Hogarth Gallery1- Beggar’s Opera III, x

Beggar’s Opera III, x

William Hogarth (1697–1764) 
Beggar’s Opera III, xi
1729
Oil on canvas

Hogarth’s painting depicts the psychological and comic climax of The Beggar’s Opera, set in Newgate Prison. Macheath, a gentlemanly highwayman, stands in chains at center stage. His two wives, Polly Peachum and Lucy Lockit, make appeals to their fathers, informant, and jailer respectively, to perjure themselves in support of Macheath. Polly sings: 

When my hero in court appears,
And stands arraigned for his life,
Then think of poor Polly’s tears;
For ah! Poor Polly’s his wife.

Part of the humor derives from the necessity for Macheath to choose between his wives; he has just sung, “Which way shall I turn me? How can I decide?/Wives, the day of our death, are as fond as a bride.” Both airs are set to traditional English ballad tunes. It seems likely that Hogarth saw in this vernacular riposte to continental musical traditions a parallel with his own uniquely English depictions of modern life in London. 

The painting is set in an ambiguous space, part prison and part stage, which situates the interplay of reality and fiction suggested in the Latin motto inscribed on the banner over the stage: “Veluti in speculum” (as in a mirror). The figures seated in boxes at the sides of the stage, occupying what were considered to be the best seats in the house, are recognizable portraits. Of particular note are John Gay, the shadowy figure at the foot of the staircase, and John Rich, standing immediately in front of Gay. In the foreground, Lavinia Fenton, the actress playing Polly Peachum, meets the gaze of the enthralled Lord Bolton; at the end of the season he would install her as his mistress and they would remain together until his death in 1754. 

YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART, PAUL MELLON COLLECTION 

Hogarth Gallery2- The Beggar’s Opera

The Beggar’s Opera

John Gay (1685–1732)
The Beggar’s Opera, as it is acted at the Theatre-Royal in Lincoln’s Inn Fields
Second edition, London: Printed for John Watts
1728

LENT BY THE BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY 

1974 1376

Hogarth Gallery3- The Enraged Musician

The Enraged Musician

William Hogarth (1697–1764) 
The Enraged Musician
1741
Engraving, second state

The musician whose practice is interrupted by the noise of the street has received a number of different identifications, including Pietro Castrucci, a violinist who was brought from Italy by Lord Burlington (whose patronage of foreign musicians is satirized in Masquerades and Operas), and Giacobbe Cervetto, whose portrait appears in the next bay. The musician is generally agreed to be a foreigner, whose refined preoccupation with his music is contrasted both with the native Beggar’s Opera, a poster for which appears on the wall next to his window, and the cacophony of the street, including a knife grinder, a sow gelder, and an itinerant oboist. Further contrasts are set up by the figure of the milkmaid crying her wares, on the one hand with the musician, and on the other with those who surround her, particularly the ballad seller standing at the left. The ballad she sells, “The Ladies Fall,” is a cautionary tale about a girl who gives herself away before marriage and has a child out of wedlock. 

TRANSFER FROM THE YALE SCHOOL OF MUSIC 

B1998.12

Hogarth Gallery4- Farinelli, seated with Lady amid Satirical Trappings and Symbols of his Wealth and Fame

Farinelli, seated with Lady amid Satirical Trappings and Symbols of his Wealth and Fame

Artist unknown
Farinelli, seated with Lady amid Satirical Trappings and Symbols of his Wealth and Fame
date unknown
Etching

Farinelli was the most famous of the castrati who became the objects of a cult of celebrity in early eighteenth-century London. The castrato voice combined the ability to reach a high register with great power and intensity. Farinelli lived in England from 1734 to 1737 and during that time received both large sums of money and lavish accolades for his performances. This satirical portrait is laden with innuendo, playing on Farinelli’s indeterminate sexuality on the one hand, and his attractiveness to women on the other. 

YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART, PAUL MELLON COLLECTION 

B1977.14.1258

Hogarth Gallery5- Marriage a la Mode IV

Marriage a la Mode IV

William Hogarth (1697–1764) 
Marriage a la Mode IV
1745
Engraving

Marriage a la Mode, like A Rake’s Progress, is a satire on aristocratic tastes and a critique of those who seek to rise above their station. Here the Countess of Squanderfield, originally a merchant’s daughter, pursues the high life in a similar manner to the Rake. The crowd at her morning levee includes a singer, identified as a castrato, whose abundance of jewelry adds to the vulgarity of the scene. Hogarth thus once again identifies a star of the Italian opera with opulence and decadence. 

LENT BY THE LEWIS WALPOLE LIBRARY 

+745.4.1.4.3

Hogarth Gallery6- The Laughing Audience

The Laughing Audience

William Hogarth (1697–1764) 
The Laughing Audience
1733
Engraving

This is a subscription ticket, given as a receipt to subscribers who paid in advance for prints that were planned or in production, in this case A Rake’s Progress and Southwark Fair. Here Hogarth returns to a familiar theme and setting, the contrast between orders of society in the context of a theatrical performance. While the orchestra plays in the pit and the lower orders appear weak with laughter, the gentlemen in the gallery are more interested in flirting with serving girls than in what is happening onstage. Subscribers who received The Laughing Audience had to wait two years for delivery of their prints, as Hogarth delayed their publication until Parliament had passed the Copyright Act protecting his (and other engravers’) work from piracy. 

YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART, PAUL MELLON COLLECTION 

B1981.25.1455

Hogarth Gallery7- A Rake’s Progress II: The Levee

A Rake’s Progress II: The Levee

William Hogarth (1697–1764) 
A Rake’s Progress II: The Levee
1735
Engraving

A Rake’s Progress tracks the fortune of a merchant’s son who squanders his inheritance and comes to a nasty end through the pursuit of luxury and social advancement. This plate shows the Rake, having just come into his fortune, adopting aristocratic habits. He is surrounded by hangers-on, including a fencing master, dance master, jockey, landscape gardener, and harpsichordist. The score on the music stand is a fictional opera, “The Rape of the Sabines,” in which the “ravishers” are played by well-known castrati and the “virgins” by scandal-laden sopranos. The scroll tumbling over the back of the harpsichordist’s chair lists gifts given to the visiting castrato Farinelli, echoing the theme of the opera-house signboard in Masquerades and Operas. The print on the floor at the end of the scroll depicts Farinelli seated on a pedestal receiving the hearts of wealthy women, one of whom calls out “One God One Farinelli” — a direct quotation from an actual incident, and an example of the adoration Farinelli inspired in his audiences. The Italian opera is thus given a central role in the Rake’s downfall, standing for all that is decadent. 

YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART, PAUL MELLON COLLECTION 

B1981.25.1412

Hogarth Gallery8- Hurdy-gurdy

Hurdy-gurdy

Hurdy-gurdy
Maker unknown
French or American, ca. 1832
Maple with ebony and ivory inlay

The hurdy-gurdy was first used to accompany choral singing in churches in the middle ages, but by the eighteenth century it was mainly associated with street musicians. The instrument has a unique, rather acid tone, sometimes used by eighteenth-century composers to evoke the rustic world. Generally, however, the hurdy-gurdy carried connotations of crudeness and disharmony, as it does in Hogarth’s engraving The Enraged Musician. 

The hurdy-gurdy is played by turning a crank with the right hand, which turns a wooden wheel mounted within the instrument. A continuous bagpipe-like tone is made as this wheel vibrates four of the six strings, which are known as the drone strings. The player’s left hand produces the melody by pressing sliding keys, which cause the two melody strings, or chanterelles, to be shortened and therefore to increase in pitch. In this example, the upper row of 22 keys controls the right string, the lower row of 10 keys controls the left string, yielding a melodic range of two octaves. This superb early nineteenth-century hurdy-gurdy bears a label, “John R Vincent Maker. Stonington, CT, March 1832.” Vincent may in fact have been a dealer who pasted his labels into imported, perhaps French, instruments. 

LENT BY THE YALE UNIVERSITY COLLECTION OF MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS 

4835.1932

Hogarth Gallery9- Southwark Fair

Southwark Fair

William Hogarth (1697–1764) 
Southwark Fair
1733
Engraving

Henry Fielding, writing in 1742 in praise of Vauxhall as a place of elegant entertainment, contrasted it with the Fairs that were held at the “Extremities of the Town,” where “the Spectators are entertain’d with a Medley of Vaulting, Tumbling, Rope-dancing, Singing, and sometimes Farces, and regale themselves, in the Interval, with Eating, Drinking, Smoaking, or making Love to the Ladies of Pleasure, whence you will easily gather that the old, social, sensual, unpolish’d frolic Turn of the English is here seen to its full Perfection.” Hogarth published Southwark Fair with A Rake’s Progress,both warning against the dangers of acting and of imitation (note the collapsing stage at the left of the print). Here Hogarth illustrates a range of human vices among the common people, employing “low” musical instruments, such as bagpipes and a hurdy-gurdy, to suggest both the cacophony of the fair and its popular character. 

YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART, PAUL MELLON COLLECTION 

B1994.4.516

Hogarth Gallery10- Masquerades and Operas

Masquerades and Operas

William Hogarth (1697–1764) 
Masquerades and Operas
1724
Engraving

Hogarth’s first self-published satirical engraving attacks “foreign taste” in high and low culture. On the right, a crowd lines up to see a pantomime, Dr. Faustus, at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields theater (where John Rich would later stage The Beggar’s Opera), while on the left a crowd is drawn into the Haymarket Opera House by a jester and a devil. The signboard for the opera is based on a contemporary print depicting a performance of Handel’s opera Flavio, which has here been altered to show a nobleman pouring out money at the feet of visiting Italian singers. In the foreground, a woman pushes a handcart loaded with “waste paper” consisting of works by distinguished English writers including Congreve, Dryden, Addison, and Shakespeare. 

LENT BY THE LEWIS WALPOLE LIBRARY 

724.2.0.2

Hogarth Gallery11- A Chorus of Singers

A Chorus of Singers

William Hogarth (1697–1764) 
A Chorus of Singers
1732
Etching

This print, which served as the subscription ticket for the engraving of Hogarth’s Midnight Modern Conversation, shows a group of singers rehearsing William Huggins’s oratorio Judith. 

LENT BY THE LEWIS WALPOLE LIBRARY 

732.12.0.3