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William Hogarth: a musicologist's progress
Contemporary Review, Summer, 2006 by Donald Bruce
The Enraged Musician: Hogarth's Musical Imagery. Jeremy Barlow. Ashgate Publications. [pounds sterling]65.00. xix + 367 pages. ISBN 1-84014-615-X.
Jeremy Barlow's title does not tell one precisely what his book deals with. It deals, in a diminishing order of emphasis, with eighteenth-century musical instruments (closely researched and clearly pictured); with Hogarth's frequent depiction of them; and with Hogarth's opinion of musical ensembles and operatic music, which was frequently contemptuous. The monochrome illustrations of Hogarth's paintings are so indistinct that they do Barlow's learned book no service. Their fogginess is partly understandable, because of Hogarth's multiplicity of detail and love of shadow in his paintings. What is surprising is the blurred reproduction of his linear and sharply incised engravings. The typeface is also tiresome: the text is small, the quotations are tiny and the notes are minuscular. There is a danger that The Enraged Musician will be confronted with the enraged peruser.
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Although they had little else in common, both Hogarth and the patrician Venetian painter, Veronese, were fond of introducing musicians into their pictures, but for different reasons. Veronese, himself an enthusiastic performer on the viola da braccio, has them playing not only at The Marriage Feast at Cana but, always sumptuous, also at The Supper at Emmaus. He delighted in music. To Hogarth, stoutly philistine and xenophobic, non-demotic music, such as Handel's operas on classical subjects, was a mostly foreign abomination. For example, in the second painting of the series, A Rake's Progress, the parasites who surround the young heir include a harpsichordist, who is playing a transcription of an imaginary opera called The Rape of the Sabines ascribed to 'F.H.' [Georg Friedrich Handel?]. The title is not merely esoteric, but would seem extraordinary and shocking to those who did not know that in its context, rape meant no more than abduction. According to Hogarth's Notes for an Autobiography, as a child he had 'a talent for mimicry'--derisive imitation. In his censorious, popularist and indeed popular sequences of engravings he treats formal music with steady derision, which incidentally increases their burlesque impact.
The author objectively notes the presence of each musical instrument, each musician and each performance in Hogarth's work, but does not develop an argument about their place in Hogarth's antagonistic perception of his society, and the appeal of that perception to his homespun public. Jeremy Barlow is a meticulous student of eighteenth-century musical instruments, but less concerned with untangling the screwed-up oakum knot of William Hogarth. One suspects that his book will be more helpful to musicologists than to historians of art.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
