The Four Times of the Day
Engraving. Plates
approx. 16 ins x 19 1/2 ins. Ref. Paulson 146 – 49. Set of four.
Rich and commodious, this set bears more than one reading. At the
most straightforward level, it is a wonderfully evocative portrait, concrete in time and
place, of a metropolis that Hogarth believed had "every thing requisite to complete
the consumate painter."
Secondly, it is an application, tongue firmly in cheek, of the
time-honored tropes of pastoral poetry to the clamor of modern urban life. In four
great prints, we follow the quadripartite cycles of antiquity: the four times of the day,
the four seasons, the four temperaments, the four ages of man and even the four stages of
matrimony.
Last but not least, it is a sophisticated re-working for an English
setting of a long-standing north-European graphic tradition – the points du jour
– that had lost all vitality. Instead of landscapes, we get cityscapes; instead
of elaborate allegory, the colorful rough and tumble of London life. If nothing
else, this set puts the kibosh on the notion that Hogarth knew next to nothing about the
the history of his own discipline.
Morning
In this scene a tight lipped and prissy old maid – a modern day
"Aurora", the goddess of dawn – is crossing Covent Garden Square to attend
early morning prayers at St. Paul's Church, Inigo Jones' great Tuscan barn.
She is trailed by a freezing page – a modern day putti? –
carrying her prayer book. Her fan held to her pursed lips, she casts a disapproving
eye over the whores and revellers who have tumbled out of Tom King's Coffee House.
But perhaps there is more to it: her elaborate dress – "mutton dressed as
lamb" – raises the possibility that she may have more than one thing on her
mind.
|
|
|
Noon
A gutter with a dead cat separates the sober, well-dressed and fashionable
Huguenots leaving the French church in Hog Lane from the English rabble cheerfully
indulging their earthy lusts.
In the traditional allegory the gods preside over the quiet pleasures of
an alfresco meal; in Hogarth's version a screeching shrew hurls a joint out of the window
of the "Good (i.e. Quiet) Woman" Tavern while an attractive young girl – a
London Venus – drops her pie as she is fondled by her black companion.
|
|
|
Evening
Hogarth introduces us to a down-to-earth Diana and upends all the
traditional roles of dominance. Instead of a quiet contemplative stroll through a
leafy grove, we get a lower-class London family trudging home from a Sunday afternoon
outing at a popular pleasure ground. They are hot, footsore, tired and bad-tempered.
The modern Diana is large, coarse and very pregnant; she lords it over her
pint-sized husband who is wilting under the weight of their youngest child. Behind
them their small and over-dressed daughter scolds her younger brother. A very
Hogarthian treatment of urban Arcadianism.
|
|
|
Night
We are in Charing Cross, the very center of London; it is the 29th of May,
the day Jacobite sympathizers commemorated the restoration of Charles II. Hogarth's
burlesque has taken a political turn.
Under cover of night the controls which usually hide confusion, disorder
and violence have been removed. Wherever one looks, one finds a world on fire or a
world turned upside down. The end, we are led to believe, may well be nigh.
The public figures who play cameo roles in Hogarth's pictures are usually
treated gently. He tended to accept, that is, the proposition that the satirist
should attack the vice and not the miscreant.
This gives an extra edge to the savage caricature – it can't be
called anything else – of Sir Thomas de Veil, a Bow Street magistrate notorious for
his hostility to the sale of "spirituous Liquors" and a keen Hanoverian, shown
in his full masonic regalia being led home dead drunk. |
|
|
