Books I'm Reading: Hogarth: A Life and a World

Jenny Uglow's biography of William Hogarth—Hogarth: A Life and a World (1997, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux)—is a big, heavy book that took me a long time to finish, reading in spurts, but I eventually did finish it and I'm glad I plowed through it it to the end. It revealed to me how ignorant I was about Hogarth and that I had conflated in my mind some of the work of Hogarth with that of French artist Honoré Daumier. I feel straightened out now. 

The book was slow going in large part because of the extraordinary detail it goes into about Hogarth the man, his work, his milieu, and the London that was the backdrop to his life, including a great deal about the politics of the day—a subject I always find hard to follow and retain. 

I had always thought of Hogarth (or my Hogarth/Daumier person?) as a printmaker and satirist. Perhaps the greatest revelation reading Hogarth was the realization that Hogarth was a fine painter, and rather more down to Earth than the best-known painters of the generation that followed him—Gainesborough and Reynolds—who always strike me as being somewhat too refined (a matter of taste, of course). I had never really thought about how Hogarth worked, but I suspect, if asked, I would have assumed his famous prints were conceived as prints, engraved from sketches, but it seems that Hogarth in most cases did full-blown oil paintings of the subjects that became his prints and that the prints were engravings of the paintings, often cut by Hogarth himself, who got his start apprenticed to an engraver (although as he got older and busier, some of his work was engraved for him by others). 

The complexity of the prints is extraordinary and because so much of the detail refers to contemporary events and people, a good portion of their meaning is likely lost on most modern viewers without some kind of annotation, and Uglow provides that, bringing each of the major works to life, pointing out the significance of the smallest details. 

She fleshes out Hogarth, the man, too—as the painter and famed satirical printmaker he became—but also as a supporter of native British artists facing what he thought was too much fuss over artists from the continent working in Britain, as a champion of the rights of engravers (he was in large part responsible for legislation that helped protect engravers from piracy), and as a philanthropist (he was very much involved in the founding of London's first institution to protect abandoned babies, which, shockingly, Uglow points out, were common at the time, often left by the side of the road or somewhere equally exposed, to die. The book's subtitle—A Life and a World—is apt. Recommended as a portrait of a man, of a great city, and of a bygone age.

Plants I'm growing: First blooms—Species tulips (March 20, 2021)

I planted a variety of species tulips (as opposed to the more common hybrid tulips) in the garden many years ago now—maybe nine of ten years ago. I planted hundreds. They were beautiful and, apparently, delicious. I large fraction of them disappeared into the gullets of a local colony of ground squirrels (since departed). Others gradually stopped blooming after a year or two, as tulips often do (while daffodils seem immortal). One species, Tulipa bakeri, has proven the most robust. These (those that remain) still come up  year after year. The first buds opened this year on March 20. 

It is from species like these that what most people think of as tulips today were developed. Tulips are native to places like Turkey and the countries of the Caucasus region. This is a variety called "Lilac Wonder." Tulipa bakeri bloomed in the garden on March 5 in 2009 and on March 16 in 2010 (although I seem to have two contradictory dates for 2010--also February 24), on March 14 in 2011, on March 4 in 2012, on February 25 in 2013, on March 6 in 2014, on February 20 in 2015, on March 9 in 2018, and on March 16 in 2019, so this is toward the late end of the range I've noted over the years, but nothing out of the ordinary.