Or so the Horrible Hogarth would have us all believe. It seems to me that as the National Gallery’s Marriage a La Mode progresses from scene to scene Hogarth’s “allusive technique” (as Robert Cowley calls it) gets steadily more tacky. I might have used the word “obscene” but that would be to risk an accusation of the pot calling the kettle black.

I spent so much time with the previous painting, No 3 in the series, The Inspection, that something of the sleaziness with which it is pervaded seems to be sticking to me. Hogarth and his many art historian and critic groupies maintain that the end justifies the means. This reminds me of George Carlin’s account about what he would do if he was involved in a plane crash. “I’ll go around the fat fuck,” said the American comedian, “Step on the widow’s head. Push those children out of the way. Knock down the paralyzed midget and get out of the plane – so I can help others!” Hogarth managed to fill his portrayals of low life, which he promoted as “modern moral subjects”, with titillating detail and when he turned his attention to the high life of the aristocracy as we see it in the National Gallery’s six part Marriage a La Mode (1743) he pretended to have replaced the prurience of his earlier Harlot’s Progress (1731) and Rake’s Progress (1732) with an approach in which he promised to take particular care that there would not “be the least Objection to the Decency or Elegancy of the whole work.” As we have seen - and as the fat fuck, widow, children and paralyzed midget will confirm - these were empty words.

On arriving at the fourth painting, La Toilette, I discover that not only is Hogarth still laying on the innuendos, double meanings and nudges and winks with a trowel but Robert Cowley in his 1983 magnum opus of a book. goes to ever more extraordinary (and in my humble opinion often untenable) lengths to demonstrate the ingenious ways in which Hogarth used images to convey a narrative. It would be wrong to suggest that, as a result, Hogarth would be turning in his grave. On the contrary, he would, I feel sure, be shaking with laughter.

My guru, Judy Egerton is apt to stray along the same path but hers are day trips in comparison with Cowley’s excursions to the moon.

Once again it’s picture-within-the-picture time. In La Toilette there are six - including the masquerade scene on the screen – in all. Leda and the Swan(seen on a salver in the lower right hand corner of the National Gallery’s painting) got a good going over in my posting of 22 October and there is nothing more to be said beyond re-emphasising that – all said and done – it is a story about bestiality.

There is more bestiality on view in the painting on the left of the picture which shows the Rape of Ganymede (“rape” as I have mentioned before meaning the act of abduction rather than the rape to come). Ganymede’s job description, once he reached Mount Olympus, was cup-bearer to the gods. If, however, you google the words ganymede and gay the result is a respectable, if that is the right word, 77,000 hits. The question here, of course, is what if anything was Hogarth trying to say to his audience about the mismatched couple at the centre of his drama and about the company that they keep?

Inadvertently, perhaps, Hogarth tells us something about himself. He is not into homosexuality and buttocks, whether on boys or girls, do nothing for him. I say this because the artists of the Renaissance had three ways of showing how Jupiter – on this occasion disguised as an eagle - transported Ganymede up to Olympus: 1) Grasped by and with his back to the eagle; 2) grasped by and facing the eagle and with his back to the viewer; and 3) dangling any old how from underneath the eagle. Michelangelo’s portrayal, on which Hogarth based his picture on the wall, broke what was for Michelangelo’s time new ground by showing the eagle pressing hard against the boy’s naked buttocks, thereby treating viewers both to an image that combined buggery with bestiality and to an eyeful of prepubescent genitalia. According to James M Saslow, whose Ganymede in the Renaissance was one of the first books bought by me from the Shelf L’Enfer at the Atrium bookshop of blessed memory, there are psychologically oriented commentators who think that Michelangelo intended to show female labia from which protrudes the eagle’s penis piercing him from the rear. The logic behind this ghastly thought being, presumably, that the boy will not be needing his tackle any more.

The detail on Hogarth’s version is insufficient for anyone to say whether he bought into this curious interpretation of the great master’s drawing but both Robert Cowley and Guru Judy think that the close proximity of the eagle’s beak to the boy’s genitals bode ill. Ms Egerton points out that the picture is located just behind the castrato singer and the eagle’s beak is dangerously lowered “as if one quick snap will result in castration if Ganymede resists.” Cowley had previously made the same point along with a bonus quote from the German polymath Georg Christoph Lichtenberg commenting on the engravings of Hogarth’s paintings some half a century after they were published. It was Lichtenberg’s opinion that “the eagle would have the singer too “. (There is, by the way, a little of Lichtenberg in the lives of everyone living outside the United States and Canada. The standardised paper system based upon A4 was his idea.) David Bindman, the third Hogarthian expert on whose words I hang, has a neat phrase to the effect that the Ganymede painting “refers covertly to the sexual proclivities of the epicene foreigners beneath.” I first came across the word “epicene” in something the English art critic Brian Sewell wrote and had to look it up. In the interim I had forgotten what it meant and had to look it up again. It comes from the Greek epikoinos meaning “common to” which in turn comes from epi-, “upon” + koinos, “common.” Today it is used to denote bisexuality or no sexuality at all. But you knew that, didn’t you?

Too much time spent with the Horrible Hogarth leaves one with a definite epicene feeling. And I do not mean bi-sexual.

There is a lot more to be said about Hogarth’s La Toilette and next up will be another picture-within-a-picture which is the painting of the Biblical celebrity Lot with his daughters which hangs above her ladyship’s lover, lawyer Silvertongue. (Her father-in-law has now died and it is “Lord and Lady Squander” from now on.) In my view the story of Lot and his Daughters is one of the most fun subjects in all art and I have been looking forward to it since I started on Marriage a La Mode.

As I recorded in my posting of 24th ultimo I did not feel able to put the third picture in Hogarth’s Marriage a La Mode to bed without first seeing what Robert Cowley had to say in his much admired comprehensive study of the paintings published in 1983. (Robert L.S. Cowley. Marriage A-La-Mode – a re-view of Hogarth’s narrative art. Manchester University Press.) My Amazon one-click/postman’s knock copy has a large rubber stamp next to the contents page which shows that it has been either de-accessioned or liberated from Gwansanaeth Llyfrgell Clwyd, otherwise known as the Clwyd Library Service. Since the book is written in English there may not have been many readers who understood it, I suppose. Or may be the Chief Librarian took a dim view of Cowley’s omission to deal fully with the two points relating to the Horrible Hogarth’s third picture, The Inspection, on which I too was specifically looking to be enlightened.

Robert Cowley’s failure to discuss the weird and unwholesome image of a skeleton doing what I think is a double handed grope on the ecorche is out of kinter with the generally very extensive and at times erudite analysis of the six paintings. Actually, I cannot speak for what is written about pictures numbers 1, 2, and 4, 5, and 6 which I have not yet had time go through, but I have read both the Introduction, and what he has to say about picture number 3, The Inspection, three times. He seems to have almost totally ignored the necrophilic necking going on inside the open cupboard in the background to the painting. The lack of an index to the book, as I have previously mentioned, is unhelpful.

It is widely accepted among art historians that the skeleton is kissing the ecorche and fondling his crotch but I go further by expressing the view that Hogarth intends us to mentally position the skeleton’s other hand on the ecorche’s bottom. I have not been able to find anyone else of the same view. It would alleviate my loneliness if there was some academic confirmation of what I think is happening in the picture as detailed in the schematic drawings. In due course I will ask to see the National Gallery’s X-rays to ascertain if they bear out what is shown in my drawings.

Robert Cowley (whose word for the ecorche is “muscleman”) is quite helpful, although just a bit wobbly, on the other point on which I am out on my own, which is what Hogarth meant when he called this painting The Inspection. My belief is that the pathetic little tot is there to be inspected and most likely to be subjected to an abortion, this being the purpose of the sharp instrument held in the bawd’s right hand. The child is wearing a dress in a style that could conceal early stage pregnancy. Everyone assumes that the boxes of pills are mercury pills for treating syphilis but one or both of them could just as easily be an abortificant that has not worked. The word “abortificant” combined with “hogarth” is a constructive googlewhack (see entry in the Glossary here) and so once again I am out on my own.

On the subject of the purpose of the knife Cowley infers one thing and then another. “The intention behind the knife, a folding scalpel or bistoury,” he says, “remains to be explained.” There is no evidence that it is intended for surgery so that the tall woman, a haughty person, he says, appears to have snatched up a convenient weapon in response to the Viscount’s criticisms. But in the next paragraph he says that the doctor is polishing his spectacles “in readiness for an inspection which can only lead to more pain.” (A bistoury is a long narrow surgical knife. You can be forgiven for not knowing. I myself had never heard the word before.)

At this point Cowley starts a protracted exercise in which he not only counts how many angels can dance on the head of a pin but what is the significance of where they are on the head of the pin in relation to the other dancing angels. It makes the book a hard read with page upon page playing chicken with the ridiculous. After half a dozen such pages we reach a bit about the traction machine and the corkscrew machines invented by the doctor which can be seen on the right hand side of the painting and which, per Cowley, add meanings to other parts of the picture and the relationship between the viscount and his “puny mistress”. The suggestion, says Cowley, is that she is to be “held and pierced by the cork screw which overlaps her skirts.” Cowley adds that the analogy between the bottle and the anaemic girl is reinforced by the fact that gin was used medicinally to relieve menstrual pain. I consulted the senior Medical Officer of the Royal Marines about this and he confirmed that the reason for the heavy consumption of gin in former times was the high incidence of menstrual pain consequent upon a reduction in the number of pregnancies as a result of adverse effect on the male libido of the work of artists like Hogarth. (For information on the expertise of the Royal Marines in art matters see Glossary Gloss here.)

A couple of pages later Cowley is arguing that the interaction of hands and arms creates an uneven movement across the line of the picture and eventually (after a leg-bone-connected-to-the-thigh-bone succession of sentences) reaches the procuress’s arm, travels along the scalpel towards the doctor and comes to a resting point on his spectacles. This chain of connections, says Cowley, unifies the tableau and offers the underlying suggestion that the doctor is eventually to “inspect” the common miss. (“Common miss” being a euphemism for an underage prostitute.)

Somewhere in all this, the skeleton and the “muscleman” get a couple of sentences. The word “caress” is used for “grope” and “whispers in his ear” substitutes for “kisses”. The relationship between these two, Cowley thinks, implies that Hogarth’s mildly resentful Viscount is also experiencing the first caress of a contagious death.

While I have spared my readers most of the chapter’s convoluted arguments and assumptions and speculations I do not want to look a gift horse in the mouth. Alone among the commentators on Hogarth’s third picture in the Marriage a La Mode series Robert Cowley accepts that “inspection” means “inspection”. He also says that the painting is full of lewd jokes – and how often does anyone writing about the Horrible Hogarth come out with that?

End piece.

If you were a follower of the Phil Spector trial, what does the skeleton nuzzling the skinned man remind you of? The image of Linda Kenney Baden and her client is what comes into my mind.

Inspection? What Inspection?

The correct name for the third picture in the National Gallery’s Marriage a La Mode is not, as many writers say, The Quack Doctor. It is The Inspection and even for those who get it right the one question that seems always to go unanswered is: What, precisely, is being inspected?

This picture is probably the nastiest single picture in the National Gallery. Which is saying something considering that there are walls filled with sado masochistic depictions of of dying saints, severed heads, rapes, massacres and other atrocities. (Doc Martin would also wish me to mention the paintings of Gothic churches with gaping orifices.)

The scene in this third picture is set in a sleazy doctor’s consulting room. The dissolute Viscount is there with a girl who is either already his young mistress or has just been given the job. She is just a little tot. The doctor, an evil and filthy looking character, is cleaning his glasses with a dirty snotrag. The fourth person in the room is a very large lady in a very large gown who is what is know as a bawd. A bawd from Central Casting, you could say.

The Viscount is seated and looking relaxed even though he is waving his cane in the air. He is holding a box of pills and saying something to the doctor who is listening but has a disbelieving expression on his nasty face. There is a second box (or may be it is the lid of the box that the Viscount is holding in his hand) on the seat of the chair and next to his groin. The bawd is holding a knife and looking like she is ready to use it. Why? And on whom? Or on what? We do not know. The Viscount and the bawd have black spots, or possibly patches covering spots, on their faces which, in Hogarth’s private language, means syphilis. The little tot, who is about to lose what shred of innocence she has left to her, is dabbing what some say is a syphilitic sore on her mouth. She, too, has a pill box in her hand.

The room is littered with an assortment of medical artefacts that include a model of a skinned corpse (technically known as an ecorche) and a skeleton. Unbelievably, the skeleton is kissing and groping the corpse. He has a bony hand on the corpse’s crotch, and one of his leg appears to be thrust between the corpse’s skin-less legs. If I have read this last correctly it is as a good an example of a slung leg (a metaphor for sexual intercourse referred to in a previous posting here) as could be imagined. There is an art genre known as Death and the Maiden which has spawned paintings that are easy on the eye in comparison with this pair. Some of them were shown in the trailer to this posting (here) but another one won’t hurt. (”Sticks and Stones can break my bones but pixels can not harm me.”)

So much for the trimmings. So what is going on? One commentator, opining on the Internet, says that the girl is being sold as a new mistress to the Viscount by her mother. This seems improbable because it takes no account of the pills and the doctor. Judy Egerton, who is a kind of guru to me as regards the National Gallery’s Marriage a La Mode pictures, says that the woman, who she calls the virago, seems to be furious that the young girl that she has procured for the Viscount has been brought back infected with his disease. She also reckons that the doctor himself is an advanced sufferer from the disease because his face is dish shaped on account of the sunken bridge of the nose, bulging forehead, thick lips and probable toothlessness and deformed (bowed) legs.

Ms Egerton makes, what I thought when I first read it in her book accompanying the National Gallery’s 1997/8 Marriage a La Mode show a very telling observation concerning the material of the virago’s bodice and the girl’s skirt which are both red flowers on a gold background. Ah! Ah! she says, prefiguring Dr Michael Baden’s evidence at the Phil Spector trial, this is Hogarth’s way of telling us “like mother like daughter”. I had second thoughts when I later came across Hogarth’s portrait of William Cavendish, 4th Duke of Devonshire, done about the same time in which the Duke’s waistcoat has much the same look about it. Hogarth’s inventive genius, while extraordinary by the standards of other artists, was nevertheless finite. On third thoughts I think Ms Egerton has a good point and it is one that no one else has spotted. It occurs to me that the bawd’s outfit and the girl’s skirt may have been cut down from the same set of curtains, Sound of Music style.

Beyond pointing out that Hogarth’s name for the painting was The Inspection and not The Quack Doctor my guru is silent on the matter of what inspection was contemplated. And in none of my reading has anyone else ventured an opinion. I am now, therefore, out on my own.

“Inspection” means that something is going to be looked at and that something can only be the girl’s private parts. But for the pills one could be reasonably certain that the purpose was to confirm her virginity, and who better than a doctor? The second most likely reason for her coming ordeal would be to confirm that she was free from venereal disease. But, once again, the pills get in the way. And, anyway, the Viscount is already infected - so what does he care? This leaves us with one remaining possibility which is to ascertain whether the girl is pregnant. And may be, if she is, to procure an abortion.

Abortion has been around since the beginning of time. The Oxford Classical Dictionary which covers the Greek and Roman eras has an entry which refers to abortion using plant products taken orally or as suppositories and also the use mechanical means. The pills, or the bawd’s knife, may have a bearing on the situation. The question is begged: How is the inspection to be carried out? It is Hogarth who is doing the begging.

My guru says that this doctor is a real doctor and not a quack. So we should assume that the inspection would conform to best medical practice in times past which respected the delicacies of a situation in which a male doctor is examining a female. I can only find one image that shows how such examinations were carried out and it post dates Marriage a La Mode by rather more than half a century. It is nevertheless valid for the present exercise.

It is necessary to again point out that the artwork generated for the purpose of illustrating points made in posting is always conceptual and when the Guide to Erotic Art in the National Gallery comes to be published it will need to be redone professionally. It will be seen that both the doctor’s syphilitic physiognomy and the rag with which he is polishing his glasses have been patched across from one to the other and the rag now protrudes from his pocket. Ms Egerton, who should know, says that it must be the most disgusting handkerchief in the whole of British art and it seemed a pity therefore not secure for the revised artwork so unique a feature. If the wretched girl has not already contracted syphilis she will have by the time the doctor has finished examining her.

With the greatest respect to Ms Egerton, whose knowledge of British Art is exponentially greater than mine (and she actually likes the stuff), I think she is mistaken in thinking the Viscount is the principal patient and the fact that he is sitting while she is standing is because she is his social inferior. She is stood up because she is going to be inspected.

I see no room for doubt as to what Hogarth had in mind when he named this third episode of Marriage a La Mode: The Inspection. I am surprised that I am the first to work it out. For me, one great mystery remains: Why should anyone in Hogarth’s time, or at any time since, want to put this picture up on their wall?

It is just not me who thinks so, apparently. David Bindman, internationally acknowledged as an authoritative commentator on Hogarth, deals at length with the Marriage a La Mode paintings in his book devoted to Hogarth published by Thames & Hudson but totally ignores the third painting both in the text and by way of an illustration. And one of the essays in The Other Hogarth (Princeton} singles out a view expressed by another acclaimed and much quoted “Hogarthian”, Robert Cowley, that - with the introduction of child prostitution to the narrative - it looked like Hogarth had temporarily lost control of his plot.

As mentioned in the trailer to this posting, I decided that I needed to read what Robert Cowley had to say before wrapping-up my own comments on this third picture in the Marriage a La Mode narrative. And regardless of what I find in his book, I have not finished with Old Gropey (the skeleton in the cupboard in case you did not realise). So, here endeth the first ninety-five percent. Another fifteen percent to come.

I started off Art Notes 4 by saying that my next posting in the matter of Samuelson, Anthony v. Hogarth, the Horrible H. was 95% complete and I hoped to put the finished article on the third drawing in the National Gallery’s Marriage a La Mode up on the site within the next seventy-two hours. That was on the 14th so the time has not run out. However…

I have decided that I will put up the 95%, as written, shortly and put up the other 5%, which is more like 15%, in a couple of days time. In the meantime I hope to have completed a Glossary Gloss on Lord Clark of blessed memory and his all time art history blockbuster The Nude and that will be uploaded as soon as it is ready.

The urgency there is that I like to use in my own writing a couple of phrases that are especially his and are, so far as I know, unique to The Nude. These are “dehanchement” which is the blessed Clark’s word for “contrapposto” and to a Frenchman means the swing of the hips (and, I would guess, “Oo! La! La!” and “Quelle Formidable!” and so forth) and “naked as a shrimp” which is how Lord Clark describes the Limburgh Brothers’ Eve in their miniature illustration to the Duc de Berry Tres Riches Heures manuscript. This was done around 1410 and Lord Clark singles it out as the first portrayal of the female form in all its shrimp like beauty in the re-birth of culture following centuries of darkness.

The delay in finalising my observations on the Horrible Hogarth’s The Inspection is that, firstly, I came to the conclusion - which I personally find extraordinary - that there were things to be said about this picture that had not been said by anyone before. Extraordinary because more, probably, has been written about Hogarth than about any other artist. This is because he was so prolific and because everything he produced was full of conundrums with no answers provided. And also because the people doing the writing are erudite and have access to libraries and are in the thick of the art milieu. I found myself quoting, at second hand, something written by Robert Cowley, who published a major critical review of Marriage a La Mode in 1983. I decided that I needed to see the full context. One Amazon click resulted in a knock on the door this morning. The book is much more comprehensive than I had anticipated and I need to digest it. Its one failing is that it does not have an index.

The second reason for delaying putting in my own two penn’orth on The Inspection is that I decided that I needed to physically eyeball the painting as it hangs on the wall in the National Gallery. There are thousands of reproductions available on the Internet, and in books, but this picture has some dark areas and I wanted to see if my theory that the skeleton is not only kissing the skinless man next to him and groping his crotch with one hand (as is generally recognised) but he is grasping the skinless (but no doubt well muscled) bottom with the other. No one, I think, has spotted this before.

So I moseyed down to the National Gallery and had a good look at the real thing. My conclusions will be included in the other 15% bringing the total of what I have to say about The Inspection up to 110%. An extra large helping considering that some commentators are content to overlook it altogether concentrating on the other five pictures. And in one seminal work, by David Bindman, it is neither mentioned nor illustrated. Marriage a La Mode was loan when the Decima Four were doing their stuff and they never got to report on any of the pictures.

My next posting in the matter of Samuelson, Anthony v. Hogarth, the Horrible H. is 95% complete and I hope to put it up on the site within the next seventy-two hours. The second picture in the National Gallery’s Marriage a La Mode six-pack, Tete a Tete, has now been seen off, thankfully, and the coming posting will deal with the third picture, The Inspection. It will not turn into a long running saga like the second picture did.

In the course of putting the illustrations together for The Inspection I looked around for something to highlight the similarity between the grisly German Death and the Maiden genre of erotic art and the Horrible Hogarth’s near in flagrante Skeleton and Ecorche which form part of the decor of the doctor’s consulting room which is the scene of the third picture. I think that “near” would have been superfluous but for the fact that there is no bone in a man’s penis. If there had been, it is doubtful whether Hogarth would have been able to resist the temptation of having the male skeleton buggering the skinless ecorche.

We are all assuming, by the way, that the skeleton in Plate III is indeed that of a man. It could turn out to belong to a woman. Ms Egerton (who wrote the National Gallery’s book of the show) has a line to the medical profession that she was able to use to check out the symptoms and treatment of syphilis. I hope that she will ask for their opinion on the gender of the skeleton. If it is male skeleton doing the kissing and the groping the popular conclusion that Hogarth is making some kind of statement about homosexuality would not be unreasonable. The ecorche looks certainly to be male on account of being notably flat chested. Whatever criticisms can be levied against Hogarth, he can not be accused of being scared of drawing a breast. His work teems with dropped necklines and exposed nipples. But if the skeleton should turn out to be a female it would be a whole new ball game (no pun intended).

In Death and the Maiden pictures there is often quite a lot of groping going on. However, it is always Death who is doing the groping and the Maiden (young, lush and naked) is always on the receiving end. To turn the tables and have the woman (albeit a skeleton) feeling up the man (albeit one that has no skin) and taking over the traditional male role of Death would have the feminists (Juno and Andrea Dworkin’s ghost among them) in ecstasy. The headline in the Olympius Mountain Times would read: “Underworld’s glass ceiling shattered!” Come to think of it, I would not put it past the Dwork to have seen off the old git with the scythe.

It was not difficult to find a Death and the Maiden image to accompany the Hogarth clip but it was not easy to choose from among them. Here are some of the rejects.

The National Gallery has a painting by Puvis de Chavannes entitled Death and the Maidens, note the plural. If I left it there I would have everyone thinking that this must be a swinging version of the story with the ladies climbing all over Death in a climactic orgy and the National Gallery would be wondering what had brought the crowds in.

Sad to say, nothing could be further from the truth. Firstly we have only got a rough sketch, not the finished art, which is in Massachusettes. Much good it may do them. Death is crashed out on the ground and the six ladies are posing in neck-to-toe nighties. Loose fitting nighties.

The National Gallery has three other works by the same artist. One of them is a decapitation picture entitled the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. As remarked in a previous posting, the public likes nothing better than a decapitation picture and, true to form, the Gallery mounted an exhibition around this painting. It was back in 2002 and I seem to remember seeing in a newspaper at the time an Xray photograph of the painting which was part of the show which revealed that the artist had originally painted Salome in the nude leaving nothing to the imagination. I do not have a note about this, much less a copy of the Xray photo, but it is not something that I am likely to mis-recollect.

The National Gallery has another picture by Puvis de Chavannes of interest. It is called A Maid combing a Woman’s Hair and there are a pair of world class breasts on display. The Decima Four never got a look at them because the picture has been on loan to the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin since 1979. The National Gallery should get it back. Aside from the fact that it is our painting, and it falls into a category where we are very thin on the ground, last time I was in Dublin there were gypsies breast feeding babies in the street. Dubliners must surely be so familiar with the sight of a bared breast as to be completely de-sensitised.

I have been shilly-shallying around this second picture in the National Gallery’s six part Marriage a La Mode for what seems like an eternity. To briefly recap. The picture is called Tete a Tete and has the Viscount and his lady wife sprawled out in their chairs exhausted after a night on the tiles. Not with each other, which is why they are looking so exhausted. Fig. 1 shows the picture as it hangs on the wall in the National Gallery with the curtained off picture arrowed. Fig. 2 is a detail from the painting with the foot projecting from beyond the curtain. Fig. 3 is a schematic drawing of the full extent of the painting were it to be unobscured by the curtain and the pillars. It is the four fifths of the painting that we are not allowed to see that we can fantasise about and what, in all probability, the Horrible Hogarth got off on when he was painting the picture.

Reams have been written about the other pictures-within-pictures in Marriage a La Mode but almost nothing has been said about this one - with nothing more than a foot to be seen - beyond stating a conclusion (shared by Ms Judy Egerton whose book of the National Gallery’s Hogarth show is now a collector’s item, it seems) that it was something very naughty. I do not think that it should be left there. I do not think that the Horrible Hogarth, forever setting conundrums, intended us to leave it there. What is needed is a scientific approach to solving this Eighteenth Century mystery of what is happening behind the curtain and it starts with the artist. In my writing he is not called the Horrible Hogarth for nothing.

It never ceases to astonish me how much work Hogarth produced. It takes me half-a-day, using cutting-edge Adobe Photoshop software, to put a differential blur on a reverse cow-girl picture (well, 30 minutes to do the blur, but three hours of experiment to see how you could make it look as if she was actually doing it in front of your eyes) and there was Hogarth churning out beautifully drawn and painted, brilliantly detailed pictures, engraving some of them himself, developing and refining a mass-marketing strategy the like of which had never been seen before, writing and politicking, socialising with wealthy rakes, frequenting bawdy houses (for observation, you understand) - how did the man find the time to do it?

The other side of the coin is that he has a long rap sheet recording the commission of every crime of innuendo, double meaning, holier-than-thou phoney sermonising, prurience and gratuitous titillation in the book. There is abundant evidence of this in every one of the six pictures that make-up Marriage a La Mode and, beyond this work, more tacky imagery than you could shake a birch switch at.

Adopting a scientific approach and so forth, the starting point must be what can be seen in the picture. What little there is is nevertheless enough to eliminate a raft of alternative surmises. The foot is undoubtedly that of a man and the man is undoubtedly laying on a bed. This rules out sleeping nymphs, dying gladiators, martyred saints (who never died in bed), annunciations, dispositions, circumcisions, seascapes, landscapes, still lifes, portraits, battles, abductions, tales of heroism and the supranatural. The foot is at first sight bordering on caricature but not if you follow Ms Judy’s reasoning that the turned up toes-on the Visountess’s fashionable shoes add “extra impudence” to her air of sly triumph. Everyone who has ever written about Hogarth’s pictures makes the point that each little detail is there for a purpose. The curling toe in the curtained picture must mean something and if it means extra impudence on Hogarth’s part the sum total of impudence invested in these pictures becomes even more awesome.

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The curtain itself can only mean that whatever is happening behind it is unfit to be seen either notionally or actually. Notionally - hanging on the wall in a painting of a room in a mansion of a viscount - or actually in a public print. Even after the passage of a century-and-a-quarter and even after the invention of photography had opened the pandora’s box in which images of women’s genitalia had been hidden from view, the world of art continued in denial. Courbet’s Origin of the World (Fig. 4) which was (as mentioned in my gloss on the Atrium Bookshop of Blessed Memory’s glossary entry was one of the treasures of its Shelf d’Enfer. It was painted in 1866 could not be placed on public exhibition. The picture shows the naked torso of a woman which begins at a point somewhere above her knees and finishes just above the nipple of one breast. As the artist’s view point was a low one and the woman’s legs were spread apart not much was left to the imagination. Courbet was an artist who liked to shock contemporary society and generally succeeded but if this painting had been placed on public exhibition the outcry that would have ensued would have undoubtedly led to the arrest of everyone concerned. Instead Courbet sold it privately to a Turkish Diplomat, Khalil Bey. The Dirty Turk kept the painting in his bathroom behind green curtains showing it only to a select group of male acquaintances. For some reason everyone who writes about this painting mentions that the curtains were green. Pepysian green, one might say. But no one, so far as I have been able to ascertain, has gone on to speculate on what the painting’s appeal could have been to, of all people, a Turk. Harems were not abolished in Turkey until 1909 and they were an amenity enjoyed by minor pashas and wealthy merchants as well as the Sultan. It follows that Khalil Bey must have seen more pussy than the rest of us have had meals - hot, cold, in front of the TV or at tailgate parties.

After Khalil Bey the painting passes through several hands rather like a dog-eared copy of Readers’ Wives, sometimes being concealed behind another painting (usually a landscape, for some reason) and ends up in a converted railway station in Paris where anyone can go and see it. So we are all one with the dirty Turk, now

To justify giving the Viscount’s picture the curtain treatment there must have been something more than a man on his own with a floppy penis. Floppy penises in main stream art (such as that on view in the National Gallery’s Cephalus carried of by Aurora by Agostino Carracci - Fig. 5) were passé by Hogarth’s time. The tumescent member, on the other hand, was taboo. It is conceivable that the foot was attached to a recumbent male alone with his limp (or erect) penis but my gut feeling, in the absence of scientific certainty one way or another, is that in Hogarth’s mind a second individual was present.

In his pictures within the picture Hogarth tended to take off popular Old Masters and Old Master subjects and since one of the pictures within a Marriage a La Mode picture is a rendering of the Rape of Ganymede (“rape” meaning the act of abduction rather than the rape to come) and another features Saint Sebastian, Patron Saint of Gays, we cannot rule out the possibility that the second imagined individual was another man or a boy engaged in fellatio. But other than Michelangelo’s fellating Sistine serpent there are no precedents in Old Master art which Hogarth could have latched on to. Hogarth, in any case, was heterosexual, and very much so as everyone will have to agree when the time comes for me to reveal the identity of his Bit of Rough.

As foreshadowed in the Progress Report put up on this site on 18 October, I am thus inclining to the view that the other party inhabiting the canvas behind the curtain was female. I believe that the sexual act envisaged by the Horrible H. (hetero) Hogarth was either cow-girl (Fig. 7) or reverse cow-girl (Fig 8), both of which place the woman on top, in control, in motion, and doing all the work. It turned out that the two images most helpful in demonstrating these sexual positions are on Wikipedia and I was amused to discover that Wikipedia has now gone very PC and no longer refers to man and woman but to “insertive partner” and “receptive partner”, “anus” and “vagina” being interchangeable as ever. You learn something new every day if you are working on a Guide to Erotic Art in the National Gallery.

The PC word “partner” does imply a sapient participant and this rules out “beast”. Hogarth has two or possibley three bestiality depictions on display in Marriage a La Mode – Jupiter is disguised as an eagle as he carries off the boy Ganymede and as a cloud or (per Ms Egerton) a bear or as a cloud doing a bear hug as he pleasures the goddess Io. Elsewhere, on a salver, we see Leda and her Swan lover. All of these unions require the insertive partner to be on top although not necessarily face-to-face in the missionary position.

The picture-within-a-picture which, in my view, makes cow-girl (going or coming) favourite for the curtained picture comes in the fourth of the six Marriage a La Mode paintings, La Toilette, and is a Lot & Dtrs. As the Bible tells it, Lot’s girls had to get the old man drunk so that he would have sex with them and thereby ensure the continuation of the human race. The story has naturally appealed strongly to artists down the years and portrayals vary from mealy, with the daughters fully dressed and respectfully plying their father with drink and no hint of the action to come, to fulsome with the girls half naked and coming on strong. Whichever of these versions most takes your fancy you will have to accept that the only conceivable and conceiving way in which the act could be effected would require the woman to take the on top position. Hogarth, in his rendering of the scene in the fourth picture in the Marriage a La Mode series, goes for the mealy option. Without a curtain he may have felt discretion the better part of valour.

Outside of the Marriage a La Mode group there is another Hogarthian foray into the darker regions of sex which suggests that Hogarth would have had no difficulty in understanding the mechanics of cow-girl. In his Rake’s Progress there is the brothel scene - a detail from which was shown in my posting on 27 October (here) - in which we saw a tart stripping off preparatory to doing a candle dance, the high point of which will be her extinguishing the candle in her vagina. Sitting on a candle requires similar mix of contortionism and acrobatics to cow-girling. Fig. 9 shows the dancer undressing preparatory to her candle-sitting performance. Figs. 7 and 10 show how it is done.

En passant, one thing that emerges from this discussion of Woman on Top is how intentionally oppressive the Church’s insistence on the missionary position and only the missionary position has been to the gentle sex. If the Church had had its way women would have spent their entire sexual existence squashed between man and mattress. It is of a piece with women not being ordained and all the other stuff that they push down the throats of the faithful. It is reasonable to suppose that the ultimate proof that there is a God in Heaven is that He gave women minds of their own. The Woman on Top position was around before Christianity overtook the Roman Empire and survived the ensuing millennium. Guilio Romano’s I modi even included (at position 14) a reverse cow-girl. (Fig. 10. ). Hogarth would not have known about Pompeii (the ruins of which were not discovered until a few years after he painted Marriage a La Mode) but I think that what he had in mind for behind the curtain would not have looked very different to what was found on the wall of a Pompeian brothel (Fig. 11).

Does anyone have a better idea?

The collective wisdom of writers on art who have turned their attention to Marriage a La Mode is that the plethora of smutty images with which Marriage a La Mode abounds is Hogarth’s way of indicating the bad taste of the characters who he is portraying. I think it says more about himself.

The third picture in the Marriage a La Mode six parter is called The Inspection and will be discussed next under the heading “The Inspection. What inspection?”. It is a nasty picture and I hope not to have to spend much time on it.

Is it any wonder that it is taking so long to get to the root of the mystery of what lies behind the curtain covering most of a picture-within-a-picture in the second installment of the National Gallery’s six part Marriage a La Mode? Waylaying me at every turn are other leavings of the Horrible Hogarth that provide yet more clues. Illustrated here is a detail from an earlier work of Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. It was featured in a Tate Gallery exhibition earlier this year and it is on the Tate’s say-so that I can tell you that the scene is set in the notorious Rose (brothel-cum-) Tavern close to Hogarth’s studio in Covent Garden. The Tate goes on to say in its notes:

“Standing to her left is a waiter who holds a polished salver to put on the table for the prostitute-cum-stripper, seen removing her clothes in the foreground, who will spin and pose upon it.”

I am only showing a detail, because I think that it’s the best thing in the picture by far and because - aside from its bearing on what is happening behind the curtain in Marriage a La Mode- it demonstrates that Hogarth had something approaching a fetish for the upskirt view and for stocking tops and for corsets. In this regard the soft porn of the 1930’s was something of a Hogarth revival. We saw another very similar upskirt view in the outdoor version of Hogarth’s Before and After pictures (you can find them here) and when we get to Picture No 5 in Marriage a La Mode we shall be presented with another heap of corset on the floor.

The detail is from Plate 3 of The Rakes Progress and you can find the whole thing, and the other seven plates, and more bowdlerised explanatory text (which is unlike the Tate) by clicking on its web site here.

What the Tate could have told us is that the dance the lady is likely going to dance is called “Black Joke” joke being another word for “pussy”. The chorus of Black Joke begins with: “Her black joke and belly so white”. Like Uncle Tom Cobley the words vary slightly from verse to verse but whether it be an English boy versed in Venus, a Welshman, a Highland man, a Grenadier or a Bishop they quickly discover that “a black joke will lather like soap.” The final verse, I regret to say, always ended up with a lawyer: “his client’s cause would quit/To dip his pen in the bottomless pit/Of a coal-black joke as will lather like soap.”

As I wrote this last, two things occured to me. There is a pub hard by the Temple where all the barristers have their chambers which is called “The Coal Hole”. It is very popular. In an earlier existence I had some correspondence with a senior trustee of the Tate’s Turner Prize who happened also to be a senior partner in a very distinguished City firm of solicitors of which, coincidentally I was an occasional client. Perhaps the Tate went easy on Black Joke not wishing to offend people in high places?

When performed “posed” on a plate with a candle, the candle is lit. The climax comes, presumably to a raucously emphatic rendering of the lawyer dipping his pen in the bottomless pit, with the dancer gyrating lower and lower over the candle until finally it is enveloped in her vagina and extinguished. A bit like Maria Ewing’s dance of the seven veils in the opera Salome which she performs over a grid covering a pit in the ground in which is imprisoned (one assumes face upturned) John the Baptist. I must tell you about it some day.

I have to now go into Flight of the Phoenix mode. There is a lot of stuff needing attending to and it will take a few days. I will try to put something interesting up on the web site on a daily basis, but it will be short and sweet. See here for what I mean by Flight of the Phoenix.

A digitised version of the captions to the illustrations will be found on the ARTISTS ILLUSTRATED page.

The Horrible Hogarth’s speciality of inserting pictures within his pictures has distracted writers with a stronger focus than me from the job in hand. At the moment I am on a detour from a detour and have been having a look at the two or conceivably three bestiality images in the National Gallery’s Marriage a La Mode. These are to be found not in the painting with the curtained-off picture but in the fourth of the six paintings, The Toilette, sometimes called The Morning Levee, which at the present rate of progress, we shall get to shortly before the End of the World or Phil Spector putting on an orange jump suite, whichever comes later.

This is like counting angels dancing on the head of a needle and it stems from wondering (in a scientific way and so forth) whether the image behind the curtain in the second painting, as envisaged by Hogarth, could take the form of a zoophilic relationship between either a) man and beast, or b) woman and beast. And, if either of a) or b), was the act committed in the missionary position (approved by the Church although not when it involves mixing the species) or a tergo (a.k.a. doggie fashion). Doggie fashion is not approved by the Church when a human is involved but is ok between beasts. And if any of the foregoing (and regardless of what the Church thinks) was it the beast or the human party on top?

In the classic art of the Renaissance images of bestiality hardly raised hardly an eyebrow and could be justified, as always, by reference to Greek mythology. Most of the bestiality stories were supplied by Jupiter, Numero Uno on Mount Olympus, who employed a modus operandi which involving disguising himself as an animal so as to get his wicked way with desirable mortals. Usually females, the exception being the boy Ganymede where Jupiter showed up at the scene disguised as an eagle.

Hogarth’s pictures within pictures include, in addition to a Ganymede, a Jupiter and Io where Hogarth painted a rampant cloud or (depending on whether you believe me or Judy Egerton) bear enfolding, in the upright missionary position, an “ecstatic” (per Judy Egerton) Io, and a Leda and the Swan. Ecstasy and being fucked against a wall do not normally go together but in art and mythology the rules are different. Since my last posting I have been taking a scientific look at whether it could have been Leda with her significant Swan who Hogarth had originally intended to put behind the curtain. It could of course have been Jupiter and Io. The thinking either way is that, needing something to put on the wall in the fourth painting, or on a silver salver bought at auction, Hogarth abandoned the idea of using either of these images in the second painting and instead curtained off the space leaving only a male leg showing.

If the man’s leg was always going to be part of the picture behind the curtain it is necessary to consider the possibility that Hogarth’s original plan was to show beast-on-man. Personally I think that this can be discounted because Hogarth’s pictures within pictures almost always referenced known works of art, engravings of which were widely available in his time and were thus known to his prospective customers. I can think of only two precedents in art for beast-on-man (or woman) - other than the boy Ganymede - and it is doubtful whether the respective images, by their nature, were in circulation. Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling portrayal of a serpent fellating an art critic who he hated would have been too gross for public consumption (no other artist has gone there) and the few attempts at achieving a plausible depiction of Pasiphae inside a wooden model of a cow were, as stated in my posting of a few days ago, very unconvincing.

Returning to the Horrible Hogarth’s Tete a Tete and the Great Curtained Picture Mystery my inclination, if we were to go down the Bestiality route, is to think Leda and the Swan because there are precedents in art for a number of variations in the way in which the act can be carried out. There is Swan on Woman missionary position (the National Gallery’s three Leda’s (counting-in Hogarth’s salver) and most of the Old Master representations show it this way. There is Swan on Woman a tergo, anatomically feasible albeit against the Church’s doctrine in more than one sense, and very rarely seen in art. And there is the Woman on Swan cowgirl style which is rarer still. The only example of the latter that I can find is a brooch made by the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71) one of whose principal patrons was Pope Clement VII.

As must be clear from these progress reports, trying to get into the Hogarthian mind to see what he was thinking of putting behind the curtain requires a deal of thinking on everyone’s part. I have already laid out my stall in the first Progress Report in which I offered for consideration a female on male cowgirl image which has the advantage of being compatible with the foot projecting from behind the curtain that can only be that of a man lying on his back. The possibility of an element of bestiality cannot be excluded, however, and I think it right to lay it the pros and cons before visitors to this site so that they can make an informed judgement for themselves.

I have been wondering whether the picture behind the curtain (as envisaged by the Horrible Hogarth in the National Gallery’s Marriage a La Mode) might have involved bestiality. Hogarth, we know, drew upon well known works by old masters (not so old in his day) for his pictures within pictures. This has taken me on a detour from the first detour, and I shall be reporting later today.

The incidence of bestiality in mythology (from which the artists of the Renaissance drew inspiration) mostly involves male-god-on-female-mortal. An exception to the general rule is to be found in the story of Pasiphae who had herself concealed in a specially made mock-up of a cow so that she could couple with a bull with which she had become infatuated. This was one of the stories in the Ten Sexiest Moments in Mythology (if you are a publisher please click here and email me) and it required considerable ingenuity (you could say thinking out of the box) to come up with a plausible solution to the logistics of the situation. Here, to be going on with, is Ian Tovey and my take on the question of how it could be done.