Engraving the Eighteenth-Century Blues: Hogarth’s Representations of Depression

Abstract

Engraving the Eighteenth-Century Blues: Hogarth’s Representations of Depression Peter Wagner (bio) One reason why Hogarth’s painted and engraved work has proven so fascinating for scholars from a variety of disciplines (history, literature, medicine, to name just the most important apart from art history and media studies) is the fact that it can be studied as a meeting ground or palimpsest where established popular and polite forms of discourse mingle to produce ambiguous, satirical meaning. This includes the subject of depression and what was known about it in the eighteenth century. In what follows, I want to discuss some of Hogarth’s prints in detail, with a few occasional glances at paintings, while trying to unearth the discourses behind his representations. Hogarth drew both on the medical and paramedical knowledge of his day and on traditional forms of verbal and visual representations, but also on sign language and theatrical gestures. On the one hand, then, I will “read” some Hogarthian images in view of their integration of depression, and on the other hand I will also try to show that Hogarth’s graphic art is not a realistic comment on the subject but rather a re-presentation of many “déjà lus/vus” in word and image, a re-presentation that was adapted to the new Augustan middle-class mentality, which he helped shape. Let me begin with some remarks about Hogarth’s self-portraits that suggest his own gradual sliding into depression in the final decade of his life. Hogarth’s earliest self-representation, entitled Self-Portrait with Palette (c. 1735–40), is today in the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut (see back cover of this volume). Produced in the wake of the stupendous success of his first two narrative cycles, A Harlot’s Progress (1732) and, after he had initiated the so-called Hogarth Act, A Rake’s Progress (1735), this portrait is, according to Elizabeth Einberg, a fine unfinished study … [that] has the penetrating gaze of a man observing himself inquiringly in a mirror, without the guarded distance of a face presented to the public, and is full of flashes of unresolved painterly experiment. He first painted himself wearing a black velvet cap, the outline of which is barely concealed by the wig which he later decided to paint over it. This is left loosely blocked [End Page 19] in and was never taken further towards being evened out with smooth detail and finishing glazes. The same goes for the deep scar over his right eyebrow (a feature of which he is said to have been rather proud), which is blocked in with energetic, impastoed brush strokes, but lacks the finishing glazes that would have shaded it in. (94, ellipsis in original) What we have here, then, is the image of a painter as he wanted himself to be seen: proud of his achievements, confident, and critical. There is a guarded expression in the eyes, and the lips are slightly open while the corners of the mouth (a give-away for psychiatrists) suggest the soupçon of a smile. Hogarth used the same face-mask, tidied up and smoothed out, in his Self-Portrait with Pug, finished in 1745 and subsequently engraved in 1749 but begun much earlier. In this self-portrait (fig. 1), he elaborated the manifesto-theme with a palette bearing his ideal “Line of Grace and Beauty.” It is interesting again that he first painted himself in a wig, and later changed it to a Montero cap, a circumstance that (together with the Latinized name Gulielmus) shows his characteristic restless search for a self-image to share with the public (Einberg 94). He used this print as a frontispiece for bound volumes of his engravings. Ronald Paulson, Hogarth’s hagiographer and surely the best known expert on his works, has nothing to say on the facial expression here. What is important for my subject, I believe, is the implied resemblance between the ideas suggested by a gruffy dog and a satirical artist: Hogarth’s lips, incidentally, are now closed but the facial expression in toto still suggests bemusement. Ten years later, when he had reached the height of...