By 1733 Hogarth was prosperous enough to take the house in Leicester Square that was pulled down, in 1870, to furnish a site for the Archbishop Tenison School that has replaced it; and in 1749, “having sacrificed enough to his fame and fortune,” he purchased the villa at Chiswick as a summer holiday home, and became a familiar figure about the Chiswick lanes from time to time – “a blue-eyed, intelligent little man, with a scar over his right eye, and wearing a fur cap.” Allan Cunningham furnishes a more vivid description of his personal appearance in his Lives of the Painters, where he says he was “rather below the middle height; his eye was peculiarly bright and piercing; his look shrewd, sarcastic, and intelligent; the forehead high and round. He was active in person, bustling in manner, and fond of affecting a little state and importance. He was of a temper cheerful, joyous, and companionable, fond of mirth and good-fellowship.” Benjamin West called him a strutting, consequential little man; and, one way and another, we know that he was sturdy, obstinate, pugnacious, and that once he thrashed a ruffian whom he found maltreating the beautiful drummeress that he sketched in his picture of Southwark Fair. Possibly that scar over his right eye was a record of this chivalrous deed.
There are very few records of his home life, and these are of the homeliest, most ordinary sort. He was fond of smoking, and the arm-chair, in which he was wont to sit with his pipe, is still preserved at Chiswick. He had a favourite dog, a pet cat, and a bullfinch, which he buried in his Chiswick garden, commemorating them with tablets that have now vanished from the wall, the bird’s epitaph being “Alas, poor Dick!” and the dog’s, “Life to the last enjoyed, here Pompey lies” – which parodies a line in the Candidate, by that dissipated, brilliant satirist, Charles Churchill: “Life to the last enjoyed, here Churchill lies.”
The Candidate was published at the beginning of 1764, and on the 25th October of that year Hogarth died. Churchill had been a warm friend of his, but before the end had become one of his bitterest enemies – that enmity arising in this wise. In 1762 Hogarth published a political print called the Times, in which he supported the policy of Lord Bute, and ridiculed Pitt, Temple, and Wilkes. By way of retaliation, Wilkes wrote a scathing attack upon Hogarth in his paper, the North Briton, in which he made a sneering reference to Mrs. Hogarth. This stirred Hogarth to anger; and when Wilkes was presently arrested on a charge of high treason, he sat in court and sketched the prisoner, immortalising his villainous squint, and accentuating all the worst qualities in his features. On this print making its appearance, Churchill, a staunch friend and partisan of Wilkes, took up the cudgels, and scarified Hogarth without mercy in An Epistle to William Hogarth (1763), praising his art, but pouring contempt upon his envy and self-esteem, and affecting to believe that he was in his dotage. He can laud the genius, he says, but not the man.
“Freely let him wear
The wreath which Genius wove and planted there:
Foe as I am, should envy tear it down,
Myself would labour to replace the crown…
Hogarth unrivalled stands, and shall engage
Unrivalled praise to the most distant age.”
But for the man —
“Hogarth, stand forth – I dare thee to be tried
In that great Court where Conscience must preside;
At that most solemn bar hold up thy hand;
Think before whom, on what account you stand;
Speak, but consider well; – from first to last
Review thy life, weigh every action past.
Canst thou remember from thy earliest youth,
And as thy God must judge thee, speak the truth,
A single instance where, self laid aside,
And Justice taking place of Fear and Pride,
Thou with an equal eye didst Genius view,
And give to Merit what was Merit’s due?
Genius and Merit are a sure offence,
And thy soul sickens at the name of sense.
Is any one so foolish to succeed?
On Envy’s altar he is doomed to bleed;
Hogarth, a guilty pleasure in his eyes,
The place of executioner supplies;
See how he gloats, enjoys the sacred feast,
And proves himself by cruelty a priest…
Oft have I known thee, Hogarth, weak and vain,
Thyself the idol of thy awkward strain,
Through the dull measure of a summer’s day,
In phrase most vile, prate long, long hours away,
Whilst friends with friends all gaping sit, and gaze,
To hear a Hogarth babble Hogarth’s praise…
With all the symptoms of assured decay,
With age and sickness pinched and worn away,
Pale quivering lips, lank cheeks, and faltering tongue,
The spirits out of tune, the nerves unstrung,
The body shrivelled up, the dim eyes sunk
Within their sockets deep, thy weak hams shrunk,
The body’s weight unable to sustain,
The stream of life scarce trembling through the vein,
More than half killed by honest truths which fell,
Through thy own fault, from men who wished thee well —
Canst thou, e’en thus, thy thoughts to vengeance give
And, dead to all things else, to malice live?
Hence, dotard, to thy closet; shut thee in;
By deep repentance wash away thy sin;
From haunts of men to shame and sorrow fly,
And, on the verge of death, learn how to die!”
Hurt and deeply mortified, a month later Hogarth satirised Churchill’s former connection with the Church and present loose living in a caricature which represented him as a bear wearing torn clerical bands, with ruffles on his paws, in one hand a pot of porter, and in the other a bundle of lies and copies of the North Briton. Garrick had heard that Churchill was making ready to issue that vitriolic satire of his, and hastened to beg him, “by the regard you profess to me, that you don’t tilt at my friend Hogarth before you see me. He is a great and original genius. I love him as a man, and reverence him as an artist. I would not for all the politics and politicians in the universe that you two should have the least cause of ill-will to each other. I am sure you will not publish against him if you think twice.” One could honour Garrick if it were for nothing else but that letter; but it was written in vain, and the exasperation and humiliation that Hogarth suffered under Churchill’s lash are said to have hastened his death. He had been broken in health and ailing all through the summer of 1764, but took several plates down to his Chiswick villa with him for retouching, and – possibly with some foreboding of his own approaching dissolution – drew for a new volume of his prints a tailpiece depicting “the end of all things.”
But he could not be satisfied to keep away from London, and on 25th October was conveyed from Chiswick to his house in Leicester Square, “very weak,” says Nichols, “but remarkably cheerful, and, receiving an agreeable letter from Dr. Franklin” (Benjamin Franklin was, by the way, dwelling at this time in Bartholomew Close; he did not remove to 7 Craven Street, Strand, until three years later), “he drew up a rough draft of an answer to it; but, going to bed, was seized with a vomiting, upon which he rang the bell with such violence that he broke it, and expired about two hours afterwards in the arms of Mrs. Mary Lewis, who was called up on his being suddenly taken ill.”
He was buried in Chiswick Churchyard;