The Bruiser (Hogarth)

William Hogarth's satirical engravings often commented on social issues like gin drinking, popular credulity, and misguided marriages, but he tended to avoid involving himself in factional political disputes. The oddly adorable image above, which depicts the poet and former curate Charles Churchill, is the outgrowth of a rare exception. In 1762, Hogarth issued an allegorical street scene entitled The Times, Plate 1, in which the central figure was a firefighter (taken to be the Tory statesman John Stuart, the third Earl of Bute) who was struggling to extinguish the fires of the Seven Years War while being harrassed by members of a war party including, among others, figures presumed to represent the radical parliamentarian John Wilkes and Churchill, his close ally. Both of the latter were acquaintances of Hogarth's and had formerly been on good terms with him. When Wilkes blasted the artist in the pages of his periodical The North Briton, Hogarth produced a vicious caricature of him as a sinister, smirking rabble-rouser with a suggestion of devil's horns. (Hogarth, who had strong ideas about the use of the word "caricature," may have regarded it as more of a study of character.)

Hogarth was eventually to tire of the squabble and lose his enthusiasm for the faction surrounding the Earl of Bute, but the damage was done. Churchill penned a damning poetic Epistle to William Hogarth that publicly assaulted both his character and his career as an artist. Though he was fair-minded enough to admit the merits of Hogarth's earlier engravings ("HOGARTH unrivall'd stands, and shall engage / Unrivall'd praise to the most distant age") he characterized the man as "weak and vain" and as a has-been.

Hogarth's response to Churchill's dressing-down was ingenious but not without a touch of the bizarre. Rather than go to the trouble of engraving an image of Churchill comparable to the one he had made of Wilkes, he took out an old plate that he had used years earlier to create a self-portrait (below).

Hogarth then effaced his own likeness, mocked Churchill as a drunken bear with tattered clerical vestments, and added a copy of the Epistle, onto which the pug (a breed Hogarth favored) is now, in a characteristic Hogarthian touch, issuing a stream of urine. In later states of the plate (as shown at top) he replaced the palette with a miniature scene including Churchill as a dancing bear and Wilkes as a monkey.

In the words of Hogarth biographer Jenny Uglow,

It was an extraodinary act, to replace his own face with that of the man who had tried to destroy him, especially when he produced such a strong, powerful, almost attractive image. To some it might seem less of a revenge than an unconscious surrender: a suicide, even. In the midst of his anger, Churchill saw this. 'I take it for granted You have seen Hogarth's print — was ever anything so contemptible,' he wrote to Wilkes, '—I think he is fairly Felo de se.'

Nevertheless, the portrayal of Churchill as The Bruiser was popular and the engraving sold well. Time was running out, however; Hogarth died on October 26, 1764. The much younger and alcoholic Churchill, in exile in France, died just nine days later.

Jenny Uglow's Hogarth: A Life and a World admirably combines art history with a good overview of the social and political background of the very lively environment in which the artist worked. For larger illustrations (always a plus, in an artist who excelled at detail) a volume like Dover's Engravings by Hogarth is indispensable.