Hogarth at Tate Britain

William Hogarth painted his Self-Portrait with Palette in 1735, the year in which he also co-founded The Sublime Society of Beefsteaks, a gentlemen’s club dedicated to the celebration of British beef and liberty. Thirty-eight years old, quivering with energy and nervy arrogance, he looks like a man running late for his dinner. The artist’s powdered wig is a cascade of curls done in coils of grey and lead-white pigment applied to the canvas with such rapidity they resemble dabbed whirls of shaving foam. His neckerchief is a slurry of dirty snow, his coat a scumbled hint, the back wall of the room a patchy void. The palette that he holds with an invisible hand is a disc of dark wood, spotted with four blurred circles of flesh-coloured paint. Hogarth himself is a vivid blur of a human being, wheeling through space to face the mirror with a gaze of keen self-inquisition. He looks optimistic and insouciant but there is something else in his expression too – a barely suppressed sense of disenchantment.

“Hogarth”, a dizzyingly compendious exhibition of the artist’s work at Tate Britain, opens with a salvo of self-portraits. In The Painter and His Pug, of 1745, the artist depicts himself in his prosperous maturity, wearing a red silk morning gown and fur-trimmed cap. He is a man of letters as well as a painter, this picture declares. The mirror in which he has caught his own likeness is perched on copies of Milton and Shakespeare, while the palette this time is a symbolic prop rather than a tool in use – it is decorated with an arabesque and inscribed with the phrase “the line of beauty”, an allusion to Hogarth’s eccentric and entertaining treatise on aesthetics, The Analysis of Beauty. The artist bears a...