The 300th birthday of the longitude act isn’t the only important anniversary this year. As well as significant commemorations for both the first and second world wars, 2014 marks 250 years since the death of William Hogarth. It’s also 10 years since the creation of the Foundling Museum, which commemorates the Foundling Hospital for orphan children with which Hogarth was increasingly involved and, through his many artist friends, which he turned into essentially the first public art gallery in London.
Readers of this blog may have noticed that I have some small interest in Hogarth’s series A Rake’s Progress, as well as in responses to it by contemporary artists such as David Hockney and Grayson Perry. I was therefore delighted to hear that the Foundling would be marking their birthday, and the anniversary of Mr Hogarth’s death,with an exhibition devoted to the series and it’s legacy: Progress. They have brought together Hogarth’s engravings with Yinka Shonibare MBE‘s photographic series The Diary of a Victorian Dandy, Grayson Perry‘s tapestries The Vanity of Small Differences, and David Hockney‘s early etchings The Rake’s Progress, as well as a new commission from Jessie Brennan: A Fall of Ordinariness and Light.
With the series shown across different rooms in the Museum building, what is immediately striking is how well this commentary on the humour and tragedy of 18th-century life, and the modern progresses inspired by it, tie into the stories that the Foundling Museum tells. Walking up the stairs to the first floor, you are first met by Hogarth’s series, at the heart, as it were, of the Museum. Turning right, Shonibare’s Victorian Dandy series acts as the entrance hall to the Museum’s elaborate boardroom, the fourth scene at 19:00 hours, where elegant gentleman and ladies listen to music, making a particularly nice connection to the room beyond.
The corner corridor that usually houses cases of the museum’s famous token collection has become home to Hockney’s delicate etchings, which similarly evoke ideas of loss and confused identity. I felt that keeping the tokens here would have made a nice aesthetic relationship with Hockney’s etchings too. Downstairs, it is a joy to be able to get so close to Perry’s rich tapestries and peer at their every detail. The multiplicity of detail and textual reference plays directly on Hogarth’s engravings, but again I felt the woven threads linked back to the scraps of fabric so often left with Foundlings. Jessie Brennan’s new commission is a delicate, touching commentary on the destruction of utopian east London social housing. I did wonder if her soft pencil was overwhelmed by the paintings of the Committee Room (including Hogarth’s March to Finchley) and would have been stronger in the next-door display on the history of the Foundling Museum as a building and institution.
But, the joy of Hogarth and his works, of course, is that he also ties into so much that is being discussed and displayed in museums at the moment. Hogarth was everywhere, and so too are his disciples. The Dulwich Picture Gallery has only recently staged a show of Hockney’s prints, Perry’s tapestries have been in the Royal Academy and touring the country, Shonibare has had shows at the Barnes in Philadelphia, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and at the National Maritime Museum, among others. Hogarth’s influence on eighteenth-century life is central to the Royal Collection’s current ‘First Georgians’ display, and he now has a place in Queen Charlotte’s Cottage at Kew Gardens.
One thing that particularly pleased me about Progress, was the notable choice of the 1735 version of Hogarth’s final scene in Bedlam (rather than the 1763 re-working). The original, of course, has the clearer image of an inmate trying to solve the longitude problem, representing longitude as well suited to this madhouse with its visual, mental and social complexities. This print is also about to go on show in our own Ships, Clocks and Stars, opening in less than 2 weeks time. So, Hogarth really does get everywhere!
