The Continental Foreigner in Hogarth's Graphic Art
p. 107-118
Texte intégral
I
1There are foreigners galore, and not only of the Continental variety, in Hogarth's graphic images. As traces of contemporary verbal and visual discourse, they are easily mistaken for signs of the real. In fact, historians have often exploited—and indeed misused—Hogarth's engravings as visual support for their arguments, with the tacit assumption that the Hogarthian prints express eighteenth-century English reality, that they are, in other words, naturalistic and realistic and therefore reliable material and grist for the historian's mill.1 In this paper, I shall be contesting such a reading and view of Hogarth's graphic art. Focusing on the graphie representation of the Continental foreigner, I hope to be able to show that while there are traces of the real in the representations of, say, Italians and Frenchmen, they are above all encoded allusions to texts, images, and general popular attitudes. And as such, they have specific functions within the larger satirical matrix of the prints. Take the exotic foreigner, usually shown in a marginal position, who embodies part of the satirical norm as a visual counter-part of the observer of the print: the African boy in plate 2 of A Harlot’s Progress, for instance (fig. 1), may be read as an ambiguous sign, an allusion to earlier artistic representations of black servant boys as surprised spectators, or even as a repoussoir figure. But like the pensive and hence rational Turk who appears at the window in Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism (fig. 2) he is also a figure borrowed from the verbal satires that used foreign commentators, e.g., Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721) and Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (1760-61).2
2Although the exotic foreigner (the African, the Turk, the American Indian) is certainly a subject worth exploring in its art-historical, socio-political, and literary dimensions, I must exclude it in this article which is concerned with Continentals, and especially with Frenchmen. Unlike the exotic foreigner whose very presence comments on European manners and customs and thus puts them in a satirical perspective, the visitor from the Continent provides images of affectation, falsity and artificiality, in short, of things and ideas that are un-English and therefore to be rejected. This is the case in Hogarth's early satires, such as Masquerades and Operas, with its telling if slightly misleading title, "The Bad Taste of the Town" (fig. 3): in this print the famous Swiss-born impresario Heidegger (in the window at the left), appears in visual and semantic association with the Italian opera singers on the showcloth, the magician with the telling (French) name Faux, and the satyr (or devil) and the fool who have roped in the audience as it were. The bad, foreign, influence is juxtaposed with the disappearance of traditional English (high) culture symbolized in the centre foreground. We shall see, however, that Hogarth's conservative view changes in his later work where things get more complicated and, as a consequence, more interesting.
3However, in order to show what remains to be done in the study of the representation of foreigners in Hogarth's art, let me provide a brief commentary on plate 4 of the series Marriage-à-la-Mode which is ideally suited for my subject because it is virtually studded with foreigners (fig. 4). The scene shows Lady Squanderfield's levee in her boudoir. Surrounded by parasites and sycophants, she is listening to her future lover, Counsellor Silvertongue. Crébillon’s fils’ "conte moral," Le sopha, sets the tone visually beside the lady's friend on the sopha. We may begin at the left, where an African boy literally indicates one of the major subjects of this scene—cuckoldry. It is obvious, I think, that the black boy is not a target of the satire but rather a helpful device for us to find our way toward the meaning of this scene. In that sense, his semantic function can be compared to that of the other African, in the background, who serves chocolate while providing a natural, "wild," facial expression that contrasts sharply with the artificial faces and gestures around him. It was the German philosopher and proto-semiotician Georg Christoph Lichtenberg who, to my knowledge at least, has given us the best ekphrasis of this detail in his Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthschen Kupferstiche. Commenting on the relationship between the adult African servant and the Italian opera singer (a satirical image of either Senesino or Carestini), Lichtenberg writes:
Truly, with the three diamonds in his face [the African]... strikes down [blitzt nieder] every jewel of the castrato. Is that not language and meaning? And is it not art to give more meaning to the sign of the new moon on the African's shoulder than to the full moon of the Italian? There is no affectation here; it is pure, raw, human-animal instinct that draws an axis between his eyes and the Italian.... He is smiling at the infantile little mouth [Lichtenberg’s term is "Brei-und Lappen-Maulchen"] that used to be washed in the weak, effeminate, Tiber, whereas his own mouth, washed in the Niger or Senegal, is of such an extension that neither these rivers nor any famous river-god would be afraid of shortage if they had to pour their storage [of water]... from this head [my translation].3
4The Africans in this picture, then, are to be read as a contrast to the Europeans as well as the English assembled in the boudoir. The allegedly sophisticated and cultured Europeans have to bear the full brunt of the satirical attack. Foremost among them is the Italian castrato singer at the right. The very epitome of artificiality, he symbolizes English upper-class infatuation with foreign (Italian) culture. Reenforcing and siding with all the Hogarthian visual prejudices, Lichtenberg dedicates almost two pages to him: he describes the Italian as a "capon," a "disgusting bagpipe" and a "monster of a swollen bag." The lacking virility of the singer fans the ekphrastic fire of the German philosopher—not least, one suspects, because "Photorin," as he called himself, was a hunchbacked cripple. But the Italian castrato need not concern us here—he is a well-known type in visual and verbal satire, making some appearances in the Hogarthian engravings which play on his sexuality or, to use a Lichtenbergian term, "neutrality."4
5It is the Frenchman and the German who deserve our attention. The German stands behind the Italian. A flutist by the name of Weidemann, he seems to be rather unobtrusive, giving pride of place to his Italian colleague. Lichtenberg (over)reads his facial expression as a good-natured smile and then speculates on the object of the smile, pouring further shame on the castrato by adding that Herr Weidemann’s mirth probably derives from the German’s comparison of his instrument with the Italian’s flute (330). The pensive gentleman sipping chocolate beside the Italian has been mistaken for another German. Even Ronald Paulson, the world’s most renowned Hogarth expert, trusts in the judgment of earlier commentators who have identified the gentleman as Herr Michel, Prussian envoy. If Paulson had read Lichtenberg, however, he would probably have been persuaded by the circumstantial evidence provided in the philosopher’s ekphrasis: Lichtenberg proves beyond doubt that this listener must be what he ternis the English house cock. In fact, if one compares his face and coat with Earl Squanderfield’s visage and "Brandenburghs" (apparently the English term for the embroidery on his coat) in the earlier plates (cf. plate 2, for instance), one must side with Lichtenberg. And why should a German envoy appear with "papillotes" (Lichtenberg’s term) at a reception? One must conclude with the German philosopher that the man is indeed the husband, perhaps still disguised as an officer (he may have gone to a masquerade the night before): he is waiting for the hairdresser to finish with his wife; and his ‘papillotes’ can be read as a prediction of his fate—he will soon be cuckolded.5
6The other foreigner in this illustrious group is the lady’s hairdresser. Since he is probably a Frenchman, it is perhaps of some interest to quote Lichtenberg’s reading of this "Friseur," an interpretation studded with national stereotypes that tries to repeat on the verbal level what Hogarth does on the visual level (cf. Lichtenberg’s rather benevolent interpretation of the German, "unser Landsmann"). The hairdresser, writes Lichtenberg,
is obviously from the country in which the English, or at least the better sort among them, have recruited people in order to have their heads decorated and their stomachs upset. Hairists and cooks, for decoration and indigestion.... The creature then is a Frenchman. As the reader may have found out already, Hogarth’s plates have their own signs for the French, just as the calendars have signs for the changing moon.... This one here is one of the empty, hungry, ones—he is still growing. We see him occupied with his pyrometrical exercise... and listening to the voice of the lawyer. It is impossible for this people to do one thing at a time. Despite his "Miene d’un mouton qui rêve," you can bet that he already knows more about the masquerade and its consequences than all the others (328) [my translation],
7Prejudiced though as Lichtenberg’s view of the Frenchman may be, it is nevertheless close to Hogarth’s jingoistic pictorial treatment; and the semiotician in him recognized immediately that the artist used special signs to characterise the French ("eigne Zeichen fur die Franzosen"). The exploration of these signs will be my subject in the following pages. But let me first conclude my commentary on plate 4 of the marriage series. We should not forget that there are also some English visitors in the room: at right, we see Mrs. Lane, the lady with the hat who was to become Lady Bingley, obviously enraptured by the Italian’s vocal performance. Her husband, soundly asleep in front of the curtain, is—if we can believe Lichtenberg—actually the unacknowledged no 3 of the musical trio, for his snoring accompanies the singer and the flutist, coming as it does "from a well tuned instrument, and judging by the strong and healthy chest, the bellows are also in a rather good condition" (Ausführliche Erklärung 334). In front of him, we see the very opposite of the hunting gentleman who seems to be lifted straight from the pages of Tom Jones: this enthusiastic man is the stereotype of the elderly, overdressed, connoisseur—a figure one encounters in Fielding’s farces and contemporary comedies. His fingers are expressive of his mood; they replace verbal exclamations—indeed, Lichtenberg terms them exclamation marks (335). The English, then, are also targets of Hogarth’s satire, representing as they do States of infatuation with what is here criticised as examples of foreign culture, a culture that is characterised as potentially noxious and dangerous.
8It should be obvious by now that these Hogarthian figures are not to be read as realistic representations but rather as polyvalent allusions, as signs that combine references to visual and verbal sources which the observer is invited to identify. What remains to be done in this area (a task I cannot undertake in this article) is an intertextual analysis of such characters as traces—Barthian as well as Derridean—traces of other texts and pictures that seem (but only seem) to define and clarify Hogarth’s graphic allusions. Similarly, it would be useful to study the pictorial traces of the foreigner in the engravings: the art works represented on the walls (e.g., in the first plate of the marriage series or in the second plate of the series on the harlot). Although some steps have been made in this direction,6 we are still in dire need of a study of the art (both high and low) in Hogarth’s works, of the graffiti, signboards, showcloths, engravings and paintings that comment from the inside on what is going on in the prints.7 I shall now turn to Hogarth’s depiction of the eighteenth-century Frenchman as a conglomerate allusion.
II
9In the picture briefly discussed above we have already seen a first specimen of the Frenchman in eighteenth-century London as he appears in Hogarth’s graphic satire. Apart from the hairdresser, the foreign quack doctor was another popular satirical figure. One of them appears in plate 5 of A Harlot’s Progress (fig. 5). Arguing with his colleague over the usefulness of his famous "pill" (he points to his pill-box while the stout doctor holds up his own medicine bottle), this is "Monsieur de la pilule," the French quack Jean Misaubin who died in 1734. He was known as the inventor of a famous pill for prophylaxis and venereal disease. On the evidence of State 3 of this print (where the paper, at right, holding the teeth bears an inscription, "Dr Rock") Paulson believes that the fat doctor in full-bottomed wig is Misaubin’s competitor, Dr Richard Rock (1690-1777) who also made money with cures for venereal disease. But Lichtenberg, deciphering the body language of these two death-bringers, takes the quack "with the positive stomach" to be a German. Apparently, he was at first a harlequin in Hamburg, dabbling on the side in cures for bad teeth (he made his pills from crushed human skulls); in London he continued in his medical profession and was later hanged for murder. This reading certainly makes as much sense as Paulson’s, for the two quacks are cast as types representing their parasitical, and indeed, lethal trade: the harlot is dying, not directly from venereal disease but from the inappropriate cures of the charlatans in consultation (she has already lost her teeth as a consequence of taking mercury). Like the lawyers and clergymen in Hogarth’s plates, the self-appointed doctors only care about themselves—their patient is dying by the fireside.8
10As far as the French quack is concerned, what is important for my context is the way Hogarth’s representation of Jean Misaubin draws on popular images, texts, and ideas. The man we see here may perhaps resemble the one in the portrait sketch by Watteau, etched by A. Pond in 1739 as Prenez des Pilules (see BM Satires, 1987)—but he represents less a true person than two types, i.e., the Frenchman and the French quack doctor as he appeared in Fielding’s The Mock Doctor, which opened shortly after the appearance of Hogarth’s series. Like his fellow countryman in plate 4 of the series on the marnage, he is emaciated and well-dressed. His negative features come out in this scene which cannot deny its theatrical borrowings: Misaubin is not to be trusted, first because he is a quack and therefore a mountebank, and secondly because he is French which, in a jingoistic and chauvinistic century, amounted to the same thing. One must of course not forget that throughout the eighteenth century the French were "the supreme bugaboo" for the English, to borrow a phrase from Michael Duffy; the French attracted many of the Englishman’s prejudices towards foreigners.9 Hogarth’s graphic representation of Jean Misaubin, then, expects the observer to recognize the Frenchman by way of allusion to his stereotyped representation in contemporary drama and popular visual satire. Between 1696 and 1732 Colley Cibber had perfected the cliché of the overdressed French dandy in his comedies; he even went to Paris to study the airs and the character of the French petit-maître. And by the late 1730s the French fop was instantly recognizable on stage.10 As so often in Hogarth, we should not read for realism but take the signs (including the human ones) for what they are, i.e., allusions to what had already been written, painted, and engraved, and, as a consequence, become firmly established in what could be termed a mentalité. As we shall see below (with Beer Street), this popular mentalité shared by all strata of society could not do without such negative stereotypes—in fact, they were absolutely necessary to create an English notion of identity and superiority.
11It is precisely because Hogarth’s graphic art appeals to such images established by previous visual and verbal discourse that we find different representations of the same person. For what matters is not realistic depiction but the allusive play with signs and traces that help the observer to identify types. Thus the Jean Misaubin we see again thirteen years later in plate 3 of Marriage-A-la-Mode (the real Misaubin had died in 1734) bears no likeness to the quack in the harlot series (fig. 6). The commentators on the print derive his name from the title-page of the folio, at left, where the author is referred to as "Monsr de la Pillule," Misaubin’s nickname. It is the pillbox that establishes a satiric and semantic line or triangle between the French quack, the gay nobleman, his disease, and the crying girl to be inspected by the doctor. However, the French text in the book is studded with spelling mistakes: this suggests that if the quack is indeed Misaubin, his French is as terrible as his cures, although one could of course also argue that Hogarth’s French was little more than mediocre. In any case, the characterization of the quack doctor is comparable to that in the harlot series: he is linked to images and emblems of illusion and falsity, and above all else to death and corruption.
12Another French type or rather caricature we encounter in Hogarth’s works is the foppish, ridiculous, beau from the world of the arts. In plate 2 of A Rake’s Progress Hogarth presents two of them at their trade (fig. 7). Tom Rakewell has become a man of the town, and during his morning levee, surrounded by rapacious hangerson, he finds himself in the situation of Paris (satirically evoked in the painting on the wall). The analogy suggests, among many other things, that the four graces contesting for his attention at the left are indeed jealous beauties. In fact, the contrasting and beautifully expressive physiognomy of these sycophants alludes both to the jealous goddesses facing Paris and to the narcissism and selfishness of Rakewell’s entourage. The group of the "graces" consists of two Englishmen and two Frenchmen: in the background, in front of the painting, we see a landscape gardener, perhaps a reference to Charles Bridgeman (who advised Pope at Twickenham and planned the park at Stowe)—although his "garden plan" looks rather French to me, which perfectly fits the satirical frame. The tall man beside him is Rakewell’s quarter-staff master, probably an allusion to James Figg the pugilist. Significantly, however, the two Englishmen stand in the back, the quarterstaff master casting a disapproving look at one of the two Frenchmen in the foreground. They represent a fencing master, apparently a genuine portrait of one Dubois, and a dancing master (holding his violin) who is the true caricature of the foppish French showman. Lichtenberg’s ekphrasis of this group is again telling and exhilarating, not least because it deciphers Hogarth’s allusive body language while attempting to capture in verbal (German) clichés what Hogarth presents in visual signs from an English perspective. The fencing master, Lichtenberg writes,
is about to venture into a violent attack against the air, shouting at this enemy... [while] a French dancing master in a kind of Gallic pas de coq seems to begin his parade before Rakewell. One can see that the enthusiasm and the inflammable air of his nation lift him up, and he touches the ground only with his toes. It has been said that this figure is exaggerated and badly drawn. But which dancing master, especially if like this one he is totally lost in the enjoyment of his own being, does not exaggerate himself and draw himself badly? This language master of gestures suffers the same fate as certain Latin ones who, overwhelmed by syntaxis ornata, cannot express themselves naturally.... A dancing master can break his neck over a little straw which a natural walker does not even feel. This happy mortal (a state witnessed by his enraptured little face, the closed eye open only toward the inside, and oh, the honey mouth slit by contentedness itself), this happy mortal, I say, is performing a corporal pas frisé which his interior being, freed from shoes and buckles and thus in the purest form of a line of beauty never drawn, admires with ineffable relish. What tranquillity of soul! Truly, wisdom itself must be astonished upon noticing a pair of feet that have led their flying owner to an aim which he would perhaps have missed ten times had he had wisdom’s head on his own shoulders [my translation].11
13Always interested in semiotic relations, Lichtenberg’s reading captures well the notes of mocking and narcissism in the satirical representation of the Frenchman. This association of the educated and cultured French foreigner with foppishness and self-love is linked with the moral implication, by way of allusion to the myth of Narcissus, that such attitudes are both ridiculous and immoral—in short, un-English. Hogarth was to use the association again in his later works concerned with aesthetics. But in The Enraged Musician (1741) and, in a masterful way, in Noon (1738), the satire works on a much more sophisticated level that does not take sides. Rather than praising English values at the expense of French foreigners, these prints juxtapose two behavioural patterns, leaving it up to the observer to make up his mind. The Enraged Musician (fig. 8) pits a foreign (probably Italian) musician representing high, exclusive, culture (classical music) against the plebeian musicians (an oboe player, a pregnant Street singer, and a drummer boy) accompanied as it were by other noise makers. The satirical ideal is perhaps to be found in the centre, as Paulson has argued, where a pretty young woman mediates between high and low culture by way of the Hogarthian line of beauty.12 Similarly, in Noon (fig. 9), the second plate in the series The Four Times of the Day, the human beings are literally and visually divided into two distinct groups representing artificiality and barbarity—seemingly elegant French refugees (Huguenots) leaving their church at right, and uncouth English folk on the left. The gutter in the middle is of course a semantic signifier, but so is the dead cat whose body provides a bridge and hence a link between sophisticated if deceitful forms of making love among the French and the lusty, straighforward, manners of the English. With the Huguenots, appearance is more important than reality; in fact, the one hides the other: the woman in the foreground may be concealing a pregnancy or a walking impediment, and her gallant companion is probably suffering from syphilis while the little boy is clearly reminiscent of Narcissus, a youth in love with his own reflection. The African paramour of the milkmaid on the left represents an equally dangerous and more natural extreme, for if the plebeian girl represents England, the English give in to their wild, uncontrolled, passions. The dead body of the cat, traditionally a symbol of selfish lust and greed, indicates the consequences of both forms of behaviour13 Clearly, the French in this picture, although they are again cast as stereotpyed figures to be despised, are neither better nor worse than their English and African counterparts.
III
14I have been arguing so far that representations of Frenchmen and French women in Hogarth’s graphic art may be explored with much profit as signs and traces of other forms of verbal and visual discourse in which drama, journalism, and popular verse take pride of place as the most powerful creators of popular English conceptions of the French. In a century when England was frequently at war with France, and when an invasion was threatening any time (see Hogarth’s deliberately popular treatment of this subject in the two plates bearing that very title), it is hardly suprising that the crudest if most effective anti-French clichés turn up in those Hogarthian plates that have political overtones. I will only point out a few examples before turning to Beer Street which highlights Hogarth’s use of national stereotypes in a fascinating manner.
15Indeed, to understand the Anglo-French rivalry that is always present as a backdrop or subtext in these prints one must bear in mind that political pamphlets and newspapers continued to reenforce popular prejudices, from A Satyr against the French in 1691, which ridiculed "fry’d frogs" as a "dainty dish," and Defoe’s immensely popular satirical poem, The True-Born Englishman (1701), to the verbal and pictorial satire of the second half of the century which contrasted soupe maigre, frogs and snails in the pots of skinny, starving Frenchmen with huge joints of English roast beef and enormous plum puddings.14 This discourse and specific political events helped to shape the picture of the French in Hogarth’s prints from the late 1740s.
16Without this subtext it is difficult, for instance, to understand the melancholy look of the Frenchman (perhaps a valet whose Jacobite master may be with the passengers) on top of the coach in The Stage-Coach, or the Country Inn Yard (June 1747). The action of the English sailor "of the Centurion" tilting the Frenchman’s hat is polyvalent (fig. 10). It illustrates, on the one hand, English slyness and cheekiness in general, and, on the other hand, the recent feats of the Centurion, the famous ship of George Anson: in 1744 the Centurion passed in a fog through the French fleet in the Channel and returned safely to England; and in May 1747 it had its main topmast shot away in a battle with the French off the Breton coast but then returned to participate in the victorious battle (see Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works 127). Two years later, Hogarth set out to institutionalise the symbolic propaganda against the French which, by that time, had already focused on the differences in food mentioned above. In The Gate of Calais, subtitled "the Roast Beef of Old England" (a popular song from Fielding’s Welsh or Grub-Street Opera [1731]), Hogarth ironically dramatises his own adventure in Calais (he was briefly arrested on a visit to France in 1748) while alluding to all the popular anti-French ideas of his time (fig. 11): a poor and suffering people, the French are addicted to fashion and the Church of Rome; and their food (soupe maigre, lenten fish, and vegetables) is no match for the impressive sirloin of beef that has been brought over from England and obviously proves too heavy for the weak French cook. I have shown elsewhere that this print is concerned, not with the gate of Calais (the title, once again, is an unreliable paratext) but with the satirical dramatisation of English popular attitudes towards the French.15
17The political aspect is perhaps most obvious in The March to Finchley (December 1750), which portrays a particular historical moment—the Jacobite rebellion of 1745—from the hindsight perspective of 1750 (fig. 12). In this case the depiction of the Frenchman in the crowd was a consequence of the perennial journalistic concern with spies. At the left, we see two men whispering together: one, marked by his dress and bag-wig, is French, and the other, a Scots Highlander (his plaid undercoat shows in Hogarth’s painting). Their faces strained by the intrigue and the perusal of a letter (A Monsier Monsier a Londre) [sic] leave no doubt about their plans. This is another role, then, in which the Frenchman found himself cast in Hogarth’s art.
18In his brief survey of eighteenth-century English attitudes towards the French, Michael Duffy notes that by 1760 the common people had apparently become so preoccupied with the French bugaboo that other nations were almost totally ignored.16 One consequence of such an attitude was that the definition and, indeed, the understanding of what constituted the English character depended on the (negative) French counterpart. Traces of this phenomenon can be found in the literature and journalism of the time. Hogarth has left us an admirable artistic treatment of the issue in the several States of Beer Street (1751 and 1759), a graphic satire that appeals once again to the observer’s knowledge of texts and images defining the French and the English—or rather one with the help of the other (figures 13-14). Beer Street is of course part of a series; an adequate understanding of its moral, aesthetic, and socio-political aspects requires that one read it together with Gin Lane. But since we now have a number of critical studies of these engravings, I can refer the reader to the recent works of Ronald Paulson and Werner Busch. Busch in particular provides a sound survey of the historical background and offers a new, insightful, reading of the series in the art historical context of the religious iconography of "The Last Judgment," thus getting us beyond the traditional explication of the prints in relation to Peter Brueghel’s pair "La cuisine grasse et maigre" of 1563.17
19My concern here is merely with the depiction of the Frenchman in the first and second States of the print (fig. 13), and his subsequent replacement with a huge loin of meat and a paviour making advances to a girl (fig. 14). Hogarth’s changes may perhaps say something about authorial intention. More importantly, however, they throw some light on the interchangeability and the meaning of important signifiers. It is precisely because they are interchangeable that, in terms of signifying, the Frenchman serves a satirical function that is similar to that of the meat. The aim is to invite the observer to identify with English patriotism (as a potential spy is being caught) or with Englishness as such (the consumption of meat and ale).
20But the commentators on this plate disagree on the nature of the meat. In tune with Lichtenberg, Paulson believes that in the third State the blacksmith is holding up a shoulder of mutton (fig. 14). The lower part of the rather small leg seems to speak in favour of such a reading. And so does the possibility that there may be a pun here on the term mutton, for beneath the meat is another piece of mutton, an eighteenth-century slang term for loose women and prostitutes.18 Werner Busch, however, thinks the blacksmith is brandishing pork. But Barry Wind has recently argued that the metamorphosis is from a Frenchman into a loin of roast beef, since popular attitudes linked such meat and beer to Englishness. Wind has a point, I think, for if Englishness is to be expressed here, what better image than a chunk of beef.19 After all, it is roast beef which represents England in The Gate of Calais. In terms of Perceian semiotics, the roast beef and the jug of ale are multifunctional sign types, serving as icons, indices, and symbols. I would argue that none of these categories dominates in the print. The joint of meat and the jug of beer are iconic because they represent things that were part of everyday life in London; they are indexical in their reference to English consumption of such food and drink, and, finally, they are symbolical because they can be replaced with a captured Frenchman—that is they serve as jingoistic allusions to a mentalité the contemporary observer associated with roast beef and beer.
21Drawing as it does on the "déjà lu" and the "déjà vu," Hogarth’s artistic if slightly ironical definition of the English character in this print cannot be achieved without the opposite, French, counterpart. In order to be effective, national stereotypes seem to work with their opposite as an inbuilt quality.20 The Frenchman/roast beef in Beer Street relates this image to The Gate of Calais, underlining the patriotic theme but also the manner in which a sign eventually becomes part of a code of allusions to the latent animosity between France and England. Beer Street and the earlier prints caricaturing Frenchmen thus allude to and draw on popular English attitudes by representing well-known signs and sign types from the special angle of satire. These signs all belong to a code urging the observer to activate his/her knowledge of previous visual and verbal discourse. It is this intertextual or rather intermedial nature of the Hogarthian prints (I prefer to call them iconotexts) which makes them fascinating even for a postmodem observer.

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Notes de bas de page
1 For a more detailed critique of such approaches still used by historians see my Graven Images: Towards an Archeology of Eighteenth-Century Engravings (London: Reaktion, 1994) chapter 1; and the forthcoming "How to (Mis)Read Hogarth or Ekphrasis Galore," 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modem Era 2 (1994).
2 The African in Hogarth’s art is the subject of David Dabydeen’s Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth-Century English Art (Kingston-upon-Thames: Dangaroo, 1985). See p. 51, where Dabydeen notes that earlier Italian paintings of Delilah’s Betrayal of Samson usually contained black servant boys. For different interpretations of the black boy in this picture, see Ronald Paulson’s Book and Painting: Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible: Literary Texts and the Emergence of English Painting (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1982) 72 and passim; and Hogarth: The "Modem Moral Subject" 1697-1732 (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers UP, 1991) 262-63 and passim. Paulson comments on the "amæed Mohammedan observer" in the catalogue, Hogarth’s Graphic Works (London: The Print Room, 1989) 177. My discussion of Hogarth’s plates in this article is indebted to the information provided in Professor Paulson’s detailed catalogue (which is not without fault as we shall see), and to his revised biography-cum-study of Hogarth, in three volumes: in addition to volume 1 quoted above, see Hogarth: High Art and Low 1732-1750 and Hogarth: Art and Politics 1750-1764, both published by Rutgers UP in 1992 and 1993 respectively. My reading of Hogarth’s graphic images is, however, substantially different from Ronald Paulson’s author-oriented, intentionalist, approach.
3 G.C. Lichtenberg, Ausführliche Erklarung der Hogarthschen Kupferstiche, ed. Franz H. Mautner (Frankfurt: Insel, 1991) 336.
4 Lichtenberg, Ausführliche Erklarung 329-30. On the satire concerned with castrato singers, including references to critical literature, see my Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (London: Grafton, 1990) 31-33. For other Hogarthian satirical views of Italian opera singers see, for instance, the showcloth in Masquerades and Operas and plate 2 (Third State) of A Rake’s Progress. It is both interesting and telling, I think, that Hogarth casts the Italian stars in what Pierre Georgel has aptly termed "la peinture dans la peinture" (i.e., on signboards, showcloths, and in engravings). Hogarth thus hints at their performance on stage and their "artificial" (sexual) nature. See Georgel’s fine essay on this aspect in Hogarth’s art in Image et société dans l’œuvre graphique de William Hogarth, éd. Frédéric Ogée (Paris: Université de Paris X-Nanterre, 1992) 91-113.
5 See Lichtenberg’s persuasive evidence presented in his Ausführliche Erkltirung 330-33; and Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works 120.
6 See, apart from Georgel’s article quoted above, the detailed analysis of the art works in the marriage series in Robert L.S. Cowley’s Marriage-A-la-Mode: A Review of Hogarth’s Narrative Art (Manchester: Manchester UP, 19S3), and Ronald Paulson’s comments dispersed in his studies on Hogarth.
7 A good if apparently rather simple example is the French king on the wall of Hogarth’s The Invasion, plate 2, where the history of graffiti and popular imagery needs to be considered.
8 Cf. Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphie Works 82, and Lichtenberg, Ausführliche Erklarung 149. On the representation of quacks in Hogarth’s prints see my article, "The Satire on Doctors in Hogarth s Graphie Works” in Literature and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century, eds. Marie Mulvey Roberts and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993) 200-26.
9 See Duffy’s useful introduction, and the section entitled "The Supreme Bugaboo: The French," in his collection of caricatures, The Englishman and the Foreigner (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1986) 13-52, especially 31-39. This book is part of the series entitled The English Satirical Print 1600-1832, in 7 volumes.
10 M. Duffy, The Englishman and the Foreigner 36.
11 Lichtenberg, Ausführliche Erkadrung 205-08. Cf. also Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works 92-93.
12 See Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works 110-11, and especially his persuasive discussion of the function of the plebeian young woman in Hogarth’s aesthetics, in Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England 1700-1820 (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers UP, 1989) 149-203. The musician in the window has been identified as Cervetto, a bass player; or Castrucci, the leader of Händel’s orchestra; and John Festin. Cf. Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphie Works 111, and G.C. Lichtenberg, Erklarung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche (Gottingen, 1801), Achte Lieferung, 93-111: Lichtenberg argues, rather convincingly, that the facial features of the musician suggest an Italian.
13 For a more detailed discussion of this print in the context of the sexual mentalité at work in Hogarth’s art see my article, "Eroticism in Graphie Art: The Case of William Hogarth," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 21 (1991) 53-75.
14 See M. Duffy, The Englishman and the Foreigner 34-36.
15 See the chapter on framing in my forthcoming Reading Graphie Images.
16 The Englishman and the Foreigner 36.
17 See Berthold Hinz, William Hogarth: Beer Street and Gin Lane: Lehrtafeln zur britischen Volkswohlfahrt (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1984); Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphie Works 145-49; Hogarth: Art and Politics 1750-1764 23-26 and passim; and Werner Busch, Das sentimentalische Bild: Die Krise der Kunst im 18. Jahrhundert und die Geburt der Moderne (Munich: Beck, 1993) 264-94.
18 See the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "mutton.” I owe this hint to Hermann J. Real who is known to the scholarly world as the leading expert on Jonathan Swift. Hogarth was fond of such pictorial and semantic punning. See, for instance, the pun on sole/soul in the third State of plate 1 of A Rake’s Progress, where the leather cover of the Bible is misused. In his commentary on the Hogarthian plates, the anglophile Lichtenberg always has a keen eye for such punning.
19 See Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works 146-47; W. Busch, Dus sentimentalische Bild 280; and Wind’s article in the collection of essays edited by Joachim Möller, Hogarth in Context (Marburg: Jonas, 1994).
20 This seems to continue even in our allegedly Euro-oriented age: cf. the revival after 1989 of anti-German prejudices in French and Anglo-American newspapers, and the attitude towards France of Mrs. Thatcher whose father, Alfred Roberts, firmly believed that the French "are entirely corrupt." See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (London: Yale UP, 1993).
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