TeaWithTater.com

William Hogarth
Painter and his Pug, 1745

Today is the birthday of William Hogarth FRSA (London; 10 November 1697 – 26 October 1764 London); painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic, and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art.  His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called “modern moral subjects”.  Knowledge of his work is so pervasive that satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as “Hogarthian”.

On 23 March 1729 Hogarth married Jane Thornhill, daughter of artist Sir James Thornhill.

Hogarth died in London on 26 October 1764 and was buried at St. Nicholas Church, Chiswick, London.  His friend, actor David Garrick, composed the following inscription for his tombstone:

Farewell great Painter of Mankind

Who reach’d the noblest point of Art

Whose pictur’d Morals charm the Mind

And through the Eye correct the Heart.

If Genius fire thee, Reader, stay,

If Nature touch thee, drop a Tear:

If neither move thee, turn away,

For Hogarth’s honour’d dust lies here.

• 

  Before

• 

  After

• 

  Portrait of Inigo Jones, English Architect

• 

  The Beggar’s Opera VI, 1731, Tate Britain’s version (22.5 x 30 ins.)

• 

  William Jones, the Mathematician, 1740

• 

  Hogarth’s Portrait of Captain Thomas Coram, 1740

• 

  Miss Mary Edwards 1742
• 

  The Gate of Calais (also known as, O the Roast Beef of Old England), 1749

• 

  March of the Guards to Finchley (1750), a satirical depiction of troops mustered to defend London from the 1745 Jacobite rebellion.

• 

  Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse. A self-portrait depicting Hogarth painting Thalia, the muse of comedy and pastoral poetry, 1757–1758

• 

  The Bench, 1758

• 

  Hogarth’s Servants, mid-1750s.

• 

  An Election Entertainment featuring the anti-Gregorian calendar banner “Give us our Eleven Days”, 1755.

• 

  Hogarth’s Election series, Humours of an Election, plate 2

Today is the birthday of Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (November 10, 1879 – December 5, 1931); poet. He is considered a founder of modern singing poetry, as he referred to it, in which verses are meant to be sung or chanted.

Lindsay’s private life was rife with disappointments, such as his unsuccessful courtship in 1914 of fellow poet Sara Teasdale before she married rich businessman Ernst Filsinger.

In 1924 he moved to Spokane, Washington, where he lived in room 1129 of the Davenport Hotel until 1929. On May 19, 1925, at age 45, he married 23-year-old Elizabeth Connor.

Lindsay had a serious love affair with Lucy Bates, a professional modern dancer who lived in New York City. His poem “How a Little Girl Danced” was dedicated to her.

Crushed by financial worry and in failing health, Lindsay sank into depression. He committed suicide by drinking a bottle of Lysol. His last words were: “They tried to get me; I got them first!”

I will not be a slave to my yesterday. I am creator, not a parrot.

I think that my first poetic impulse is for music; second a definite conception with the ring of the universe…

Poetry is for the inner ear

And today is the birthday of Louis le Brocquy HRHA (Dublin 10 November 1916 – 25 April 2012 Dublin); painter.  His work received many accolades in a career that spanned some seventy years of creative practice. In 1956, he represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale, winning the Premio Acquisito Internationale (a once-off award when the event was acquired by the Nestle Corporation) with A Family (National Gallery of Ireland), subsequently included in the historic exhibition Fifty Years of Modern Art Brussels, World Fair 1958.  The same year he married the Irish painter Anne Madden and left London to work in the French Midi.

Le Brocquy is widely acclaimed for his evocative “Portrait Heads” of literary figures and fellow artists, which include William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and his friends Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon and Seamus Heaney. Towards the end of his life, le Brocquy’s early “Tinker” subjects and Grey period “Family” paintings attracted attention on the international marketplace, placing le Brocquy within a very select group of British and Irish artists whose works commanded prices in excess of £1 million during their lifetimes, a group that includes Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Frank Auerbach, and Francis Bacon.

The artist’s work is represented in numerous public collections from the Guggenheim, New York to the Tate Modern, London. In Ireland, he is honoured as the first and only painter to be included during his lifetime in the Permanent Irish Collection of the National Gallery of Ireland.  Le Brocquy died on 25 April 2012 and was survived by his daughter Seyre from his first marriage (1938–1948) to Jean Stoney, and his two grandsons John-Paul and David; his second wife Anne Madden whom he married in 1958, and their two sons, Pierre and Alexis.

Le Brocquy designed the covers for the albums Lark in the Morning and The Rising of the Moon.

Le Brocquy was educated at St Gerard’s School, studied chemistry at Kevin Street Technical School in 1934, and then Trinity College Dublin.

Gallery

The Girl in grey

The picnic

Anne