William Hogarth and Luke Sullivan – The March to Finchley
William Hogarth – The March to Finchley
Hogarth’s representation of the chaotic scene at the Tottenham Court Road Turnpike, at the intersection of the Euston and Hampstead Roads, as the British Army assembles to march north to Scotland to put down the Jacobite Rebellion.
The central figure is a bemused soldier, accosted on one hand by a young pregnant ballad singer and on the other by a screaming hag waving a copy of the (Jacobite) journal The Remembrancer.
Weeping wives cling to their men, a drunken soldier has collapsed in a puddle on the right, piesellers and pickpockets work the crowd, two bruisers have a boxing match on the leftand whores wave goodbye from the windows of the brothel on the right.
In the background the vanguard is seen marching north up the hill towards Hampstead.
It is said that Hogarth dedicated the plate to His Majesty the King of Prussia, an Encourager of Arts and Sciences! as an ironic rebuke to George II (notoriously indifferent to the arts), who had rejected Hogarth’s painting of this subject (now in the Coram Foundation, Lincolns Inn Fields). Paulson 184 VIII/IX.
William Hogarth, (born November 10, 1697, London, England—died October 26, 1764, London), the first great English-born artist to attract admiration abroad, best known for his MORAL and satirical engravings and paintings—e.g., A Rake’s Progress (eight scenes,1733). His attempts to build a reputation as a history painter and portraitist, however, met with financial disappointment, and his aesthetic theories had more influence in Romantic literature than in painting.
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