Word: hogarths
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...British muscled in on Chicago last week. In the heart of Anglophobe Colonel Robert McCormick's bustling bailiwick they set up a loan exhibition of 62 of Britain's best paintings, by Hogarth, Constable, and Turner. The British Ambassador, Lord Inverchapel, was on hand at Chicago's Art Institute to open the show with a suitably democratic address. Said he: "[These] painters . . . are all of the humble English earth; very earthy, simple folk, men of the people...
...stood, note-taking, in Parliament, until his feet swelled, raced over England in post chaises, sometimes wrote all night-and managed at the same time to pen his first, instantly successful literary works: Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers. He gave up journalism after he married Catherine Hogarth, an unambitious, lethargic Scot, who once remarked of the Garden of Eden: "Eh, mon, it would be nae temptation to me to gae rinning about a gairden stark naked ating green apples...
When the critics called Hogarth's engravings "crude," he replied, with 18th-Century involution, that the passions may be more forcibly expressed by a strong, bold stroke than by the most delicate engraving. To expressing them as I felt them, I have paid the utmost attention and, as they were addressed to hard hearts, have rather preferred leaving them hard, and giving the effect, by a quick touch, to rendering them languid and feeble by fine strokes and soft engraving, which require more care and practice than can often be attained, except by a man of a very quiet...
Technically, Hogarth's etchings were sometimes on the sloppy side, but today's critics were more than happy to settle for what they got. Looking at his prints was like seeing a strange world through the wrong end of a telescope. It took a long time to see any of the pictures; each one was loaded with details. Said Charles Lamb: "Other prints we look at, his prints we read...
...Hogarth had an explanation of his own. In one of the neatest esthetic credos in English, he described what he was trying for: "variety without confusion, simplicity without nakedness, richness without tawdriness, distinctness without hardness, quantity without excess...