Note 56 — HOGARTH.
Reading edition
Sigismunda, however, though she missed of judicious admirers, had, at least, the good fortune to meet with a flatterer in the late Mr. Robert Lloyd, whose poem intituled Genius, Envy, and Time, addressed to William Hogarth, esq. has the following lines. Time is the speaker.
"While Sigismunda's deep distress Which looks the soul of wretchedness, When I, with slow and softening pen, Have gone o'er all the tints agen, Shall urge a bold and proper claim, To level half the ancient fame; While future ages, yet unknown, With critic air shall proudly own Thy Hogarth first of every clime For humour keen, or strong sublime, &c."
It is but justice, on one hand, to add, that when Lloyd wrote this eulogium, he was not yet enlisted under the banners of fashion; but impartiality, on the other hand, requires we should observe that, having, like Hogarth, seen few pictures by the best masters, he was treating of an art he did not understand.
The authors of the Monthly Review are of opinion, that Mr. Walpole speaks too contemptuously of Sigismunda, and that there is no ground for the insinuation that the person for whom it was painted thought meanly of it. "We have in our possession (say they) a letter to Hogarth from the noble person referred to, in which he expresses himself in the following terms;—I really think the performance so striking and inimitable, that the constantly having it before one's eyes, would be often occasioning melancholy ideas to arise in one's mind, which, a curtain being drawn before it, would not diminish in the least." Surely this epistle, if genuine, was ironical. Or shall we suppose that, afterwards, his lordship only saw the picture through the disgusting medium of the price? Mr. Wilkes's opinion of the piece will be best conveyed in his own words, which are therefore copied in note 65, below.
Dr. Morell, an intimate friend of Mr. Hogarth, who was applied to for information, returned for answer: "His excellencies, as well as his foibles, are so universally known, that I cannot add to the former, and would not, if I could, to the latter. I should think we lived in a very ill-natured world, if the whims and follies in a man's life were to be exposed, and his oddities and mistakes, ubi plura nitent, seriously condemned. But the unhappy affair of Sigismunda requires animadversion. And I will venture to say that even this Sigismunda would not have deserved so many hard things as have been said of it, if Mr. Hogarth had timely and properly observed the caution—Manum de Tabula. But it was so altered, upon the criticism of one Connoisseur or another; and especially when, relying no longer upon strength of genius, he had recourse to the feigned tears and fictitious woe of a female friend; that, when it appeared at the exhibition, I scarce knew it again myself, and from a passable picture it became little better than the wretched figure here represented. In my opinion, I never saw a finer resemblance of flesh and blood, while the canvas was warm, I mean wet; but, like that of real flesh, as soon as it was chilled, the beauty wore off. And this, he said, could not be helped, as no colours, but those of pure nature, as ultramarine, &c. would keep their natural brightness. But it is granted that colouring was not Mr. Hogarth's forte; and the subject we are upon is a disagreeable one."