The Bench (Hogarth) - Inscription

Inscription

The print was accompanied by a second sheet of the same size with a lengthy inscription detailing Hogarth's motives for creating the piece. In a letter to Hogarth, a correspondent identified only as "B" noted that the print seemed of minor importance compared to the inscription, indeed it was the only written work that Hogarth released under his own name after the completion of The Analysis of Beauty; Paulson suggests it may have been a rejected passage from that book, and Trusler, a nineteenth-century commentator on Hogarth, goes as far as to wrongly attribute the inscription as an excerpt from chapter six.

Text of the inscription:

THERE are hardly any two things more essentially different than character and caricature, nevertheless they are usually confounded, and mistaken for each other, on which account this explanation is attempted.

It has ever been allowed that when a character is strongly marked in the living face, it may be consider as an index of the mind, to express which with any degree of justness in painting requires the utmost efforts of a great master. Now that which has of late years got the name of caricature is, or ought to be, totally divested of every stroke that hath a tendency to good drawing; it may be said to be a species of lines that are produced rather by the hand of chance than of skill; for the early scrawlings of a child, which do but barely hint an idea of a human face, will always be found to be like some person or other, and will often form such a comical resemblance, as, in all probability, the most eminent caricatures of these times will not be able to equal with design, because their ideas of objects are so much the more perfect than children's, that they will unavoidably introduce some kind of drawing: for all the humorous effects of the fashionable manner of caricaturing chiefly depend on the surprise we are under at rinding ourselves caught with any sort of similitude in objects absolutely remote in their kind. Let it be observed, the more remote in their nature, the greater is the excellence of these pieces. As a proof of this, I remember a famous caricature of a certain Italian singer, that struck at first sight, which consisted only of a straight perpendicular line with a dot over it. As to the French word outré, it is different from the foregoing, and signifies nothing more than the exaggerated outline of a figure, all the parts of which may be, in other respects, a perfect and true picture of human nature. A giant or a dwarf may be called a common man outré; so any part, as a nose, or leg, made bigger or less than it ought to be in the part outré, which is all that is to be understood by this word, injudiciously used to the prejudice of character.