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.

The Water Street Mission, Revisited

This little "Manual of the Water Street Mission" in New York City was published in 1880, and seems to have served both as an introduction for prospective clients and as the mission's annual report. The founder of the mission, a onetime "river rat" and reformed alcoholic named Jerry McAuley, was still alive at the time. Following his death in 1884 a number of subsequent publications would keep track of the mission's activities, including the Rev. R. M. Offord's Jerry McAuley: His Life and Work (1885), Samuel H. Hadley's Down in Water Street (1902), and Mrs. S. May Washburn's "But, Until Seventy Times Seven": The Story of the McAuley Water Street Mission (1936).

The image at the top of this post shows the pamphlet's very nice engraved frontispiece; the cover, which sports another engraving, is shown below. Neither image is credited.

Laid inside my copy, but definitely later in date, I found the gatefold photograph below, which bears the caption "This photograph was taken by Mr. Thomas Savage Clay, and shows the class of men from which we get our converts." A cropped version of the same image is reproduced in "But, Until Seventy Times Seven."

Previous Water Street Mission posts:

The Madonna of Cherry Hill
Death of a Salesman
A Manhattan Mission
Cassie Burns

Thomas Bewick

In our image-saturated culture it may be hard to imagine a time when the average European's exposure to visual representations of the world might be limited to tavern signs, decorations in churches (where these were not proscribed), and the crude illustrations of chapbooks and broadsides, an era before photography, lithography, and their digital successors made possible the routine mass-production of pictures. Thomas Bewick's oft-reproduced wood engravings may appear quaint and bucolic to us now, at least at first glance, but in their day they represented a revolutionary advance in the production and marketing of images. For much of his audience, Bewick's depiction of the wonders of nature was a revelation.

Bewick was born in 1753 in a village a few miles west of Newcastle upon Tyne. By his own account he was a fairly incorrigible youth, given to pranks and outdoor escapades and subject to canings for his misbehavior. His saving grace was an early acquired fondness for drawing, his stroke of good fortune an apprenticeship to the Newcastle engraver Ralph Beilby, later his partner. Under Beilby's stewardship he took on a variety of metal engraving tasks, but it was his knack for the relatively novel technique of wood engraving that brought him renown and a good living for the rest of his long and largely fulfilling life.

Unlike traditional woodcuts, wood engravings use sections of wood -- boxwood from Turkey was the preferred source -- that are sliced across rather than with the grain. The resulting blocks are small but tough, and a skilled hand like Bewick's could achieve fine detail that could otherwise only be obtained through the more expensive metal engraving techniques.

The three images below are from Bewick's illustrations for The Fables of Aesop and Others (1818). Though confined within strict borders, they display vivid naturalism -- the result of the marriage of technique and first-hand familiarity with the countryside -- and a flair for drawing out the personalities of his subjects.


For Bewick's most famous productions, his illustrated natural histories of quadrupeds and birds, the borders were shed, allowing his subjects to come right up to the viewer's eye.


In printing the great natural history works, Bewick engraved a series of tail-pieces (or "tale-pieces," as he called them, with deliberate wordplay), intended to occupy empty spaces at the end of a chapter. These rustic slice-of-life scenes afforded Bewick an opportunity to make subtle satirical or moral statements that can be easy to miss with a cursory glance. Bewick was in his day what might be called a moderate radical, sympathetic to political reform movements, to the Scots, and to those displaced by enclosures, skeptical of sectarian creeds and war makers. In one "tale-piece," entitled "The Proper Use At Last of All Warlike Monuments," a jackass rubs its posterior against an inscribed pillar leaning over in a field.

Many of Bewick's pictures have been endlessly reproduced and are widely available on the web, but the number of high-quality scans is surprisingly low, especially for the "tale-pieces." (Bear in mind that the original blocks were often only a few inches tall.) I was unable to find good versions of the illustrations Bewick created for Oliver Goldsmith's poem "The Deserted Village" ("Ill fares the land, to hast'ning ill a prey, / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay;"), and only one of the copper engravings Bewick executed for Matthew Consett's A Tour through Sweden, Swedish-Lapland, Finland and Denmark.


With the exception of the reindeer, the images shown here are from the galleries of the Bewick Society, which also publishes a blog entitled Tale-Pieces. The Edmonton Art Gallery has a fuller selection with, unfortunately, fairly poor scans.

In the end, though, Bewick's engravings are best appreciated as they were intended to be seen, on paper, and fortunately, there are various collections of his work, ranging from inexpensive paperbacks to budget-breaking limited editions. Two years ago the Ikon Gallery published a hardcover catalogue of the first comprehensive exhibition of the "tale-pieces," and for those with deep pockets Nigel Tattersfield's three-volume Thomas Bewick: The Complete Illustrative Work will be published by the British Library and Oak Knoll Press this month.

Jenny Uglow's Nature's Engraver, the most recent biography of Bewick, has a number of illustrations, as does printing historian Iain Bain's definitive edition of the artist's posthumously published Memoir (Oxford University Press, 1975 & 1979), which is recommended both for its unaffected charm and as a valuable record of rural life and workshop practices.

A Manhattan Mission

The Cremorne McAuley Mission, at 104 West 32nd Street near Sixth Avenue, New York. The engraving, which probably dates from around 1883-84, is from Jerry McAuley: His Life and Work (Second Edition), edited by Rev. R. M. Offord. The artist is not credited.

Posada for Children

Though the Mexican engraver José Guadalupe Posada is best known for his topical broadsides and ghoulishly whimsical depictions of skeletons at play, he produced thousands of engravings, spanning a wide range of subject matter, in his forty-year career. The images here spotlight his work as an illustrator of inexpensive books for children.




The dog in the above image has some of the same anthropomorphic expressiveness of the dogs in Maurice Sendak's early work. Since Sendak is a notorious magpie -- I mean that as a compliment, naturally -- it's possible that he was familiar with the image or others like it. The proper Mexican couple below are quite fetching.





All of these pictures are from a delightful book published in 2005 by Editorial RM in Mexico City, Posada: Illustrator of Chapbooks by Mercurio López Casillas. (There's also a Spanish-language version, entitled José Guadalupe Posada: Ilustrador de Cuadernos Populares.) The compact little hardbound volume contains hundreds of color images, including interior art as well as covers, organized into three categories: Songbooks, Children's Books, and "Divers Manuals" (a miscellany, not books on diving).

A good jumping-off place on the web for the whole of Posada's work is this post at Bibliodyssey.