On the trail of Hogarth

‘All gilt and beshit’. That was Hogarth’s crisp verdict on French interiors when he visited Paris in 1748. As an image it is hard to fault, conjuring up gilded boiseries and the bird-droppings of rococo plasterwork. ‘In the streets [of Paris],’ the eye-witness report continued, ‘he was often clamorously rude.’

Hogarth sounds like a modern-day football fan. And he characterised the French in his pictures, if not as cheese-eating surrender monkeys, then as scrawny frog- and fish-fed skeletons, victims alike of a tyrannical monarchy and a grasping Roman Catholic Church. In contrast, as a proud member of the Society of Beef Steaks (motto, ‘Beef and Liberty!’; song, ‘O The Roast Beef Of Old England!’) Hogarth saw Britons with a fonder eye: fat with beer and beef, gorged on freedoms won by yeomen over centuries.

Or did he? Hogarth was not that simple. Whenever ‘Beer Street’ comes to mind, remember ‘Gin Lane’.