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not to be learnt without much practice, and demanded a larger portion of patience than I felt myself disposed to exercise. Added to this, I saw little probability of acquiring the full command of the graver, in a sufficient degree to distinguish myself in that walk; nor was I, at twenty years of age, much disposed to enter on so barren and unprofitable a study, as that of merely making fine lines. I thought it\ still more unlikely, that by pursuing the common method, and copying old drawings, I could ever attain the power of making new designs, which was my first and greatest ambition. I therefore endeavoured to habituate myself to the exercise of a sort of technical memory; and by repeating in my own mind, the parts of which objects were composed, I could by degrees combine and put them down with my pencil. Thus, with all the drawbacks which resulted from the circumstances I have mentioned, I had one material advantage over my competitors, viz. the early habit I thus acquired of retaining in my mind's eye, without coldly copying it on the spot, whatever I intended to imitate.* Sometimes, but too seldom, I took the life, for correcting the parts I had not perfectly enough remembered, and then I transferred them to my compositions.

My pleasures and my studies thus going hand in hand,

*

[Though averse, as he himself expresses it, to coldly copying on the spot any objects that struck him, it was usual with him, when he saw a singular character, either in the street or elsewhere, to pencil the leading features, and prominent markings upon his nail, and when he came home, to copy the sketch on paper, and afterwards introduce it in a print. Several of these sketches I have seen, and in them may be traced the first thoughts for many of the characters which he afterwards introduced in his works.

J. IRELAND.]

the most striking objects that presented themselves, either comic or tragic, made the strongest impression on my mind; but had I not sedulously practised what I had thus acquired, I should very soon have lost the power of performing it.

Instead of burthening the memory with musty rules, or tiring the eyes with copying dry and damaged pictures, I have ever found studying from nature the shortest and safest way of attaining knowledge in my art.* By adopting this method, I found a redundancy of matter continually occurring. A choice of composition was the next thing to be considered, and my constitutional idleness naturally led me to the use of such materials as I had previously collected; and to this I was further induced by thinking, that if properly combined, they might be made the most useful to society in painting, although similar subjects had often failed in writing and preaching.

To return to my narrative,—the instant I became master of my own time, I determined to qualify myself for engraving on copper. In this I readily got employment; and frontispieces to books, such as prints to Hudibras, in twelves, &c. soon brought me into the way. But the tribe of booksellers remained as my father had left them, when he died about five years before this time,† which was of an illness

* As this was the doctrine I preached as well as practised, an arch brother of the pencil once gave it this turn; that the only way to draw well, was not to draw at all; and on the same principle, he supposed, that if I wrote an essay on the art of swimming, I should prohibit my pupil from going into the water, until he had learnt.

† [Hudibras was published in 1726, so that his father probably died about the year 1721, leaving two daughters, Mary and Anne, besides his son William, who, on the leaf of an old memorandum

occasioned partly by the treatment he met with from this set of people, and partly by disappointment from great men's promises; so that I doubly felt this usage, which put me upon publishing on my own account. But here again I had to encounter a monopoly of printsellers, equally mean, and destructive to the ingenious; for the first plate I published, called The Taste of the Town,* in which the reigning follies were lashed, had no sooner begun to take a run, than I found copies of it in the print-shops, vending at half-price, while the original prints were returned to me again; and I was thus obliged to sell the plate for whatever these pirates pleased to give me, as there was no place of sale but at their shops.

Owing to this and other circumstances, by engraving, until I was near thirty, I could do little more than maintain myself; but even then I was a punctual paymaster.

book in my possession, after mentioning the time of his own birth and baptism, thus continues,

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'Mary Hogarth was born November 10th, 1699. "Ann Hogarth, two years after in the same month. "Taken from the Register at Great St. Bartholomew's." J. IRELAND.]

[His sister Anne Hogarth survived till August 13, 1771. I have Hogarth's portraits of his two sisters, which have not been engraved. N.]

* [The print alluded to is The Small Masquerade Ticket, or Burlington Gate. J. IRELAND.]

CHAPTER II.

Marries paints small Conversations, which subjects he quits for familiar prints; attempts History; but finding it not encouraged in England, returns to engraving from his own designs. Occasionally takes portraits large as life, for which he incurs much abuse. To prove his powers and vindicate his fame, paints the admirable portrait of Captain Coram, and presents it to the Foundling Hospital.

I THEN married, and commenced painter of small Conversation pieces, from twelve to fifteen inches high. This having novelty, succeeded for a few years. But though it gave somewhat more scope to the fancy, was still but a less kind of drudgery; and as I could not bring myself to act like some of my brethren, and make it a sort of a manufactory, to be carried on by the help of back-ground and drapery painters, it was not sufficiently profitable to pay the expenses my family required. I therefore turned my thoughts to a still more novel mode, viz. painting and engraving modern moral subjects, a field not broken up in any country or any age.

The reasons which induced me to adopt this mode of designing were, that I thought both writers and painters had, in the historical style, totally overlooked that intermediate species of subjects, which may be placed between the sublime and grotesque; I therefore wished to compose pictures on canvas, similar to representations on the stage; and further hope that they will be tried by the same test, and

criticised by the same criterion. Let it be observed, that I mean to speak only of those scenes where the human species are actors, and these I think have not often been delineated in a way of which they are worthy and capable.

In these compositions, those subjects that will both entertain and improve the mind, bid fair to be of the greatest public utility, and must therefore be entitled to rank in the highest class. If the execution is difficult (though that is but a secondary merit), the author has claim to a higher degree of praise. If this be admitted, comedy, in painting as well as writing, ought to be allotted the first place, as most capable of all these perfections, though the sublime, as it is called, has been opposed to it. Ocular demonstration will carry more conviction to the mind of a sensible man, than all he would find in a thousand volumes; and this has been attempted in the prints I have composed. Let the decision be left to every unprejudiced eye; let the figures in either pictures or prints be considered as players dressed either for the sublime,-for genteel comedy,* or farce,— for high or low life. I have endeavoured to treat my subjects as a dramatic writer: my picture is my stage, and men and women my players, who by means of certain actions and gestures, are to exhibit a dumb show.

Before I bad done any thing of much consequence in this walk, I entertained some hopes of succeeding in what the puffers in books call the great style of History painting; so that without having had a stroke of this grand business before, I quitted small portraits and familiar conversations,

* [It has been truly observed that comedy exhibits the character of a species,-farce of an individual. Of the class in which Hogarth has a right to be placed, there can be little doubt; he wrote comedies with a pencil. J. IRELAND.]

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