at the back of No. 30 through a mews off Castle Street, via Leicester Court (see Pl 1a). As well as sea-coal and pit-coal from Newcastle and beyond, the house required charcoal for braziers and some firewood (coal was less expensive than wood). If the household did store and split its own logs, then doing so under cover in a back yard would have made sense.

Although the house was connected to the sewers at the front, there may well have been a privy with multiple seats in the backyard, its cleaning supervised by the yardman. Rubbish and nightsoil would have been collected on a regular basis, perhaps by a tradesman such as Robert Stone, a night-man who promised on his card ‘decently’ to perform all that he undertook (Pl 20). The card of William Woodward shows night-men carrying a load through the front door of a house in a large cask about to be tipped into a tank on a cart (Pl 20a).

 

 

20 Trade-card of Robert Stone, ‘Nightman’ at the Golden Pole, upper end of Golden Lane, London, 1745.
Heal Collection, British Museum

20a Trade-card of William Woodward, ‘Nightman, Carman & Chimney Sweeper… NB: Rubbish Carted’

 

 

 

Oh yes, and there had to be a kennel for dog Trump and somewhere for the house cats. But who were the people that occupied this mixed-use building? Some details follow.

 

 

 

Notes on the individuals at No. 30 Leicester Fields

 

 

William Hogarth 1697–1764)

 

 

21 Self-portrait by William Hogarth (1697–1764), c1735. Oil on canvas, 54.6 x 50.8 cm.
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA. Note the small range of pigments on the palette.
The portrait will have been taken from the reflection in a mirror

 

 

Principal manufacturer, entrepreneur, hands-on chief executive, employer, policy-director, entertainments officer, co-financial officer, publicist and market-maker. He had various careers as a painter of portraits and families, as a history painter, as the maker and seller of various sorts of prints, as a polemicist, as charity worker, and as contracts officer for selling his modern art by subscription. There can be no doubt that he was the boss.

 

 

Jane Hogarth (1710–1789)

 

 

22 Jane Thornhill, Mrs William Hogarth, as St Agnes by William Hogarth, c1735–1746?
Oil on canvas, 85 x 52.8 cm. Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums Collection

 

 

Day-to-day manager, co-finance officer, book-keeper, and overseer of provisioning. Jane was a resourceful woman who, with the aid of her mother, reputedly brought about a reconciliation between her father and her husband. He painted Jane in the role of Saint Agnes, holding her lamb, a saint known for her fearless determination and chastity.

Jane did not retreat in her widowhood, but let out rooms after her husband’s death, petitioned the Crown for a pension, commissioned drawings of his works and defended his reputation vigorously. She said of The Shrimp Girl (c1740–45, National Gallery, London): ‘They say he could not paint flesh. That’s flesh and blood for you; – them!’ Her words were echoed in an anecdote about Ben Ives, the servant. He showed David Garrick one of Hogarth’s drawings of a woman modelling the head of the goddess Diana and exclaimed, ‘There, sir, there’s a head! They say my master can’t paint a portrait. Look at that head.’^[81]

Only a little is known of Jane’s friendships – she played quadrille with unnamed friends – but her cousin, Mary Lewis, could have been close: they both had fathers who rose from modest social backgrounds to achieve considerable status, the one as a royal painter and the other a harpist of repute. Post-1745, Julian Bere might have been a player too (see below). The eccentric author the Revd John Trusler published Hogarth Moralized (1768) with the ‘approbation’ of Jane. Did this make her particularly interested in the ethical content of her husband’s work as opposed to anything else?^[82] In her widowhood she was a regular churchgoer in Chiswick. St Nicholas’ Church there was the family church: both Jane and William were interred there.

 

 

Lady Judith Thornhill, née Fletcher (c1673–1757)

Little is known of Jane’s mother: she supported her daughter in negotiating with her father in order to further a reconciliation. She may have been at the centre of a tiff with Hogarth himself. According to Trusler, a female relation of Hogarth’s was pleased with the supposed resemblance between herself and the ‘old maid’ in ‘Morning’ from the Four Times of the Day series. When it was explained to her what the picture was about, she threatened to cut William out of her will. That relative might have been Hogarth’s mother, Anne, but she was too poor to leave her son much of a legacy, whereas Lady Thornhill could well do so.^[83] The parallel, tentatively proposed, suggests that Lady Thornhill might have been as religious as the old maid in Morning.^[84] The suggestion is strengthened by the presence in the same picture of William’s careful study of the old façade of Saint Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, the church nearest to the Thornhill home in the Great Piazza. According to Einberg, Lady Thornhill was a socially ambitious person, and it may have been that she saw it her role as to discipline the servants. Before mechanical mounted bell systems were introduced, towards the end of the century, maids were expected to attend their mistresses at up to sixteen hours a day, often waiting on a chair.

 

 

Anne Hogarth (1701–1771)

After her sister’s death in 1741, Anne moved into No. 30 to be with her family.^[85] She had considerable experience of running clothing shops which would have made her invaluable in the reception area at No. 30. Paulson noted that her signature began to appear on bills and receipts once she had moved in.

 

 

Mary Lewis (c1720–1808): companion

 

 

23 Mrs [sic] Mary Lewis by William Hogarth, 1755. Oil on canvas, 58 x 47.5 cm.
Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums Collections

 

 

The niece of Lady Thornhill.^[86] Her role is uncertain, at least initially, because lesser female members of well-to-do families were often forced into service of one kind or another. Einberg suggests that she came into the Hogarth household in her early teens and one would suppose that would have been as a servant at that age.

‘Molly’, as Hogarth called her, ran the business when the family were in Lambeth or Chiswick. Hogarth died in her arms and he left her the considerable sum of £80 or more in his will (accounts differ). John Nichols referred to her good nature and affability. She became more than a servant as Jane’s companion and eventual heiress, accompanying her cousin to church at Chiswick. She was referred to somewhat disparagingly (?) in a letter by her cousin as Hogarth’s ‘shop-woman’, but he also wrote she ‘managed’ the shop. After her cousin’s death, she sold the remaining store of copperplates to John Boydell, the engraver and publisher, in return for an annuity, and closed the business.

 

Miss Julian Bere (1721–1790)

She was the daughter of a Charles Bere, a London property owner who lived in Hammersmith, the village next to Chiswick. The Beres may have been distant relations of the Thornhill family in the West Country. Her father died in 1745, and so it is reasonable to ask whether, as an only child and adult orphan, Julian Bere came to live with her distant relatives shortly after that date. The wording of her will, and the valuable bequests she made to William and Jane suggest that her relationship with the family was close. She may have been particularly close to Anne because she bequeathed her a Bible and a ring.^[87] They may have been particularly devout.

 

 

Servants

 

 

24 Heads of six servants of the Hogarth household by William Hogarth, c1750–1755.
Oil on canvas, 63 x 75.5 cm. Tate Britain

 

 

In later life, Hogarth painted the heads of his servants in a remarkable friendship picture (Pl 24).^[88] In this charming study, five faces form a circle round a sixth, one of the two manservants, as if to suggest that he was the senior servant. His forehead is high, and it is difficult to decide whether he is wearing his own hair or a wig. His black coat and white collar give him an aura of seriousness. His head echoes that of the steward in the second picture of Marriage A-la-mode, the ‘Tête-a-Tête’ (Pl 24a).

 

 

24a ‘The unhappy steward’, detail of Plate II, ‘The Tête-à-Tête’ , in Marriage A-la-mode by William Hogarth, 1745.

 

 

 

Elizabeth Einberg identified this figure as a non-conformist on the basis of his plain clothes, together with the fact that he has a copy of George Whitfield’s essay on ‘Regeneration’ in his pocket. Was Hogarth hinting that his senior servant was perennially dissatisfied with the spendthrift ways of his employers?^[89] The names of two servants have survived: it may have been that the senior servant was Ben Ives, Hogarth’s personal servant, perhaps his valet.^[90] The older servant with grey hair at top right may have been the ‘Samuel’ who is known to have pushed Jane to church in a chair in her widowhood.

The women have smooth, unlined faces, framed by mob-caps. Einberg reports that there was once another head in the bottom left-hand corner, and one important servant seemingly missing from the set is the cook. Was she, or he, originally meant to be included, but left the household before the painting was worked up to its present state? Commentators have identified one of the women as Mary Lewis, but none of them offers a resemblance to her as seen in the 1755 portrait by Hogarth (Pl 23). And my personal view is that Mary Lewis became too much a member of the family to be included in a picture of servants.

It is difficult to estimate the age of the serious-looking youth at top left, but his inclusion perhaps makes him more than a low-status messenger-boy or a someone who was employed to wait at table. A likeness has been noticed between him and the woman immediately below – a mother and son perhaps. If such a relationship did exist, knowledge of it has disappeared. Did he begin work as a messenger-boy and then became a protégé of Hogarth’s, a pupil, perhaps, almost a family member, working and learning in the painting and engraving rooms? The picture of the servant’s heads ended up in Chiswick after William’s death, but I wonder whether it had been hung in the reception area at No. 30 or in the painting room as a message about how servants should be treated.

Hogarth’s coachman is known only from a drawing after Hogarth by Livesay. His note on the drawing describes the subject and concludes by stating that ‘the portrait is drest in Mr Hogarth’s Livery’.^[91] Einberg describes the coachman’s clothes as a pinkish coat with a yellow collar, and a white cravat. The solemn youth has a yellowish collar, but whether this amounts to a livery, I am not sure. A collar of gold would be appropriate when it is remembered how Hogarth coloured his cork bust of Van Dyck. Liveries were not uncommon in the servants of well-to-do households, including artists (Vic Gantry mentioned Reynolds’s painted carriage, liveries, and his fine house on the ‘good’ side of Leicester Square).^[92] A livery would have been a sign of Hogarth’s pride in his servants – and in return they, by wearing it, would show their pride in him as an employer. I can imagine Hogarth’s doorman in a distinctive coat with a golden collar standing beneath the Golden Head.

I have found no signs of the sales-staff selling prints after of artists other than Hogarth; the publicity always ‘had’ his own works available at No. 30. However, the 1790 sales list creates a problem: a dozen of the lots, a considerable number out of a total of sixty-nine, were gathered together under a heading of ‘Loose Prints and Drawings’. They point to the ownership of innumerable prints by engravers other than Hogarth himself. They range from a ‘small book’ of etchings to a portfolio of prints after Watteau. Did Jane widen the scope of her sales to include the works of others; possible, but unlikely. Were they the remnants of Hogarth’s personal collection of prints by others? They are idiosyncratic enough, and so that is probable. His ownership of a book of 60 Kit-Cat Club prints is possibly significant. The Club had distinct Whig associations and Hogarth, although not a member, would have been sympathetic to it in outlook. I suspect that he acquired the book for use as reference work of portrait-painters and engravers.

Throughout his career, Hogarth actively sought out master engravers to work for him – twelve in total. The ‘impressive team of French engravers’ who worked on Marriage A-la-mode in 1743 to 1745 was threefold: first, Bernard Baron (1696–1762), for plates 2 and 3. ^[93] He has been called the ‘leading history engraver’ in England.^[94] He was involved in an anecdote, recorded on the margin of a proof of Evening. According to the note, it ‘was Deliver’d by Mr Baron to Mr Hogarth, & it being told [to him that], this boy had no Apparent Cause to Wimper, he put in his sister, threatening him to deliver his Gingerbread King, now he put in Cause. The character Hogarth alter’d where he is Crying’.^[95] The note suggests that Baron was working in his own premises away from No. 30; that there was two-way communication between them – Hogarth listened and responded and that Baron sent the proof to Hogarth by messenger instead of taking it himself.

Simon Francois Ravenet, the Elder (1706–1774, plates 4 and 5). George Vertue noted in his diary that Hogarth brought in ‘a young Engraver from Paris to assist him in his plates or to work for him’. He may have stayed with the family until he found somewhere else to settle. He was later to work for the Bow Pottery, where he introduced transfer-printing to the decoration of porcelain, known as ‘decals’. He was later contracted to John Boydell. His relationship with Hogarth was an uneasy one. He disliked Hogarth’s attempts to retouch the faces of characters and they quarrelled.

Gerard Jean-Baptiste Scotin the Younger (1698–post 1755, plates 1 and 6). Among other works, he engraved paintings by Watteau and Boucher in France. He may have been in London from as early as 1735.

I believe that that these commissioned engravers would begin work at No. 30, where they would reduce the image of a painting to the size of a copperplate and reverse the image with a mirror to make a drawing. They would then take it back to their premises where they had their own equipment and tools. They would coat the back of the drawing with red chalk and press it onto the plate. They would then incise the front of the drawing to leave its outlines in red chalk on the plate underneath. Finally, they would etch and engrave the plate itself, referring back to Hogarth for proofs on occasion, as Baron’s story suggests. One reason why few of these drawings have survived is that they ended up in places other than at No. 30. In addition, Hogarth was always concerned that they did not fall into the wrong hands. He did his best to have them destroyed.

Hogarth is known to have brought engravers to Chiswick in later life. According to Mrs Chapel, he ‘manifested much provident care for the engravers in his employment’. They worked at the bottom of the garden to prepare a collection of his prints. For recreation ‘in their hours of leisure he had a skittles ground prepared for them, that they might enjoy a healthful exercise without being tempted to drink by going to a public house’. The recollection is intriguing; the engravers sound more like youthful assistants rather than dignified master-engravers – who would not have been inclined to play around at Chiswick on a regular basis. Perhaps the story also accounts for the dubious claim that Hogarth had a studio at the bottom of the garden. The coachman’s room above the stables could have been used by lesser engravers who brought their basic tools and materials with them and were at Hogarth’s bidding.

 

Conclusion

This extended speculation is based on the belief that working under the sign of the Golden Head was a symbolic and deeply emotional matter. The house became so well-known a landmark that the adding of an address to adverts was unnecessary. Other artists and engravers both respected and derided the device.^[96] I argue that the business and workshop on the ground floor of No. 30 put sufficient pressure on the available space elsewhere that there was a knock-on effect on the floors above and out in the backyard.

Sala asserted that the ‘vast mass of the stupendous work [was] by one man’s hand’. There is some truth in the claim, but Hogarth also had considerable support from his family, loyal servants, commissioned specialists, other outworkers and, by no means least of all, visitors. Perhaps the only arguably solid suggestions are the proposed roles of doorman, yardman, and a pupil/assistant. I see that I have emphasised the humble domestic occupation of dusting. All painting rooms had to be kept fairly free of dust, but in the case of this modern artist and eminent engraver it was doubly necessary.

A speculation is no more than that, but of all the possibilities, there is no doubt that No. 30, Leicester Square was a famous, even notorious, hive of activity over the course of many years.

 

 

 

Appendix

 

‘A shop-sign’, also a ‘Design for a Shop-bill’. Was the original by Hogarth?

 

There is a claim that that Hogarth himself designed a shop-sign to publicise his work. In May 1799, James Mérigot (1760–1824) engraved a picture for the publisher and collector Samuel Ireland. It shows a group of men studying a large shop-sign entitled: ‘W, Hogarth PAINTER’ (Pl 25). The caption referred to the picture as ‘A design for a shop-bill’ and declared that Hogarth painted the original and that Mérigot engraved it after him, for Ireland.

 

 

25 Design for a shop bill by James Mérigot (1760–1824) as after William Hogarth.
Published for Samuel Ireland, 1 May 1799. Mezzotint, 12.25 x 18 cm.

 

 

The location of the original sketch is unknown, but it was sufficiently authentic for Mérigot’s print to be included in Einberg’s catalogue of Hogarth’s paintings with an appropriate attribution and question-mark.^[97] The existence of the surviving print pre-supposes not only a lost sketch, but also an actual shop-sign or bill.

An advert for a lost dog and a reward in December 1730 had Hogarth’s address as at ‘The Broad Cloth Warehouse, Little Piazza’.^[98] The advertisement did not mention that he lived under a sign publicising his occupation as a painter. Surely, the advert would have mentioned the sign under such circumstances. The press reports of his marriage called him an engraver rather than a painter.

A list of unfinished commissions in 1731 reveals that he was almost overwhelmed by the number of commissions.^[99] The painting of a relatively large shop-sign would have had a low priority on such a list and would not have been a necessity for someone who had plenty of work. Furthermore, if Jane and he were living in short-term rented accommodation, as it would appear they were, then ordering a shop-sign was not a particularly practical thing to do.

In 1731/2, the couple moved into the house of Jane’s parents in The Great Piazza.^[100] None of the contemporary views of the Piazzas included shop-signs and, besides, they may not have been appropriate places, aesthetically speaking, in which to hang them. There is no hint of their having settled down in premises of their own before Jane and he moved to Leicester Fields. Hogarth could have prepared or ordered a shop-sign and then changed his mind about it, of course. But why would he, a busy person, have needed to sketch or order a sign from someone else for a temporary studio at some point before 1732/1733? Subsequently, Hogarth set up what was to become his famous business under a Golden Head, which was a ‘sculpture’ and not a shop-sign.

The contents of Marigot’s reproduction are also puzzling: in the foreground, male figures examine a shop-sign, while a man in work clothes holds it upright. He props it up with a hand while at the same time holding a tri-corn hat. The implication is that he has brought the sign into the room from outside the business and is the sign-maker himself seeking approval from a customer.

The viewer nearest to the sign directs attention to it as if to make a point. He wears an artist’s soft cap and is presumably intended as a likeness of Hogarth himself, although this figure has a narrow face and pointed chin, unlike the rounded face of the artist in his self-portraits. It the identification of the subject is correct, then it would appear that Hogarth was not known personally to whoever painted the original or knew the self-portraits.

In the background, journeymen work on easel-paintings, one wears a dirty smock and another glances away as if to study a sitter sited outside the picture-frame. Another assistant inks a copper-plate. I cannot see Hogarth letting an assistant work on a full-size portrait like the one in the background and, as is claimed in the essay above, he did not employ painting-assistants. In reality, painting as an activity had to be kept separate from the inky, sooty, and dusty engraving processes. These background figures, emblematic of Hogarth’s areas of expertise, were included and arranged by someone who knew that Hogarth often painted and then engraved the same subject, but was unaware that he did not employ painters.^[101]

The contents of the shop-sign itself are unexpected. They consist of a bust of St Luke the Evangelist, the patron saint of artists with his open book and his ox. It was not the first time that the Saint was depicted in this way; St Luke was a popular subject in many forms of art from before the Renaissance, especially as he was believed to have painted the Virgin Mary. More particularly, a trade-card of the London colour-man John Calfe is illustrated by a bust of a St Luke, together with his palette and his ox. It was etched and engraved by a quite well-known printmaker, John Savage (active 1683–1701) (Pl 25a).

 

 

25a Trade-card of John Calfe ‘Colour Seller at St Luke’s head without Temple Barr [sic]’

 

 

The card is close in its essentials to Merigot’s shop-sign and it implies that this sort of image was not an unfamiliar one in popular art and culture. Furthermore, Hogarth, in designing the Bagnio scene of Marriage A-la-mode included a little detail of the saint on the wall of the bed-chamber (Pl 25b, Pl 25).

 

 

25b ‘The Death of the Earl’ (or ‘The Bagnio’), Marriage A-la-mode by William Hogarth, 1745.
Plate V. Engraving

25c Detail of Pl 23c showing St Luke and his ox

 

 

Hogarth’s depiction is closer to the Mérigot image than Calfe’s trade-card and so it prompts me to suggest that the lost picture Mérigot records is a veiled quotation from Hogarth’s best-known series. If that is the case, that lost shop-card sketch was made after1745 when Hogarth was at the Golden Head in Leicester Fields – and where he had no need of a shop-sign. Hogarth’s preference was for something more original, personal, and grandiose.

One of the forerunners of the Royal Academy was the Society of the Virtuosi of St Luke.^[102] This was a convivial society founded around 1689 by Van Dyck as a means of supporting artists and art-technicians. It tended to be neo-classical in outlook with Lord Shaftesbury, William Aikman, William Kent and James Thornhill among its members. Hogarth belonged to an alternative society, the Rose and Crown Club. They were not rivals – George Vertue belonged to both – but Hogarth’s personal values were more democratic than those of the Virtuosi, and his Club gave the study of ‘Nature’ in art a more prominent role than they did. It is unlikely that he would have shown himself as working under a sign of St Luke.

The original sketch may have been in Jane Hogarth’s possession, but it was not by her husband. My guess is that as the hero-worship of Hogarth gathered pace after his death, someone with some knowledge of his work composed it as if it were by her husband and gave it to her as a memento of one of his more famous works. Later, Samuel Ireland acquired it and commissioned Merigot to make a copy for inclusion in a later volume of his Graphic Illustrations of Hogarth.

 

 

 

1. Billy and Jenny were the ‘playfully-familiar appellations which Hogarth ordinarily used’: see ‘Billy and Jenny, or, Souvenirs of the Celebrated Hogarth and his Lady’, letter written by ‘Truth’ to the editor, The New Mirror, no. 20, Saturday 20 May 1843, vol I, pp306–7. The letter describes Mrs Chapel’s recollections of the Hogarth family when aged between eighty and ninety. She was reportedly Jane’s favourite servant for 15 years. NB it includes an account of a bill coming into the hands of Mrs Hogarth, but it does not confirm that she did the accounts. For convenience’s sake, the letter is referred to as ‘Mrs Chapel’. ↑
2. The picture and the print of A Midnight Modern Conversation (1732/3) were advertised to be ‘seen’ next door to the ‘New Play-house in Covent Garden Piazza’ ie before the Hogarth couple could afford to move. The move may have come as early as late 1732. I have drawn on Tom Taylor’s detailed observations in his Leicester Square: its Associations and its Worthies (London 1874), ch XII, ‘Hogarth at the Golden Head’, pp281–340. ↑
3. In 1745, Hogarth could afford to hire master engravers. By 1749, he could afford to buy or lease a house in Chiswick. Later, he owned a coach and horses plus a coachman. While working as a painter, print-maker and seller, he thus had surplus of income over expenditure. Only after he died did Jane begin to struggle financially. ↑
4. Hugh Phillips, Mid-Georgian London: a Topographical and Social Survey of Central and Western London about 1750 (London 1964). He explains how quiet a place Leicester Fields was to live in (p86). He also identifies Thornhill’s house in Covent Garden (p138). ↑
5. The name of the square itself was controversial. Both William and Jane referred to ‘Leicester Fields’ until the end of their days. He advertised the sale of The Analysis of Beauty (1753) as from the old address and so did Jane when she re-issued that engraving under her name in 1772. By implication, both thought that their likely purchasers accepted the traditional name. I vacillate between the two. ↑
6. Three modern biographies provide a basis for this speculation: Ronald Paulson, Hogarth (3 vols, various publishers, 1991, 1991, 1993 (=H I, H II, H III); Jenny Uglow, Hogarth (London 1997) (=Uglow); and Jacqueline Riding, Hogarth: Life in Progress (Croydon 2022 edn) (=Riding). The second half of the essay is a development from passages in Riding’s biography describing Leicester Fields and Hogarth’s house, esp pp266–70. They are supplemented by Ronald Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works (3rd revd edn, London 1989) (=HGW), and Elizabeth Einberg, William Hogarth: a Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (New Haven and London 2016) (=Einberg). ↑
7. In Georgian Terrace Houses – Random Bits of Fascination (online, 2021) Maria Grace calculated that a first-tier house might include as much as 4500 square feet in total. ↑
8. I cannot imagine a row of aristocratic houses in an important London Square not having access to the streets at the back. Both wood-ash and coal-dust were useful commodities in brick-making, pottery and fertilizers and so were collected from many properties. Hogarth’s business required the delivery of basic commodities for his business activities so access at the back should be regarded as a necessity. Rubbish and at least some excrement were cleared out from the back (below). In 1783, John Hunter, the anatomist, bought no. 28 Leicester Square including the ground between it and Castle Street in order to set up his museum. ↑
9. See Raymond Taylor, ‘The English Coal Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, The American Historical Review, vol 27, no. 1 (October 1921) pp1–23. Samuel Pepys had referred to coal holes in pavements old and new as early as 1662. ↑
10. It is alleged that when the cork rotted away, Hogarth replaced it with a plaster head (below). The account is repeated in several commentaries including that of ‘Nollekens’ ↑
11. George Augustus , commented sourly that there was ‘a plethora of Golden Balls in London about this time [1720s]’. See his William Hogarth: painter, engraver, and philosopher (London 1866; reprint, Trowbridge and London, 1866) p125 (= Sala). This exuberant journalist gathered together many of the anecdotes about Hogarth at home, based largely on Nichols. Pawn shops nation-wide were identified by their ‘golden’ balls – of brass. Hogarth used them as pawnbrokers’ signs in Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751) ↑
12. Riding confirms that Hogarth himself advertised prints in 1724 from the Golden Ball in Little Newport-Street (p93). ↑
13. It is possible that Frederick, Prince of Wales, encouraged the purchase of his grandfather’s statue in order to irritate his father, the current king, George II. He was to design and print an invitation ticket for the Prince on the occasion of a five-day anniversary party at Cliveden. Other famous squares declared their loyalty to the dynasty through their names: Hanover Square found fame for its society weddings, which took place in the church of St George. ↑
14. See Robin Simon, Hogarth. France and British Art: The rise of the arts in eighteenth-century Britain, London 2007, pp159–60 (and for other sources for this painting). ↑
15. Uglow, p 353. ↑
16. John Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth, 3rd revd edn, London 1785, p57. Paulson, quoting from Nichols, suggests that by ‘choosing his subject’ ‘Hogarth meant someone like Coram’, ie his portrait of Captain Coram presented to the Foundling Hospital in 1740: H II, p160. ↑
17. The encounter between Hogarth and Walpole is related at length, with full quotations, by H III, pp325–6. ↑
18. The Analysis of Beauty, Preface. ↑
19. I have failed to identify which of Van Dyck’s portraits of duchesses Hogarth had in mind. Pieter Stevenz van Gunst (1658/9–1732) engraved 10 plates from the Duke of Wharton’s collection. It may have been that Hogarth was referring to a painting of another duchess from within the Duke’s collection other than those engraved by Van Gunst. A portrait from Van Dyck’s workshop of the Duchess of Lennox and Richmond is close, but then so is his portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria. Van Dyck’s duchesses have awkwardly placed arms, perhaps because he preferred to put the elegance of hands, for which he was admired, before the overall ‘grace’ of his compositions. ↑
20. One of his enemies ridiculed his bust, saying that Hogarth lived at the sign of ‘The Golden Block Head’: unkind, but it demonstrates the renown of the address. ↑
21. Quoted in H III p 51, referring to Vertue’s diary (vol 3 p156). John Freke (1688–1756) may have been alluded to in the surgeon operating on Tom Nero’s eye on the anatomy table in The Reward of Cruelty (1751). ↑
22. Newton as Master of the Royal Mint lived close by in St Martin’s Street between 1710 and 1725 and later bought a house on the west side of the Square. ↑
23. The Hogarth family was settled in the house by the autumn of 1733 and were advertising A Rake’s Progress and Southwark Fair in December of that year as from the Golden Head. Jonathan Tyers wrote to Hogarth at the Leicester Fields address in the spring of the same year. Uglow suggests they were installed as early as autumn of 1732. ↑
24. The contents of the advert say something about Hogarth’s art and methods: the prints were to be engraved by ‘the best Masters in Paris’ rather than by him. The six pictures are not identified as a story or even a series, but as a ‘variety of modern occurrences’. The work would be decent and elegant. None of the characters represented would be ‘personal’. Hogarth was not the only person to avoid the word ‘sold’ (if that is a fair inference): Thomas Worlidge, the painter and engraver (1700–1766), announced that his prints were to be ‘had’ at his house. It was a common usage but may indicate sensitivity about the subject. ↑
25. ‘J. Reeves’ was probably John Reeves, a printer of Saint Martin’s-in-the-Fields, not to be confused with his son also John, a printer and prestigious lawyer. (Reeves was not a forebear of the famous company of artists’ suppliers: Thomas Reeves and his son, oil and colour-men at No 80 Holborn Bridge from the late 18th century onwards). ↑
26. The Duchess of Manchester is reported as refusing to speak to a celebrated French actor simply because he worked for his living. ↑
27. At his most modest, Hogarth would have considered himself an artisan, an engraver and print-maker. ↑
28. Several versions of the story exist: see J Dicks, The Works of Hogarth with Sixty-eight Illustrations (London, nd), p66. ↑
29. An over-painted crest on the door of an upturned coach in The Second Stage of Cruelty indicates that Nero’s hackney carriage was bought second-hand from an armigerous person. ↑
30. A likeness of David Jones, the coachman, survives as an undated chalk and crayon drawing by Richard Livesay (1750–1823, Einberg, p221). He lodged with Jane 1777–1785 and drafted a number of pictures after Hogarth. See Einberg, p311 and p357, for details of the coach. ↑
31. 31 Hannah Regnier, ‘Hogarth in Leicester Square’ for London Historians Ltd., online November 2011, chapter from her book on Leicester Square, five pages. Bernd W Krysmanski identified a profile in Hogarth’s Enthusiasm Delineated (1761) as that of one of the murderers, Theodore Gardelle: Hogarth’s Hidden Parts, Hildesheim 2010, pp53–4, and also see Sala, p63. Gardelle may have been sketched by Hogarth in a now lost drawing and his resemblance, identified as a ‘devil’, is found in Hogarth’s The Cockpit. ↑
32. Sala, p63. ↑
33. A letter dated c1767 by a lodger explained that Jane lived in so large house that she no longer needed part of it. ↑
34. Hogarth’s weekend and late summer refuge at Chiswick is now a museum dedicated to him and is well known, thanks to its enthusiastic staff and Hounslow Council. ↑
35. Having admitted to speculating at the beginning of this essay, I refrain from using the term subsequently for fear of over-use. There is some confusion concerning the naming of floors. The English refer to a ground floor followed by the first floor, and so on. In the United States, the ground floor is the first floor (and so on); see ‘Characteristics of the Georgian Town house’, Jane Austen’s World (online, 2009). I use the English descriptions. ↑
36. César de Saussure (1705–1783) in The letters of Monsieur, describing London life between 1725 and 1729, wrote home about London terraced houses as follows:[… the basement is] ‘well lighted, and has as much air as the others [floors] have. In order to accomplish this a sort of moat, five or six feet in width and eight or nine deep, is dug in front of all the houses and is called the “area”. This moat is edged on the side next the street with iron railing. The cellars and vaults where coal is stored are very strongly built beneath the streets, and to reach them you cross the area. Almost all the houses have little gardens or courtyards at the back.’ ↑
37. I have drawn on Kim Rendfeld’s essay ‘“This is the Way We Wash the Clothes… ” in the 18th and Early 19th Centuries’ (online, September, 2012). ↑
38. I have drawn on Rachel Laudin’s ‘Servants in the Kitchen: Professed Cooks and Plain Cooks’ (online, 2016). ↑
39. Hogarth was to declare that it was in the nature of ‘true-born Britains’ to eat roast beef every day, according to Piers Beirne in ‘Raw, roast, or half baked? Hogarth’s beef in Calais Gate’ in Theoretical Criminology, vol 22 (3) (2018), p426. The kitchen table would have been large: see Fanny Louvier, ‘ “Not fit to eat in the same room as other human beings”: eating in British Servants’ Autobiographies 1900–1939’ (online, Feast Journal). Although the dates given are later than Hogarth, much of the detail in the essay applies to earlier times. ↑
40. An antiquarian, the Revd William Cole, of Milton near Cambridge, recalled (c1735) sitting for Hogarth in No. 30 and described how a manservant refused a gratuity because his employment would have been at risk if he accepted. Cole was surprised by and admiring of Hogarth’s liberality (Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes, 3rd edn, London 1785, p14). After the success of A Harlot’s Progress, Hogarth gave his maidservants fans decorated with the scenes from the series as a thank-you. ↑
41. Samuel and Sarah Adams, The Complete Servant: being a Practical Guide to the Peculiar Wage, Duties, and Business of all Servants (London 1825). Also Sarah Murden, ‘Servants wages in the Late Georgian Era’, in 18th Century Occupations (online, 2025) for examples and tables; and Jacob F Field, ‘Domestic service, gender, and wages in rural England c1700–1860’, originally in Economic History Review, 2013, now online at JSTOR. ↑
42. The wages of servants are near-impossible to calculate in terms of an individual employer like Hogarth, unless they survive by chance. I have not included the cost of provisions, utilities, travel, allowances to family, and so on. ↑
43. Paulson has suggested that Hunter’s house at No. 28 forms something of a model of what No. 30 was like. Hunter’s downstairs rooms consisted of a study and an afternoon bedroom (H II, p52, p395n17). ↑
44. I wonder whether Hogarth encouraged people to pay for prints on the spot or whether they were ordered, sent out and followed up with invoices labelled ‘Dr to Mr Hogarth’ and signed by him or his sister? ↑
45. Riding, p384, suggests in passing that one of the servants in Hogarth’s painting of their heads acted as a doorman. ↑
46. By 1745, Leicester Square was changing. Many passers-by and sight-seers of various sorts came through the Square, including those hostile to the Hanoverians, making home security a factor. Joshua Reynolds is known to have bolted and barred his premises at night. ↑
47. The group consisted of A Chorus of Singers, The Laughing Audience, Scholars at a Lecture, and The Company of Undertakers. ↑
48. There are other possibilities. Did Jane and William attend to subscriptions seated at a knee-hole desk with a secret drawer? ↑
49. Thomas Macklin’s print-shop (from 1779) had three counters with a large number of drawers. He had five print stands, a portfolio-stand, and seven lamps. ↑
50. Framers had to have multifarious skills as joiners, carvers, gilders, cleaners mould-makers. Elaborate rococo frames seemed to have percolated into Britain around 1720. Some of Hogarth’s paintings were set in striking rococo trophy-frames: one of his Beggar’s Opera frames is surmounted by a bust of John Gay. His Bishop Hoadly has a mitre on a Palladian frame and his Garrick as Richard III has a military trophy appropriate to Garrick’s role as a warrior-king. At the time of his unhappy sale of Marriage A-la-mode, Hogarth complained that the frames alone were worth four guineas). He is known to have patronised the Gosset family of frame-makers (see The Frame Blog, Jacob Simon, ‘William Hogarth, Mr Gosset, and the Story of a Frame [that of Paul Before Felix]’ (October 2012). ↑
51. I’ve not been able to track down a known mirror-writing specialist. There must have been a considerable number of them who served the typographical/visual-image culture of the time. ↑
52. 53 L’Encyclopedie de Diderot et d’Alembert (Paris 1751–1772) in 40 vols, section entitled ‘Gravure en Taille douce’, Fig.1 bis, vol 21. The illustration is a gathering together of activities rather than the representation of a real workshop; Hogarth would not have had so many assistants. He would also have known of the manual on copperplate engraving by Abraham Bosse. ↑
53. The resist probably had a beeswax base. ↑
54. Two separate details in Industry & Idleness refer to the Sun Alliance company. ↑
55. Hogarth may have bought in his copperplates from someone like William Cave, who, according to his trade card, was a ‘Copper Plate-Maker’ in West Smithfield (early to mid-century). He and his partner, Charles Johnson in Chancery Lane, claimed to sell copperplates cheaply and would buy in old plates at the best prices. Hogarth could have been interested in their services. Facsimile Analysis, ‘Introduction, p11. See ‘Copper & steel engraving explained’, antiqueprints.com which reproduces an illustration (from 1805) showing an engraver copying a picture on an easel via a mirror. ↑
56. Sandby is not a reliable witness, but his parody assumes that there were assistants in Hogarth’s painting room and that pictures hung on the walls. For a modern account of the grid method see Thaneeya McArdle, ‘The Grid Method: an Easy Step-by-Step Instructional Guide to Transferring or Enlarging Images – Art is Fun’ (online from 2009). ↑
57. The surviving engravers’ drawings for Marriage A-la-mode are more closely squared. Hogarth dusted the back of his intermediary drawings with red chalk and then incised the drawings themselves in order to transfer lines onto his copperplate. Just why Sandby attacked Hogarth so cruelly is unclear. I guess that he was paid by an enemy of Hogarth. ↑
58. Hogarth could have bought in his stationery from Hannah Nicholson, a stationer in the Strand who claimed to be stationer to the Princess of Wales (certainly active in the 1760s and probably earlier). He could have bought quill pens and inks from ‘Mr Raper’s Toyshop’. One item in the sale of Jane’s effects sale is of interest: a half ream of French printing paper was bought by ‘Richardson, the Strand’. He was probably the William Richardson, a print-seller at No 174, the Strand. He advertised a framing and glazing service for prints and drawings. His father may have sold prints in High Holborn, perhaps supplying Hogarth in his later life. Richardson also appears to have bought good prints of Morning and Noon. Was this to complete a set with Evening and Night already in his possession? ↑
59. A lamp-lighter, John Clark, of Denmark Street hired out candle and oil lamps, called ‘globular lamps’ for both outdoor and indoor lighting. A candle-lantern is a frequent detail in Hogarth’s moral subjects, often with symbolic meaning. ↑
60. I have not found a picture of a press specifically designed for proofs. Roger Gaskell in his discussions of the relationship between printing houses and engraving shops (2004) refers in passing to rolling presses used for proofs. Samuel Pepys attended a dinner of ‘The Loving Society of Rolling-press Printers’ in around 1685. ↑
61. See Michael Phillips’s account ‘Curating a Blake exhibition: Part 2’ https://blog.blakearchive.org/2016/05/27/curating-a-blake-exhibition-part-2/The exhibition was ‘William Blake: Apprentice and Master’, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 4 December 2014–1 March 2015. ↑
62. Not all meals were formal. A comic invitation to supper and ‘pie’ on a Thursday was supposedly sent to Doctor Arnold King at one point, featuring outrageous puns on the Greek alphabet. According to AP Oppé in The Drawings of Hogarth (London 1958), King provided Hogarth with the captions for Industry and Idleness (cat. 107, p62). The mock-formal invitation refers to a ‘Mr King’ rather than to a ‘Dr King’, and so there are other individuals it might refer to including Giles King, publisher of A Harlot’s Progress in two sheets (active 1732–1740) or Thomas King, an actor and theatre manager (1730–1805) or, an intriguing but unlikely possibility, Tom King of the notorious coffee-house in Covent Garden, who died in 1735. There is ample evidence of Hogarth’s interest in gadgets. He praised the Harrison clock in The Analysis; he engraved mechanical toys and telescopes; he was knowledgeable about weaponry, having engraved a series of military pictures; later, he was to make an allegory out of a stand of arms. He showed a pulley on a gantry at work in The Times II (published from 1786). The idea of a dumb-waiter would have come naturally to him. ↑
63. See Zara Corvett, ‘The Lost Ancient Practice of Communal Sleep’ for its prevalence (online, 2024). In Hogarth’s jaunt among the islands of the north Kent coast, remembered as Hogarth’s ‘Peregrination’ (1732), the five holiday makers shared bedchambers and on more than one occasion slept two to a bed. ↑
64. Sala, p84. ↑
65. An illustration in Mrs SC Hall, Pilgrimages to English Shrines (1850) supposedly shows Hogarth’s painting room at Chiswick. I suspect that it is an imagined recreation by her illustrator, FW Fairholt. He did over 80 illustrations for Hall’s book and they both visited Chiswick, but he was such a prolific illustrator that he may have used his imagination rather more than his powers of observation. Recent excavations reveal the remains of stabling at the bottom of the garden, but no evidence of a painter’s studio. I think it unlikely that Hogarth would want to transport fragile canvases backwards and forwards between central London and Chiswick. Psychologically, I believe that he spent time in lodgings in South Lambeth and, later, Chiswick, as a means of getting away from it all. He probably kept a note-book with him, though. Sophie Mesplede has suggested that towards the end of his life an irritable Hogarth removed his painting room to the backyard at Chiswick in ‘Portraitists’ Studios’, The Digital Encyclopedia of Sociability in the Long Eighteenth-Century. In my view, this is unlikely since No. 30 was such a practical base. (I am grateful for this information to Steven King, Visitor Experience Duty Officer, Historic Houses, London Borough of Hounslow, email 20.12.2022). ↑
66. The European Magazine and London Review, June 1801, pp442–3. ↑
67. Joshua Reynolds had a similar problem on the other side of the Square and built a separate octagonal painting room behind his house. Its dimensions were roughly 20 feet by 16 feet with one half-sized window 9 feet up. Was he influenced by his knowledge of Hogarth’s painting room? Paulson explained the need for a separate painting room in H II, p51. ↑
68. Information courtesy of Robin Simon. ↑
69. Facsimile Analysis, chap XII ‘Of Light and Shade [short title] p95. ↑
70. I had previously assumed that this detail was a view of the interior of the house, but it is too incongruous to be that, and so I have changed my mind: exploded views had been around from the Renaissance. The ceiling looks as if it might be twice the height of the long-case clock standing behind the easel. ↑
71. Investigators at the National Portrait Gallery have found that under Self-portrait painting the Comic Muse there are the remains of another full-length portrait supposedly hanging on the back wall, an echo of that in The Battle of the Pictures, perhaps? ↑
72. Hogarth’s palette for A Rake’s Progress has been described as relatively traditional and his pigments were well-established ones. See Griffin, Macaro, and Townsend, ‘Hogarth’s Materials and Techniques: How was A Rake’s Progress Made?’, Tate Gallery online, 2025; and David Bomford and Ashok Roy’s analysis of the paintings of Marriage A-la-mode, National Gallery, Technical Bulletin, vol 6, 1982, pp44–67. ↑
73. The Royal Academy of Arts was also given a mahl stick supposedly belonging to Hogarth. It is inscribed as such on its silver cap. ↑
74. One candidate for an assistant was Philip Dawe, later quite a well-known mezzotint engraver (c1730–1832). He recalled accompanying Hogarth on his tours of the Fleet Markets in the early 1750s. Sandby’s satire on Hogarth, Puggs Graces, shows a small flat box on a stool. The lid is open to reveal a small bottle – of turpentine, perhaps. Was this part of Hogarth’s portable equipment? The same satire has a nude sitting on a twelve-drawer cabinet covered with a drape. A twelve-drawer cabinet was more suitable for the colour ranges of the time than fifty-four. The latter sounds like over-kill, but it does appear to have been Hogarth’s. ↑
75. Richard Campbell, The Artist’s Repository and Drawing Magazine (London, c1785) vol 3, p63. ↑
76. Einberg, p224. Originally transcribed by John Ireland. ↑
77. James Millard, son of Anthony James, has told Robin Simon that he remembers Hogarth’s chair being sold to Victor Lownes of the Playboy Club and delivered to his office in Berkeley Square. It was given by Lownes to a Royal Academician (information kind courtesy of Marilyn Lownes) who has kindly confirmed that it is in his possession. ↑
78. Reported in John Nichols, The Genuine Works of William Hogarth, 2 vols, London 1808, 1810, I, p127. Morell was a librettist whom Hogarth drew in the 1760s. ↑
79. Smith’s picture is one of a series that he drew to illustrate Hogarth’s life (1817). In other drawings, he imagined a boy bringing a letter and a bundle to Sir James Thornhill; Hogarth is shown painting Henry Fielding (on a dais), while seated in his chair and working on an unusual inclined painting table with barley-twist legs; two bedroom scenes in No. 30 include curtained beds. ↑
80. The outdoor workshop of the television programme The Repair Shop comes to mind. ↑
81. Sala, note p291. ↑
82. In practice, Hogarth Moralis’d is more descriptive than moral in content. ↑
83. Nichols, among others, hinted that Julian Bere was a model for the old maid, but Richard Livesay’s drawing associated with her shows a plump woman, whereas the old maid is markedly angular. ↑
84. There was not an exact likeness: Louis le Coeur’s portrait-engraving after Hogarth’s portrait of Lady Thornhill has her as a full-faced woman (Einberg, cat. 88.1, and p379). ↑
85. Her sister Mary Hogarth (1669–1741) possibly looked after their mother in nearby Cranbourn Alley until her death in 1735 and then lived alone until her own death (their father had died in 1718), (H II, p273). ↑
86. Mary Lewis’s cousin, John Phillips, wrote a memorandum to accompany his sister’s portrait. As well as calling her a ‘shop woman’ he claimed that her father was Harper in Ordinary to the King. Einberg reproduces his memorandum as Appendix 2, pp377–380. She has reservations about his role (p379). In his will, Hogarth thanked Mary Lewis for her service. ↑
87. I have found no evidence that Julian Bere was involved on the business side of No. 30. ↑
88. Einberg, cat. 210, pp 310–311. ↑
89. There are several pointers that some of the occupants of No. 30 were devout. The non-conformist servant; possibly Lady Thornhill; Jane appears to have been a regular church-goer in Chiswick. Hogarth himself, although from a non-conformist background, was a free-thinker and possibly a nominal Anglican at least, who painted the Archbishop of Canterbury and at least one other bishop. Was he under pressure over beliefs at home? ↑
90. The importance of the senior servant to the family is underlined by Livesay’s drawing of him on his own in 1782. Such a personal image was unlikely to be a good seller, and so perhaps it was a personal memorial for Jane. He has been identified as a coachman, but Hogarth did not buy a coach until the 1750s, and so the chronology would have been tight. ↑
91. See Einberg, cat. 221, p329. ↑
92. Gantry p 141. ↑
93. Richard Goddard, ‘The Genius and Abilities of the greatest and most rival Nations’: French Engravers in Eighteenth-Century London (online 2024), p195, ch 3, pp139ff, and ch 4 on Ravenet, pp179ff. ↑
94. ↑
95. Note in margin BM Proof 1860-7-28-62 (quotation reproduced HGW, pp105–6). ↑
96. Did the business become so popular that it caused dissatisfaction among its neighbours? ↑
97. Einberg, Appendix 1 (cat. 248, p369). ↑
98. To our modern eyes, a cloth warehouse should have had room for a couple to live together including: William’s painting equipment; his engraver’s tools and materials; a proof-press; and a dog. The elder Joseph Sympson sold prints from his ‘warehouse’ at the Dove [Inn?], Drury Lane. It was a concept growing in popularity in the long 18th century, although a warehouse could simply be a grandiose name for a shop. It could have been that for a while the couple lived with the Thornhill family and hired the premises in the Broad Cloth Warehouse as a place in which to paint and engrave. ↑
99. The list of unfinished paintings on 1 January 1731 is reproduced in Einberg, Appendix 3, cat. 262, p381. It is likely that Hogarth acquired his commissions by word of mouth and through the recommendations of sponsors, such as Vanderbank and his father-in-law. ↑
100. Vertue recorded that Hogarth took subscriptions for A Harlot’s Progress in Thornhill’s house. ↑
101. With the exception of George Lambert, the landscape painter, whom Hogarth employed (or collaborated with) on several occasions. ↑
102. I have drawn on Martin Myrone’s essay in the ODNB, ‘The Society of the Virtuosi of St Luke ‘(act. c. 1689–1743’ (online). ↑