It seems obvious now you mention it, but it took someone to notice and then do something about it: Hogarth’s pictures are often very noisy. Whether outdoors or in, his compositions variously feature musicians, crying babies, street criers, yapping dogs, yowling cats, noisy children, yelling crowds and sometimes all of the above. Cacophony. This new exhibition at the Foundling Museum is called Hogarth & The Art of Noise.
Anyone who knows a little Hogarth if prompted about noise, will of course cite The Enraged Musician (1741), for many, his most amusing piece.
The curators claim 19 sources of racket in this image. I only managed to pick out 14. How about you? Here’s a bigger version.
But the centrepiece of this exhibition, the painting from which all else in the show is derived, is the museum’s own Hogarth masterpiece: The March of the Guards to Finchley (1750). It is Hogarth at his most opinionated, prejudiced and spiky. In short, at his best. It depicts the then fairly new Guards regiments in their mitre style headgear carousing in Tottenham Court prior to marching off to quell the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Many of the noisy elements from The Enraged Musician are present – e.g. yowling rooftop cats: Hogarth was never shy of recycling a good visual joke. The point of the picture is to contrast the virility and virtue of Hanoverian Protestant Britain on the left with the weak, immoral and Catholic late Stuarts on the right.
Larger version of this painting here.
Elsewhere in this quite small exhibition we have other examples from many of Hogarth’s work and noise, e.g. The Laughing Audience, alongside comparisons with his near contemporaries. To add further context, you can also listen via headphones to readings from Henry Fielding, Daniel Defoe and others.
William Hogarth and the Founding Museum are inextricably connected. He was a founding Governor of Captain Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital (1739) for (mainly) illegitimate babies. Along with GF Handel and others, he did pro bono work for the hospital, such as designing its logo, as well as participating in fund-raising art exhibitions along with contemporary artists. He and his wife Jane – childless themselves – also occasionally fostered children from the hospital at their home in Chiswick.
This is a very thoughtful and thought-provoking exhibition. It’s further reassuring to see one of its consultants was Elizabeth Einberg, author of the most scholarly book on Hogarth’s work ever produced. Most of all, though, it presents the opportunity to examine a Hogarth masterpiece completely unhindered by glass, distance or crowds. Don’t miss it!
Hogarth and the Art of Noise runs at the Foundling Museum until 1 September 2019.
Mike Paterson
London Historians' Blog 