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As a painter of social life, Hogarth shows the benefit of the system of memory training which he made a self-discipine. London was his universe and he displayed his mastery in painting every aspect of its people and architecture, from the mansion in Arlington Street, the interior of which provided the setting for the disillusioned couple in the second scene of the "Marriage à la Mode", to the dreadful aspect of Bedlam. Yet he was not content with one line of development only and the work of his mature years takes a varied course. He could not resist the temptation to attempt a revalry with the history painters, though with little successs. The Biblical compositions for St. Bartholomew's Hospital on which he embarked after "The Rake's Progress" were not of a kind to convey his real genius. He is sometimes satirical as in "The March of the Guards towards Scotland", and the "Oh the Roast Beef of Old England!(Calais Gate)", which was a product of his single expeditionabroad with its John Bull comment on the condition of France, and also the "Election"series of 1755 with its richness of comedy. In portraiture he displays a great variety. The charm of childhood, the ability to compose a vivid group, a delightful delicacy of colour appear in the "Graham Children" of 1742. The portrait heads of his servants are penetrating studies of character. The painting of Captain Coram, the philanthropic sea captain who took a leading part in the foundation of the Foundling Hospital, adapts the formality of the ceremonial portrait to a democratic level with a singularlyengaging effects. The quality of Hogarth as an artist is seen to advantage in his sketches and one sketch in particular, the famous "Shrimp Girl" quickly executed with a limited range of colour, stands alone in his work, taking its place among the masterpieces of the world in its harmonyof form and content, its freshness and vitality.
The genius of Hogarth is such that he is often regarded as a solitary rebel against a decaying artificiality, and yet though he had no pupils, he had contemporaries who, while of lesser stature in one way and another, tended in the same direction.
William Hogarth expressed in his art the new mood of national elation, the critical spirit of the self-confident bourgeoisie and the liberal humanitarianism of his age. He was the first native-born English painter to become a hero of the Enlightenment. One reason for his popularity was that the genius of the age found its highest expression in wit. From Molière to Votaire, from Congreve through Swift and Pope to Fielding, the literature of wit was enriched on a scale unprecedent since antiquity. The great comic writers of the century exposed folly, scarified pretension and lashed hypocrisy and cruelty.
It was the great and single-handed achievement of Hogarth to establish comedy as a category in art to be rated as highly as comedy in literature. According to the hierarchy of artistic categories that was inherited from the Renaissance, istoria, --the narrative description of elevated themes, especially from the Bible and antiquity --was the highest branch of art measured by a scale which placed low-life genre at the bottom.
Hogarth was actually sensitive to the categorical deprecation of comic art, and with his friend Henry Fielding set about a campaign to raise its standing.
In a number of works and statements Hogarth identified his cause with comic literature. In his self -portrait of 1745 the oval canvas rests on the works of Shakespeare, Milton and Swift. Because his reasons for invoking literature were misunderstood, Hogarth exposed himself to the charge of being a "literary" artist. The legend of the literary painter can be traced back to his own age. "Other pictures we look at, "wrote Charles Lamb, "his prints we read." Some of the blame for aesthetic deprecation must be placed on the shoulders of Hogarth himself. He seems to have even encouraged an image which mystified his critics. He remarked of the connoisseurs "Because I hate them, they think I hate Titian and let them!" He outraged Horace Walpole by saying that he could paint a portrait as well as Van Dyck. He compared nature with art, to the desadvantage of the latter.
Реферат опубликован: 8/04/2006