Sigismunda Mourning Over The Heart of Guiscardo - Reception

Reception

Hogarth exhibited the painting at the Society of Artists in Spring Gardens in 1761. Although press reports – perhaps placed by Hogarth and his supporters – were enthusiastic, Sigismunda mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo was attacked by critics who marked Hogarth's attempt to emulate the drama depicted in older Italian paintings as foolhardy and ridiculous. Many critics were repulsed by the shocking contrast between the melancholy beauty of Sigismunda and the grotesquely bloody organ that she delicately touched. It was said that Hogarth placed an attendant next to the painting to note the remarks made by the viewers; changes to the painting suggest that he may have responded to these criticisms by altering his work, although it is impossible to ascertain whether many of the changes were made before or after the painting was exhibited.

One of the fiercest critics of Hogarth's work was the critic and writer Horace Walpole. Walpole, who had admired the "Correggio", compared Hogarth's portrayal of Sigismunda to that of a "maudlin fallen virago", and saw in it:

None of the somber grief, no dignity of suppressed anguish, no involuntary tear, no settled meditation on the fate she meant to meet, no amourous warmth turned holy by despair

John Wilkes dismissed it as "not human". More predictably, in his Epistle to William Hogarth, Charles Churchill sympathised with Sigismunda as the "helpless victim of a dauber's hand".

After ten days of the exhibition, Hogarth replaced the painting with another of his canvases, Chairing the Member, the fourth and last piece in his Humours of an Election series.

Hogarth was unable to sell the painting, but he considered selling engravings based on it. A subscription ticket for the engraving of Sigismunda depicting Time Smoking a Picture was made, and some subscriptions were sold before being recalled, but by March 1761 Hogarth had abandoned the project, having failed to find an engraver to produce the plates. Hogarth instructed his widow not to sell the canvas for less than £500. On Jane Hogarth's death in 1789, the painting passed to her cousin, Mary Lewis. She sold it by auction at Greenwood's in 1790 for 56 guineas to the publisher John Boydell, who exhibited it in his Shakespeare Gallery. Benjamin Smith made an engraving which was published in 1795. The painting was sold for 400 guineas at Christie's in 1807, and had been acquired by J.H. Anderdon by 1814. He bequeathed it to the Tate Gallery in 1879.