Booze, whores and high living a modern take on Hogarth's Rake

On the 250th anniversary of Hogarth's death, Jenny Uglow explores how artists including
David Hockney and Grayson Perry have been inspired by his riches to rags anti-fairy story.


The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal by Grayson Perry. Copyright: The Artist.
William Hogarth's Rake's Progress shows Tom Rakewell inheriting his wealth
from his miser father, and wasting it in a splurge of excess. It is an anti-fairy
story: riches to rags, a rollercoaster of glamour, greed and despair. In eight
plates the Rake ditches his pregnant fiancee Sarah, dons his new clothes,
splashes out on high art and high living, and on low: the booze and whores of
the Rose Tavern. As the money flies, his creditors gather and when he recoups
his fortune by marrying a rich widow, he throws this away at the gambling
table. From imprisonment in the debtors' prison, he tumbles to madness, Bedlam
and death. On the surface then, A Rake's Progress is a stern moral tale, but
Hogarth's vision of Tom's downfall is less judgment than lament, full of
compassion for the fool at odds with the city. The timeless curve of the story
and the blend of caustic wit and deep feeling make it a perfect model for
exploring other ages of affluence and crash. How clever, then, of the Foundling
Museum to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Hogarth's death in 1764 by
showing the Rake alongside works by four modern artists inspired by Hogarth's
prints. Clever too, to call the exhibitionProgress, with its implied question
mark.
The Foundling Hospital was important to Hogarth, both in his role as a
benefactor and in his dogged determination to promote British art, and the
exhibition reflects both these concerns. Upstairs and downstairs, we find
different Rakes, each in a different medium. Here are David Hockney's etchings
and aquatints, based on the sketchbook from his first trip to New York in 1961,
when he was 24, thrilled by its glamour, gay bars, galleries and studios, and
dazed by its Kennedy-era politics, the poverty of Harlem and the music and
madness of the city. Here is Yinka Shonibare, casting himself as hero of
his Diary of a Victorian Dandy, 1998, his posed photographs reminding us of
the slavery that underpinned empire. "I chose Hogarth for his social
commentary and the political aspect of his work", Shonibare explained when
the Diary was shown at the Tate in 2007: "My series is a commentary on our
times, but it is also about daring to parody the establishment which was
something Hogarth was very good at." Here, too, is Grayson Perry's Tim
Rakewell striding among the taste tribes of today's Britain in the six tapestries
of The Vanity of Small Differences. Commenting on these in 2012 Perry said:
"Hogarth has long been an influence on my work. I identify with his
Englishness, his robust humour and his depiction of, in his own words, 'modern
moral subjects'."

Detail from the Heir, part of William Hogarth's Rake's Progress, Photograph: Derek Bayes
Aspect/Lebrecht Music & Arts/Corbis
The angry wit of those modern moral subjects is felt even when the Rake
disappears. The youngest artist here, Jessie Brennan, felt anxious about not
having a single protagonist, but her Fall of Ordinariness and Light, specially
commissioned for the show, presents its own version of dream and collapse, an
imploding pile of grandeur. Her spectral drawings of crushed photographs
dramatise the demolition of Alison and Peter Smithson's 1960s "streets in the
sky" housing estate, Robin Hood Gardens in Tower Hamlets a metaphor both
for the conflict over rejected modernist ideals, and for communities wrecked by
gentrification. "A Rake's Progress", Brennan says, "had, and still has, the ability
to confront what people's ideals of progress are". Today's Londoners are living
through social upheaval, as Hogarth did: many have no hope of a home, while
the super-rich buy mansions and leave them empty. There is plenty of
development in London, but the utopian language of regeneration is at odds
with the experience. "When a cynical government does nothing," says Brennan,
"I can't understand why we don't all riot."
Hogarth made political points by eliding high life and low, like John Gay'sThe
Beggar's Opera, a play that he painted over and over again as a young artist.
Similarly, these works overturn stereotypes: Shonibare casts himself as a black
dandy surrounded by obsequious white servants; Perry uses tapestries the
grand decor of the rich to show the close weaving of taste and money. But the
great allure of Hogarth's series lies in the precise placing of the story in the
London of his day, the streets, salons and gaming houses of St James's, the
taverns of Covent Garden, the churches of Marylebone, the Fleet prison and
Bedlam. The men and women who bought the prints when they first appeared in
1735 could recognise every setting, and find the originals of many of the
people, like Handel in his wig (another Foundling benefactor), with the cast list
of his new opera. The plates throb with detail, deepening the satire. In the scene
at the Rose Tavern portraits of Roman emperors hang on the walls: these are the
idols of the so-called Augustan age, but on these murky walls all the portraits
are defaced except for Nero's.

Jessie Brennan's A Fall. Copyright: The Artist
The modern artists take up this suggestiveness, and make it their own.
Hockney's etchings are full of specific references, often half hidden: Mahalia
Jackson sings in Washington Square, a label on a bottle carries letters from
"Lady Clairol", the dye that he first used to bleach his hair, and the plate's title
echoes its advertisement The start of the Spending Spree and the
Door Opening for a Blonde. Perry's tapestries bristle with redolent objects: a
graduation photo, Penguin Classics mugs, a cafetiere, an iPad. Shonibare's
rooms are full of fantastic luxury goods and shimmering materials. Brennan's
collapsing flats have washing hanging on their balconies. A Rake's
Progress appeals to all, Brennan thinks, because of its playful quality, the way
the narrative unfolds in time, and the details that make it human.
Hogarth's art is extravagant, ruthless, violent and tender by turns: he could mock
and touch the heart at the same time. He understands the helplessness of the
outsider, like Tom Rakewell, venturing into the tight cliques of the rich. But as
an artist, he values the outsider's uncluttered view. This participant/outsider
duality is felt in the later Rakes, in Hockney's reaction to New York, and in the
Nigerian-born Shonibare's celebration of the dandy as an "outsider, who upsets
the social order of things". Does it help artists not to "belong"? As Shonibare
said in a recent interview, "That's what the artist is striving for, this
independence of mind. I've always liked these Trojan-horse ideas, where you
can camouflage, but then you can potentially cause a lot of havoc." Perry too, is
in disguise, and not, this time, as his alter ego, Claire: "I have a thick crust of
Islington," he told the Guardian's Charlotte Higgins, "but if you cut me, you
would find Essex there. The tone of my taste decisions is often very Essex, but I
put an Islington spin on them. That might be the deciding factor in my entire
oeuvre I am an exquisite punk."
As the show's curator Caro Howell says, Hogarth's work "acts like a lightning
rod for other artists' particular concerns": the politics of sex, gender, race and
class; of progress and disenfranchisement. Placing the original Rake's
Progress in conversation with them makes them spring into relief. Hogarth
often called himself a dramatist, and much of the work here has a cinematic
quality, pulling us in. In the intimate space of the Foundling Museum, Perry's
tapestries loom close, so that you seem to meet the men and women walking
through them as you do with Hogarth's series. The immediacy and recognition
makes them both more overwhelming and more familiar. This doesn't feel like a
static exhibition. It is mobile, dynamic. The very act of moving through the
building reflects the narrative movement of the different Progresses, and
imparts a feeling of translation, of conversation. The works seem "to fly
around", as Brennan says, "reflecting off each other".

Detail from Yinka Shonibare's Diary of a Victorian Dandy: 14:00. Copright: The Artist
Photograph: Yinka Shonibare
The show gains more than this from its setting. Hogarth was governor of three
charitable hospitals, but the Foundling Hospital was closest to his heart,
demonstrating what Howell calls his "benevolent engagement as well as his
commercial marketing nous and awareness of the importance of branding
almost the first thing he did was to create a badge". He went beyond this,
designing uniforms and supervising wet nurses, and he and his wife Jane,
childless themselves, fostered several children over the years. He used his art
as he would later in Gin Lane andIndustry and Idleness as an instrument for
social change.
Hogarth himself carried a shadow from his childhood. His father, an immigrant
teacher from the north, was a publisher of Latin and Greek textbooks who tried
to set up a Latin-speaking coffee house in Smithfield. Not surprisingly this
failed, and like the Rake - he was incarcerated in the Fleet prison for debt,
taking his family with him. In Shonibare's view Hogarth's hatred of authority
began here: "his work was irreverent towards the authority that imprisoned
him". His career had the makings of a story: an apprentice silver-engraver who
turned to printmaking, he married the daughter of the painter Sir James
Thornhill and painted pioneering "conversation pieces" of high-ranking
families. But the itch to mock authority always upset his courting of the polite
world, and after the success of A Harlot's Progress in 1732, the first
of his "modern moral subjects", he turned to engraving for the wider market,
defiantly hanging a tradesman's sign outside his door.

Detail from David Hockney's Bedlam, A Rakes Progress. Copyright: The Artist
Three years later, when the Rake was published, he won the first copyright act,
Hogarth's Act, protecting engravers' work from piracy. By now he was a leading
figure among the artists of Old Slaughter's Coffee House and the St Martin's
Lane Academy, raging against an art market that favoured old masters and
continental painters, and at connoisseurs blind to the talent outside their own
back door. Sorely aware of the lack of exhibition spaces, he saw the potential of
the Foundling Hospital when it was established in 1739, with its attraction for
well-off visitors. His powerful portrait of the founder, Captain Coram,
expressed his admiration but also shouted his claim that he could do grand-
manner portraiture as well as any French court painter. In the hospital's Court
Room, with its wonderful rococo interior, his painting of Moses Brought Before
Pharaoh's Daughter took pride of place among works by London artists,
including Hayman, Highmore and Wilson. All the artists were well established,
except one, the 21-year-old Thomas Gainsborough, whose inclusion was a
gesture of support for talent and optimism for the future of British art. There is a
parallel in today's show: the three men are established, if far from establishment,
figures, while Brennan is from the coming generation. Her inclusion highlights
the importance the older artists place on such support, in schemes such as
Shonibare's "Guest Works", where he lends his studio space to younger artists.
And it's good, too, to have a woman's take on the Rake, especially one that
refuses to be overtly gendered.
When I talked to Howell, as she ducked under ladders amid the bustle of
preparation for the show, she was excited. She sees Progress as part of the
museum's continuing dialogue between past and present. "So much of our work
is with vulnerable, marginalised children," she says, "and so much of their
experience is about feeling isolated, unloved, unacknowledged. It is amazing
when they come here and realise that they have a history, that there were people
in the past who were like them, and that those people are celebrated they have
a museum dedicated to them." Next week the museum holds its 10th birthday
celebration, and behind it, on the walls of the museum, the Rake and his modern
fellows walk through their stories of aspiration and fall, the dreams and
madness of Hogarth's age, and our own.
Progress is at the Foundling Museum until 7 September.
foundlingmuseum.org.uk. Jenny Uglow is the author of Hogarth: A Life and a
World (Faber).