Hogarth was even sixty-six, and at work upon his last
plate. Although, hitherto, the best painting in England had been done
by foreign artists such as Holbein and Van Dyck, yet there had always
been Englishmen of praiseworthy talent who had painted pleasing
portraits. Hogarth carried this native tradition to a high point of
excellence. He painted plain, good-natured-looking people in an
unaffected and straightforward way. But he was a humourist in paint,
and as great a student of human nature as he was of art. His insight
into character and his great skill with the brush, combined with his
sensitiveness to fun, make him in certain respects a unique painter.
In the National Gallery there is a picture of the heads of his six
servants in a double row. They might all be characters from Dickens,
so vividly and sympathetically humorous is each.
In his engravings Hogarth satirised the lives of all classes of the
society of his day. When we look at them we live again in
eighteenth-century London, and walk in streets known to fame though
now destroyed, thronged with men and women, true to life.
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