Beer Street
1750/1
14 1/16” X 11 3/4" (H X W)
View the full resolution plate here.
Beer Street is the only one of Hogarth's famous plates where sex is not fraught with an unpleasant aftermath. In this positive display, middle class beer drinkers fondle lovers openly in a town bustling with progress and potential. The scene exhibits plenty without sliding into decadence, demonstrates desire without approaching deviance. It is perhaps this happy medium, this mixture of work and play, which is the delicate balance not achieved in the relationships of his other series. The female fondles a key, hinting that this equilibrium is the key to happiness: a little work, a little play—toil without exhaustion, affection without vulgarity, indulgence without alcoholism.
Balance is the theme for the work, as buildings are built, beer is quaffed and lovers are loved. The fishwomen, blacksmith, butcher and other tradesmen display neither the casual recklessness of the aristocracy nor the despondency of the impoverished and thus do not slide into vulgar displays of vice that typify Hogarth’s portrayal of both extremes. They are not greedy but rather satisfied.
The pawnbroker’s building, doing a steady business in Gin Lane is here the only one in disrepair. The artist, painting, and potentially drinking, gin, dresses in rags and hints at the inappropriate nature of that other, more problematic, vice and warns us that even though we can witness the joys of Beer Street, the problems of Gin Lane are around the corner. The plate rejoices in the prosperity of the citizens depicted here, but it does not deny the want that exists elsewhere.
The caption reads as follows:
Beer, happy Produce of our Isle
Can sinewy Strength impart,
And wearied with Fatigue and Toil
Can chear each manly Heart.
Labour and Art upheld by Thee
Succesfully advance,
We quaff Thy balmy Juice with Glee
And Water leave to France.
Genius of Health, thy grateful Taste
Rivals the Cup of Jove,
And warms each English generous Breast
With Liberty and Love.
Beer Street
Trusler, Rev. J. and E.F. Roberts. The Complete Works of William Hogarth. (1800)
This admirable delineation is a picture of John Bull in his most happy moments. In the left corner, a butcher and blacksmith are each of them grasping a foaming tankard of porter. By the king’s speech, and the Daily Advertiser upon the table before them, they appear to have been studying politics, and settling the state of the nation. The blacksmith, having just purchased a shoulder of mutton, is triumphantly waving it in the air. Next to him, a drayman is whispering soft sentences of love to a servant-maid, round whose neck is one of his arms; in the other hand a pot of porter. Two fishwomen, furnished with a flagon of the same liquor, are chanting a song of Mr. Lockman’s on the British Herring Fishery. A porter, having put a load of waste paper on the ground, is eagerly quaffing the best of barley wine.
On the front of a house in ruins, is inscribed, “Pinch, Pawnbroker;” and, through a hole in the door, a boy delivers a full half-pint. In the background are two chairmen. They have joined for three-pennyworth to recruit their spirits, and repair the fatigue they have undergone in trotting between two poles, with a ponderous load of female frailty. Two paviers are washing away their cares with a heart-cheering cup. In a garret window, a trio of tailors are employed in the same way; and on a house-top are four bricklayers, equally joyous. Each of these groups seem hale, and well clothed; but the artist, who is painting a glass bottle, from an original which hangs before him, is in a truly deplorable plight; at the same time that he carries in his countenance a perfect consciousness of his talents in this creative art (129).
Beer Street
Shesgreen, Sean. Engravings by Hogarth. (1973)
A panegyric on ideal middle-class drinking habits, Beer Street depicts the heath, prosperity and happiness that attend the tranquil, well-regulated lives of the London tradesmen and working classes who drink beer even as they labor. A church steeple rises in the background (perhaps St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields); its flag suggests it is October 30, the birthday of George II. Blocking the church from view is a flourishing tavern with the sign of a radiant sun. Four men work on its roof; three drink and wave their hats joyfully, the fourth descends to share some ale with the three tailors in the building across from them.
In front of the tavern two chairmen bearing a very heavy woman pause; one refreshes himself with beer. In the street three pavers work; a fourth caresses a responsive girl who rests beside her bag of vegetables; she holds a key, the symbol of access to the good life. A fat butcher chuckles at the couple. On the table in front of him lie The Daily Advertiser and a paper reading “His Majesty’s Most Gracious Speech To both Houses of Parliament On Tuesday ye 29 Day of November 1748.” It says: “Let me earnestly recomend to you the Advancement of Our Commerce and cultivating the Arts of Peace, in which you may depend on My hearty Concurrence and Encouragement.”
Behind a butcher a blacksmith raises a tankard in one hand and a large piece of meat in the other. Above the blacksmith, a thin painter in tattered clothes paints an advertisement for gin. The gin bottle to his right is both his model and his source of his inspiration. The sign celebrating beer above this shows a happy crowd in a farmyard dancing around and on a stack of barley. “Health to the Barley Mow” is inscribed below the scene. In the center of the foreground two sisterly fishwives pause to read :A New Ballad on the Herring Fishery by Mr. Lockman.” To their right a porter drinks down the last of his ale before carrying his basket of books, “For Mr. Pastem the Trunk maker in Paul’s Ch. Yd.” The basket contains volumes which Hogarth detested; these books are “Modern Tragedys Vo: 12,” “Hill on Royal Societies,” “Turnbul on Ant[ient] Painting,” “Politicks Vol: 9999” and “Lauder on Milton.” Only the house of “N Pinch Pawn Broker” is dilapidated on Beer Street. Here the pawnbroker is a debtor instead of a creditor and must receive his ale cautiously through a hole in his door. An empty mousetrap, symbol of his business, is visible through the upper window of his crumbling establishment. The man’s cat is dead, perhaps of hunger.
In an earlier state, Hogarth, still smarting from his Calais humiliation, depicted the heavy smith hoisting an overdressed, skinny Frenchman in the air; later the artist replaced him with the amorous couple and the meat. A preliminary sketch reproduced here contains much less detail and a number of figures not included in the final scenes (75).
Beer Street
Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth’s Graphic Works. (1965)
CAPTION:
Beer, happy Produce of our Isle
Can sinewy Strength impart,
And wearied with Fatigue and Toil
Can chear each manly Heart.
Labour and Art upheld by Thee
Succesfully advance,
We quaff Thy balmy Juice with Glee
And Water leave to France.
Genius of Health, thy grateful Taste
Rivals the Cup of Jove,
And warms each English generous Breast
With Liberty and Love.
The church steeple has been identified as St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, and the flag shows that it is October 30, George II’s birthday. The "royal parish" of St. Martin's hoisted the flag on the King's birthday, as Hogarth, living in Leicester Fields, would know (Stephens, BM Sat) The steeple does not, however, exactly resemble St. Martin's--it is a generalized representation of a Wrenish steeple. The flag and the King's speech on the table link the drinking of beer with not only local but national prosperity. The workmen on the housetop are waving their caps in celebration of the day and of the beer they are drinking. The building is an ale house ("the Sun," with the checkerboard by the door) The two sedan chairmen have stopped to refresh themselves at this alehouse; their burden, a huge woman, is hemmed in by her hoop which rises on either side of her (cf. the screen in Taste in High Life). The three curious cross-legged figures in the window of the next building are tailors, one holding out his beer mug expectantly. The drink that Hogarth has in mind in the print is porter, a dark-brown beer which resembles light stout, made from charred or browned malt.
The emaciated Frenchman being hoisted by the blacksmith (in the first states) points up one of Hogarth's sources. In Brueghel's La Cuisine Grasse a thin, ragged boy-piper is being driven from the kitchen by one of a group of fat cooks. In the third state, with the Frenchman gone, the only signs of adversity in the street are the pawnbroker's shop and the sign-painter. The pawnbroker's house is propped up by a board and utterly neglected. The box in the upstairs window is a mousetrap; what looks like the body of the cat lies under a pile of fallen bricks on the step. The door, which has a sign over it, "N. PINCH PAWN BROKER," is equipped with a peephole for spotting creditors. The artist across the street is up on his ladder painting an almost abstract representation of a liquid flowing in an arc from a spirit bottle into a glass (cf. the bottle hanging from the sign, which is his live model); his is the only thin, ragged person in the print-either because his nourishment is in the illusion of art and not in reality, or because (as J. Ireland, 2, 79 n., thought) Hogarth "intended to shew the state of the arts at that time," when artists were reduced to painting tavern signs. The painter, however, looks far too pleased with himself for that. (And it is difficult to accept Antal's theory, p. 164, that he is meant to be a graceful anticipation of the Antinous in The Analysis, Pl. 1; nor could he, according to another of Ireland's theories, have been a satire on the painter Liotard, who only came to England in 1754.) It should be noted that the design of the bottle he has produced was a convention (it appears again in The Invasion, Pl. 2). Hogarth is most likely contrasting the painter's painstaking realism with its re- sults, and the abstract design (like a palladian design or Ramsay's George III) with the reality of the bottle. Significantly, in the drawing he is plump and part of the group below him; in the print he is detached, high on his ladder, regarding his painting with an entranced expression. The bottle is, by the way, a gin bottle-which sets the painter off even farther from the rest of these beer-drinking folk.
The sign-board shows a barley mow in a farmyard with drinking, dancing people around and on it; the tavern is "The Barley Mow." Below is written: "Health to the Barley Mow"; and under the sign- painter's picture is "... AN CALVAR[t's] BEST BUTT [Be]ER " The drinkers at the "Barley Mow" are a fat butcher (he has a steel for sharpening knives at his belt), a blacksmith or a cooper (hoisting a Frenchman or a shoulder of mutton), and a pavior, who has left his companions working on the street to make advances to a servant-maid. The pavior has his rammer under his arm, and the girl prominently displays a large house-key; beside her is a basket of vegetables she has probably just brought from the market. Two fishwomen and a porter complete the group. On the table beside the butcher lie "The Daily Advertiser" and "His Majesty's Most Gracious SPEECH To both Houses of PARLIAMENT On Tuesday ye 29 Day of November 1748,” which reads: "Let me earnestly recomend to you the Advancement of Our Commerce and cultivating the Arts of Peace, in which you may depend on My hearty Concurrence and Encouragement." The fishwomen are reading "A New Ballad on the Herring Fishery by Mr Lockman." John Lockman (1698-1771; see Frontispiece to "The Travels of Mr John Gulliver") was a friend of Hogarth's and sometimes called "The Herring Poet" because he was secretary to the Society of the Free British Fishery, called the "Herring Fishery," and wrote The Shetland Herring and Peruvian Gold-Mine (1751), contrasting the solid profits of the one industry with the illusory promises of the other. The Society of the Free British Fishery, an ambitious attempt to foster national fisheries by protective legislation, had been incorporated in the autumn of 1750 with the Prince of Wales as Governor.
A large hamper of books is directed "For Mr Pastern the Trunk maker in Pauls Ch Yd.” The books, destined for waste paper are labeled: "Modern Tragedys Vo: 12," "Hill on Royal Societies," "Turnbul on Ant[ient] Painting," "Politicks Vol.- 9999," and "Lauder on Milton." "Dr." or Sir John Hill (1716?-75) wrote pseudo-scientific works; A Dissertation on Royal Societies (London, 1750) was the result of the Royal Society's refusal to make him a member. George Turnbull's A Treatise upon ancient Painting (London, 1740) praised the ancient "masters," apparently too lavishly for Hogarth's taste. William Lauder (d. 1771) wrote An Essay on Milton's Use and Imitation of the Moderns in his “Paradise Lost” (London, 1750) to prove that Milton had plagiarized Paradise Lost from seventeenth-century Latin poets such as Masenius and Staphorstius. While he did prove that Milton had studied the works of these poets, he bolstered his case by interpolating in his quotations from their works a Latin verse translation of Paradise Lost. John Douglas (afterward Bishop of Salisbury) proved Lauder's fraud, which Lauder confessed in A Letter to the Reverend Mr. Douglas (1751) before emigrating to Barbados, where he died. Dr Johnson, who wrote a preface and concluding note to Lauder's book, was one of the duped (208-209).
Beer Street
Uglow, Jenny. Hogarth: A Life and a World. (1997)
Hogarth painted [fellow artist and friend Francis Hayman] affectionately in Beer Street as the big-nosed sign-painter, teetering on his ladder in his torn coat with his shirt-tails hanging out, enthusiastically nodding at his own great achievement (68-69).
In comfortable Beer Street a barrel, not a man, dangles from the pole and “N. Pinch”, pawnbroker, is out of business. This is Britain At Its Best, seen though it is affectionately guyed, and James Townley’s verses suggest that ale is a patriotic weapon, just like good roast beef:
Beer, happy Produce of our Isle
Can sinewy Strength impart,
And wearied with Fatigue and Toil
Can chear each manly Heart.
Labour and Art upheld by Thee
Succesfully advance,
We quaff Thy balmy Juice with Glee
And Water leave to France.
Genius of Health, thy grateful Taste
Rivals the Cup of Jove,
And warms each English generous Breast
With Liberty and Love.
The nationalist note is underlined by the flag on the steeple, always raised by St. Martin-in-the-Fields on George II’s birthday, 30 October. The King’s Speech lies on the table, next to the laughing butcher. With some fudging of dates it is marked 29 November 1748 (the opening of the first session of Parliament after Aix-la-Chapelle), and its text reads “Let me earnestly recommend to you the Advancement of Our Commerce and cultivating the Arts of Peace, in which you may depend on my hearty Concurrence and Encouragement.” The king of commerce Hogarth recommends is suggested by the fishwives who are studying “A New ballad on the Herring Fishery”; this refers to Hogarth’s friend John Lockman, who was currently lobbying for protective legislation as Secretary to the Society of the Free British Fishery.
Hogarth slyly suggested that beer-drinking might even cure cultural follies: the hamper of books being sent as waste paper to the trunk-maker contains some modern tragedies, “Hill on Royal Societies, Turnbul on Ant. Painting, Politicks Vol:9999” and wedged in sideways, Lauder on Milton (a scholarly fraud of 1750 suggesting that Milton was a plagiarist). But the one artist he shows—the lanky, ragged sign-painter—does not quite fit the street. Leaning back from his ladder beneath the sign of the “The Barley Mow”, a rural idyll, he beams dreamily at the bottle his is copying and we notice that it is not a flagon of all but a round, unmistakable gin bottle. Between his first sketch and the print, Hogarth had replaced a fat, affable painter with this absent-minded figure. Did he mean that even in this land of foaming pints, a poor painter could still be driven to painting signs, and sink into the arms of Madam Gin? (497-499).
Beer Street
Paulson, Ronald. Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth. (1979)
A church steeple is closer and more prominent in the pedant Beer Street, and the king is manifested front-center in George II’s printed Address to Parliament, which is being read by fat, prosperous tradesmen. The king’s Address offers plans for the “Advancement of our Commerce,” which in terms of the metaphor of fat/beer versus thin/gin means making them fatter. The two prints are as much about the absence of royal/ecclesiastical authority as about the drinking of beer or gin.
The fact is that the government encourages distillation and sales of gin in order to support the landed interest (encourage the production of spirits distilled from home-grown cereals) and provide itself with revenues. As one historian of gin has concluded, “the rise and decline of gin drinking can be related directly to taxation and legislation.” In 1743 Parliament repealed the 1736 Gin Act and adopted a more moderate one, drafted by a prominent distiller of the time. Lord Bathurst’s argument was that since it was impossible to prevent the retailing of spirits, it would be better to license it instead, as this would reduce usage by increasing expense and also provide money for the European wars. The new law, known as the Tippling Act, increased the price of gin, granted licenses only to alehouse license holders, and forbade distillers to retail. But in 1747 the distillers petitioned for the right to retail, and the act was modified accordingly. Once this right was restored to the distillers, gin consumption, which had waned slightly since 1743, rose markedly; drunkenness increased, population declined, and in 1750 a commission reported that in some parts of London one in every five houses was a ginshop. Whether or not Hogarth had this information, he assumes some such situation when he includes the spire of St. George’s in Gin Lane and juxtaposes with this print of the emaciated gin drinkers the prosperity of the fat merchants in Beer Street. The basic cause and effect relationship would be understood by the poor: not that beer drinking leads to prosperity and gin drinking to want, but the reverse. Rather, beer drinking is a product of prosperity and gin drinking of want.
Another pair of details is relevant. In the background of Beer Street a fat, encumbered upper-class woman is being crushed in her too-tight sedan chair (related to the fat beer drinkers in the foreground), and in Gin Lane a poor, emaciated dead woman lies in her coffin. Each woman has two attendants and a box to hold her. Such details may have been overlooked by the audience of responsible citizens to which Fielding addresses himself, but the poor would have seen them straightaway. And once the women are seen as a pair, the fat one becomes a cause of the emaciated, dead one, as do the fat, beer-drinking purveyors of essential commodities in the foreground.
The two plates convey an implied contrast between the state’s paternalist duty to regulate on the old mercantilist basis and the new ideal of supply and demand in a free market (“advance our commerce,” as the king’s Address says) which wishes to regulate itself and determine its own level of profit and cost. “Whereas the first appeals to a moral norm—what ought to be men’s reciprocal duties—the second appears to say: ‘This is the way things work, or would work if the State did not interfere.’” From the point of view of eighteenth-century bread rioters, the assumed the shape of the man (here the pawnbroker, but any merchant) who seeks private gain at the expense of his own neighbors, who accordingly can only riot or sink into gin and crime. For the poor man of this period, as Francis Place wrote, “none but the animal sensations are left; to these his enjoyments are limited, and even these are frequently reduced to two—namely sexual intercourse and drinking . . . Of the two . . . drunkenness is by far the most desired” since it provides a longer period of escape and costs only a penny. The people of Gin Lane could not have afforded beer; gin alone was within their competence. (5-7).
By implication, all Gin Lane’s world of hunger and want is rejected in Beer Street, as the verses under Brueghel’s print emphasize: “Beat it, Thinman! Though you are hungry, you are wrong,/ This is Fat Kitchen here, and here you don’t belong!” I do not know to what extent we can extrapolate the content from the model in this case; Brueghel’s prints cannot have affected Hogarth’s popular audience. But they do draw our attention to the extremes of fat and thin, of eating and starving in Hogarth’s plates (250).
Beer Street
Dobson, Austin. William Hogarth. (1907)
It is probable, however, that the total abstainers of to-day would regard the bloated prosperity of Beer Street as scarcely less dangerous than the pinched emaciation of Gin Lane. With the lusty beer-drinkers everything prospers but the pawn-broking business; with the consumers of “Bung-your-eye” or “Lay-me-down-softly” everything is the reverse, and the dweller at the sign of the “three balls” is driving a roaring trade. We cannot linger on these plates further than to call attention to the inimitable professional complacency of the ragged sign-painter in Beer Street (in those days there was a regular sign-market in Harp Alley, Shoe Lane), and to the appalling figures of the itinerant gin-seller and the maudlin mother in the companion print (105).
Beer Street
Quennell, Peter. Hogarth’s Progress. (1955)
The reverse of the picture [Gin Lane] is displayed by Beer Street. England was a prosperous country, where the industrious apprentice might, with luck and application, hope to become his own master, and the prudent artisan need not despair of rising in the commercial scale. The English standard of living had always been high: food was plentiful and usually cheap: and the blacksmith, the chairman, the porter, the road-mender and the London fish-wife, if undebauched by poisonous gin, could still afford to refresh themselves with huge pewter tankards of strong ale. Published together at the beginning of February 1751, Hogarth’s attacks on cruelty and drunkenness (both of which had a popular effect that may be compared to the effect afterwards exerted by the novels of Charles Dickens) were his last attempts to simplify his art in the interests of a straightforward moral lesson; and even here the artist sometimes prevails against the moralist. Henceforward, as at an earlier period, he was generally more preoccupied with the spectacle of life, so complex, dramatic and absorbing, than with its underlying moral significance; and he was also increasingly concerned with the elaboration of an æsthetic theory (211-212).
Beer Street: Basket
Shesgreen
To their right a porter drinks down the last of his ale before carrying his basket of books, “For Mr. Pastem the Trunk maker in Paul’s Ch. Yd.” The basket contains volumes which Hogarth detested; these books are “Modern Tragedys Vo: 12,” “Hill on Royal Societies,” “Turnbul on Ant[ient] Painting,” “Politicks Vol: 9999” and “Lauder on Milton.” Only the house of “N Pinch Pawn Broker” is dilapidated on Beer Street (75).
Beer Street: Basket
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
A large hamper of books is directed "For Mr Pastern the Trunk maker in Pauls Ch Yd.” The books, destined for waste paper are labeled: "Modern Tragedys Vo: 12," "Hill on Royal Societies," "Turnbul on Ant[ient] Painting," "Politicks Vol.- 9999," and "Lauder on Milton." "Dr." or Sir John Hill (1716?-75) wrote pseudo-scientific works; A Dissertation on Royal Societies (London, 1750) was the result of the Royal Society's refusal to make him a member. George Turnbull's A Treatise upon ancient Painting (London, 1740) praised the ancient "masters," apparently too lavishly for Hogarth's taste. William Lauder (d. 1771) wrote An Essay on Milton's Use and Imitation of the Moderns in his “Paradise Lost” (London, 1750) to prove that Milton had plagiarized Paradise Lost from seventeenth-century Latin poets such as Masenius and Staphorstius. While he did prove that Milton had studied the works of these poets, he bolstered his case by interpolating in his quotations from their works a Latin verse translation of Paradise Lost. John Douglas (afterward Bishop of Salisbury) proved Lauder's fraud, which Lauder confessed in A Letter to the Reverend Mr. Douglas (1751) before emigrating to Barbados, where he died. Dr Johnson, who wrote a preface and concluding note to Lauder's book, was one of the duped (209).
Beer Street: Basket
Uglow
Hogarth slyly suggested that beer-drinking might even cure cultural follies: the hamper of books being sent as waste paper to the trunk-maker contains some modern tragedies, “Hill on Royal Societies, Turnbul on Ant. Painting, Politicks Vol:9999” and wedged in sideways, Lauder on Milton (a scholarly fraud of 1750 suggesting that Milton was a plagiarist) (499).
Beer Street: Carriage
Paulson, Popular and Polite Art
In the background of Beer Street a fat, encumbered upper-class woman is being crushed in her too-tight sedan chair (related to the fat beer drinkers in the foreground), and in Gin Lane a poor, emaciated dead woman lies in her coffin. Each woman has two attendants and a box to hold her. Such details may have been overlooked by the audience of responsible citizens to which Fielding addresses himself, but the poor would have seen them straightaway. And once the women are seen as a pair, the fat one becomes a cause of the emaciated, dead one, as do the fat, beer-drinking purveyors of essential commodities in the foreground (6).
Beer Street: Carriage
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
The two sedan chairmen have stopped to refresh themselves at this alehouse; their burden, a huge woman, is hemmed in by her hoop which rises on either side of her (cf. the screen in Taste in High Life) (208).
Beer Street: Corpulent
Trusler
a butcher and blacksmith are each of them grasping a foaming tankard of porter (129).
Beer Street: Fish
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
The fishwomen are reading "A New Ballad on the Herring Fishery by Mr Lockman." John Lockman (1698-1771; see Frontispiece to "The Travels of Mr John Gulliver") was a friend of Hogarth's and sometimes called "The Herring Poet" because he was secretary to the Society of the Free British Fishery, called the "Herring Fishery," and wrote The Shetland Herring and Peruvian Gold-Mine (1751), contrasting the solid profits of the one industry with the illusory promises of the other. The Society of the Free British Fishery, an ambitious attempt to foster national fisheries by protective legislation, had been incorporated in the autumn of 1750 with the Prince of Wales as Governor (209).
Beer Street: Fish
Uglow
The king of commerce Hogarth recommends is suggested by the fishwives who are studying “A New ballad on the Herring Fishery”; this refers to Hogarth’s friend John Lockman, who was currently lobbying for protective legislation as Secretary to the Society of the Free British Fishery (499).
Beer Street: Lovers
In this positive display, middle class beer drinkers fondle lovers openly in a town bustling with progress and potential.
The female fondles a key, hinting that this equilibrium is the key to happiness: a little work, a little play—toil without exhaustion, affection without vulgarity, indulgence without alcoholism.
Beer Street: Lovers
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
[This is] a pavior, who has left his companions working on the street to make advances to a servant-maid. The pavior has his rammer under his arm, and the girl prominently displays a large house-key; beside her is a basket of vegetables she has probably just brought from the market (209).
Beer Street: Painter
The artist, painting, and potentially drinking, gin, dresses in rags and hints at the inappropriate nature of that other, more problematic, vice and warns us that even though we can witness the joys of Beer Street, the problems of Gin Lane are around the corner.
Beer Street: Painter
Trusler
the artist, who is painting a glass bottle, from an original which hangs before him, is in a truly deplorable plight; at the same time that he carries in his countenance a perfect consciousness of his talents in this creative art (129).
Beer Street: Painter
Dobson
We cannot linger on these plates further than to call attention to the inimitable professional complacency of the ragged sign-painter in Beer Street (in those days there was a regular sign-market in Harp Alley, Shoe Lane) (105).
Beer Street: Painter
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
The artist across the street is up on his ladder painting an almost abstract representation of a liquid flowing in an arc from a spirit bottle into a glass (cf. the bottle hanging from the sign, which is his live model); his is the only thin, ragged person in the print-either because his nourishment is in the illusion of art and not in reality, or because (as J. Ireland, 2, 79 n., thought) Hogarth "intended to shew the state of the arts at that time," when artists were reduced to painting tavern signs. The painter, however, looks far too pleased with himself for that. (And it is difficult to accept Antal's theory, p. 164, that he is meant to be a graceful anticipation of the Antinous in The Analysis, Pl. 1; nor could he, according to another of Ireland's theories, have been a satire on the painter Liotard, who only came to England in 1754.) It should be noted that the design of the bottle he has produced was a convention (it appears again in The Invasion, Pl. 2). Hogarth is most likely contrasting the painter's painstaking realism with its re- sults, and the abstract design (like a palladian design or Ramsay's George III) with the reality of the bottle. Significantly, in the drawing he is plump and part of the group below him; in the print he is detached, high on his ladder, regarding his painting with an entranced expression. The bottle is, by the way, a gin bottle-which sets the painter off even farther from the rest of these beer-drinking folk (208).
Beer Street: Painter
Uglow
Hogarth painted [fellow artist and friend Francis Hayman] affectionately in Beer Street as the big-nosed sign-painter, teetering on his ladder in his torn coat with his shirt-tails hanging out, enthusiastically nodding at his own great achievement (68-69).
the one artist he shows—the lanky, ragged sign-painter—does not quite fit the street. Leaning back from his ladder beneath the sign of the “The Barley Mow”, a rural idyll, he beams dreamily at the bottle his is copying and we notice that it is not a flagon of all but a round, unmistakable gin bottle. Between his first sketch and the print, Hogarth had replaced a fat, affable painter with this absent-minded figure. Did he mean that even in this land of foaming pints, a poor painter could still be driven to painting signs, and sink into the arms of Madam Gin? (499).
Beer Street: Pawn Shop
Shesgreen
Here the pawnbroker is a debtor instead of a creditor and must receive his ale cautiously through a hole in his door. An empty mousetrap, symbol of his business, is visible through the upper window of his crumbling establishment. The man’s cat is dead, perhaps of hunger (75).
Beer Street: Pawn Shop
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
The pawnbroker's house is propped up by a board and utterly neglected. The box in the upstairs window is a mousetrap; what looks like the body of the cat lies under a pile of fallen bricks on the step. The door, which has a sign over it, "N. PINCH PAWN BROKER," is equipped with a peephole for spotting creditors (208).
Beer Street: Speech
Paulson, Popular and Polite Art
the king is manifested front-center in George II’s printed Address to Parliament, which is being read by fat, prosperous tradesmen. The king’s Address offers plans for the “Advancement of our Commerce,” which in terms of the metaphor of fat/beer versus thin/gin means making them fatter. The two prints are as much about the absence of royal/ecclesiastical authority as about the drinking of beer or gin (5).
Beer Street: Speech
Shesgreen
On the table in front of him [the butcher] lie The Daily Advertiser and a paper reading “His Majesty’s Most Gracious Speech To both Houses of Parliament On Tuesday ye 29 Day of November 1748.” It says: “Let me earnestly recomend to you the Advancement of Our Commerce and cultivating the Arts of Peace, in which you may depend on My hearty Concurrence and Encouragement” (75).
Beer Street: Speech
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
The flag and the King's speech on the table link the drinking of beer with not only local but national prosperity (208).
On the table beside the butcher lie "The Daily Advertiser" and "His Majesty's Most Gracious SPEECH To both Houses of PARLIAMENT On Tuesday ye 29 Day of November 1748,” which reads: "Let me earnestly recomend to you the Advancement of Our Commerce and cultivating the Arts of Peace, in which you may depend on My hearty Concurrence and Encouragement" (209).
Beer Street: Speech
Uglow
The King’s Speech lies on the table, next to the laughing butcher. With some fudging of dates it is marked 29 November 1748 (the opening of the first session of Parliament after Aix-la-Chapelle), and its text reads “Let me earnestly recommend to you the Advancement of Our Commerce and cultivating the Arts of Peace, in which you may depend on my hearty Concurrence and Encouragement” (499).