The Bench (Hogarth) - Background

Background

Hogarth had often been accused of being a caricaturist, but regarded this as a slur on his work. In his book on art, The Analysis of Beauty, Hogarth claimed that the critics had branded all his women as harlots and all his men as caricatures. He complained:

…the whole nest of Phizmongers were upon my back every one of whome has his friends and were all taught to run em down.

He had made an early attempt to address what he perceived as a mistake on the part of his critics with the subscription ticket for his 1743 series Marriage à-la-mode, on which he contrasted a number of his reproductions of classical caricatures - from Annibale Carracci, Pier Leone Ghezzi and Leonardo da Vinci - with his version of some Raphael characters (from the Cartoons) and a hundred of his own character profiles. After Hogarth's death the subscription ticket was reproduced as print in its own right, minus the subscription details for Marriage a-la-mode, and came to be known as Characters and Caricaturas (from the inscription Hogarth had added at the foot of the original).

Hogarth intended to formally address the point with The Bench by creating a print for sale that showed characters, caricatures and outré. Hogarth dismissed outré as a subset of caricature, but considered caricature to be as far below the art of character painting as the "wild attempts of children". In his own comments on The Bench he compared character, caricature, and outré to comedy, tragedy, and farce in the theatre. Comedy, which he aligned with character, showed a true view of nature, as nothing was outside reality. Tragedy, which he compared to caricature, heightened reality, exaggerating aspects of its subjects. Farce and outré both took this heightening of features to ridiculous extremes. Hogarth scholar Ronald Paulson suggests that by the time he produced The Bench Hogarth had become very sensitive to the criticisms levelled at him as a painter, and was anxious both to distance himself once and for all from the caricaturists, and to prove both that he could capture the true nature of his subjects. Hogarth originally dedicated the print to the soldier and caricaturist George Townshend, but removed the dedication before the print was issued, fearing it would be misinterpreted; some variations on the first state of the print still show "Addressed to the Hon'ble Col. T--ns--d". Townshend was just the sort of talented amateur Hogarth despised: he used his talents as a caricaturist to attack his political opponents and gain an advantage for himself; by trying to differentiate character and caricature Hogarth hoped place himself in a class with the Renaissance painters and disassociate his work from that of the gentleman caricaturists for whom caricature was a enjoyable distraction or tool for their own advancement.