James Mcconnachie

Hogarth and the harlots of Covent Garden were many things, but they weren’t ‘bohemians’

Vic Gatrell's The First Bohemians is a chaotic work — but it's good on coffee

issue 02 November 2013

It was Hazlitt who said of Hogarth that his pictures ‘breathe a certain close, greasy, tavern air’, and the same could be said of this book. It describes the fermenting stews of 18th-century Covent Garden, and the pungent work of the artists who lived and worked among them, Hog- arth and Thomas Rowlandson in particular. You could read it as a baggy prequel to Vic Gatrell’s marvellous, Wolfson Prize-
winning study of post-1780 caricaturists, City of Laughter.

The ‘ring of antique courts and alleys that laid siege to the Piazza’ of Covent Garden covered no more than a quarter of a square mile of London but, according to Gatrell, they brewed up a uniquely rich artistic culture. Renaissance Florence, Amsterdam, the Quartier Latin, Greenwich Village: none apparently ‘generated such culturally engaged lifestyles or such opportunities for talent and innovation’. Or indeed such opportunities for the turbulent mixing of artists, aristocrats and prostitutes.

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