human
Farewell, great painter of mankind! Who reached the noblest point of art, Whose pictured morals charm the mind, And through the eye correct the heart.
gpt
The twelve plates of the parallel biographies of
human
Industry and Idleness he employed as an illustrated weekly sermon for the benefit of the working classes, and he was able to observe with satisfaction that they had an actual influence on the conduct of the people, as instanced in the diminution of gin shops. Yet for all that, in the elevation of public morality, the highest aim of art is not, as Garrick asserted, fulfilled. Who has ever seen such a painter? Would he be a painter? It is exactly by this moralising with the brush that Hogarth stands in such abrupt opposition to his predecessors, the Dutch. They were painters, nothing but painters, and in their painting reckoned on eyes which could appreciate their pictorial subtilty. Man was for them a patch of colour; the real delight of their eyes was the rich light that came mellowed through the shadows, and played upon the ruffed garments and the clumsy forms. With Hogarth, in the place of the idea of colour, the anecdote is brought in. He saw the world not so much with the eyes of the painter, as with those of the physician, the criminologist, the pastor. The familiar element, that serene and comfortable observation of an everyday occurrence upon which Dutch art was based, has altogether disappeared in his pictures. He did not paint because something pictorial urged him, but saw in men the actors of the parts which he had in his mind. This departure from the purely picturesque is in part explained by the predominance of literature in England at that time. In a country where the tragedy of familiar life as well as the domestic novel had arisen there was imminent peril that a young school of painting working without traditions should branch off also on to those lines. Hogarth desired to give painting a new manner; he seized upon what was epic or dramatic, and painted the pictorial counter parts to Smollett's and Richardson's novels. In the age of enlightenment the painter makes way for the writer. With this idea he himself wrote:
gpt
I have endeavoured to treat my subjects as a dramatic writer; my picture is my stage, my men and women my players, who, by means of certain actions and gestures, are to exhibit a dumb show.
human
Shrimp Girl,