(1 Nov 2021) LEAD IN:
A new exhibition dedicated to the British artist William Hogarth opens at Tate Britain this week (3 November).
It includes the masterpiece "Miss Mary Edwards" that was last in the UK in the early 19th century.
STORY-LINE:
For the first time in over a century, this portrait is back to the U.K.
"Miss Mary Edwards" by British painter William Hogarth (1697-1764) is part of the new exhibition "Hogarth and Europe" at Tate Britain in London.
Edwards was the painter's patron.
"She was quite an interesting woman, and I think that comes across in the portrait. She's seen, I guess, with some of the attributes that you'd normally associate with male portraiture," says curator, Alice Insley.
The exhibition draws a parallel between Hogarth's paintings and those of his European contemporaries.
Such connections include "The White Tablecloth" by French painter Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin.
"One of the most exciting pairings for me is Jean (-Baptiste) Simeon Chardin's white tablecloth with Hogarth's "Marriage A-la-Mode," and the kind of parallels in the way that they were working and particularly in the kind of rendering of still-life details, is something that scholars have commented on for quite a long time," says Insley.
The series of paintings "Marriage A-la-Mode" by Hogarth is composed of six artworks depicting different stages of marriage, from settlement to death.
Two of them feature a similar table and table cloth: "The Tête à Tête" and "The Lady's Death."
"I think it's quite interesting to think of "Marriage A-la-Mode" as a bit of a homage to him, but whereas Chardin's paintings are quite contemplative and quite still paintings. There's a level of kind of chaos and in particular in the last scene of "Marriage A-la-Mode" where the dog is stealing the food off the table. It's much more about ruin and disaster. It's a quite different tone, I think," says Insley.
Other highlights include "The Hon. Mrs Constantine Phipps being led to greet her Brother, Captain the Hon. Augustus Hervey, later 3rd Earl of Bristol."
Upon the family's request, the bodies were painted by a French painter and their faces by a Swiss artist.
But one Lady portrayed in the artwork was dissatisfied with her face and that of her son, so she commissioned a British painter to redo them.
The work is now attributed to all three painters.
On top of the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing together all these works was a challenging task — one that started more than 10 years ago.
"I guess the kind of ideas for the exhibition began in 2012, and then there was a workshop in 2014 around Hogarth and European contemporaries. There were lots of shows that could have come out of that and this is, I guess, the idea that kind of came to fruition," says Insley.
Painting conservators at Tate studied the artworks and found that Hogarth may not have always completed his paintings before engraving variations of the prints.
X-rays of "A Rake's Progress: VIII The Madhouse" show that the painter adjusted the position of the man sitting on the floor.
His head was positioned slightly higher and his body was more upright at the start, but the end result suggests that Hogarth changed his mind and depicted him closer to the floor.
The parallels drawn by the museum are both sometimes striking and at times less evident, according to art critic Tabish Khan.
"So when you're connecting and comparing the cities of, say, London with Paris and Venice, of course, there's going to be a lot of similarities in the art created, naturally," says Khan.
Hogarth's work remains contemporary, according to Khan.
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