Word: hogarths
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...From all over Europe and the U.S., music-lovers and critics flocked to Venice to hear a Stravinsky translation into opera of Hogarth...
Stravinsky got his idea from William Hogarth's eight-picture series showing the rise & fall of an 18th Century man about London. He first saw the paintings four years ago, had an immediate "theatrical reaction." Moreover, he found the paintings full of "a morality I respect." Stravinsky decided to translate Hogarth into opera. He got distinguished help from Poet W.H. Auden and Brooklyn-born Chester Kallman, who worked up an English libretto with a Faustian theme; Poet T.S. Eliot lent a hand with the final polishing...
...cross William Hogarth had to bear was that he simply did not impress his contemporaries as a serious painter. His colors were too fresh, his draftsmanship too free & easy, his characterizations too blunt and unflattering. When he held auctions of his oils in 1745 and 1751, the paintings he liked best were laughed at. Even the oil originals of some of his most popular engravings sold for little more than the price of their frames. Finally, in disgust and despair, he took down the shingle of his trade from his London house and retired to the country. He wrote...
Last week's show supported a conclusion that time and later critics reached long ago: besides being one of the most biting social satirists and moralists who ever etched an engraving, Hogarth at his best could paint circles around most of his contemporaries. His portrait of Captain Thomas Coram, philanthropist-founder of London's Foundling Hospital, displays a British humor and humanity that Hogarth's two famous 18th Century successors, Gainsborough and Reynolds, too often sacrificed for a slick and fawning elegance. His March of the Guards Towards Scotland, an action-filled canvas of the departure...
...first big Hogarth exhibition in London in more than 100 years. Nobody in Britain seemed able to explain the long oversight for sure. Roland Beckett, art historian and Hogarth expert, suspected it was the old trouble: "People think of him as a mere cartoonist...