Pictures of Fielding

Abstract

IF IT IS TRUE, as Addison observed in commencing The Spectator, a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure, 'till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, Fielding's works have become classics of our literature despite a considerable handicap: we have had no very clear idea of how he looked. What were, literally, the aspect and complexion of the author of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, of Amelia and the stern social tracts of his last years? No contemporary portrait of him, it has seemed, survives: Hogarth's famous one (Fig. 1), served as the frontispiece to the so-called Murphy edition of Fielding's Works (1762), was produced from memory, and apparently with difficulty, nearly eight years after his friend's death. According to Murphy, Hogarth, when asked to draw the portrait, was unable to oblige, until a certain lady showed him a cutting she had made of Fielding's profile, which gave the distances and proportions of his face sufficiently to restore his lost ideas of him.1 Whether or not the lady in question was Fielding's acquaintance Margaret Collier, as Dobson and Cross believed, this story-published by the editor of the Works while Hogarth was still living-is not improbable; whereas another account, propagated by Garrick, is clearly preposterous. Long after Hogarth's death Garrick told Fielding's translator, Pierre Antoine de la Place, that he had appeared to the painter disguised as Fielding's ghost, intending, successfully as he claimed, to terrify him into drawing the picture.2 This yarn, with little need for embellishment, was later made into a one-act comedy entitled Le Portrait de Fielding (1800), by Alexandre Joseph Pierre de Segur.