(7th February—29th April, £10)
Elbowing your way into the Hogarth exhibition at Tate Britain is like squeezing into an Arsenal match when they're playing Tottenham at home. By the time it closes on 29th April, this will be one of Tate Britain's most successful shows. Since Tate Modern was launched in 2000, its Millbank cousin has often felt like a poor relation. But not this time. Opening hours have been extended, and the crowds make it hard to scrutinise the small print—and there's a lot of it—on Hogarth's much-loved paintings.
Apparently, visitors are spending twice as long as in most Tate exhibitions: two hours instead of one. The array of words is one reason for the throng. These are pictures that you literally read, as Jenny Uglow pointed out in her fine 1998 biography Hogarth: A Life and a World. Besides the written labels, his best-known images nearly all have a pepper-pot scattering of visual symbols; some of them rather obscure, 250 years later. To pin down all the meanings, you may need to consult Uglow when you get back home, or Tate Britain's excellent catalogue, or Linda Colley's wonderful Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (of which Hogarth is a star).
The insular English love visual puzzles and pictures that tell a story, to the despair of global-minded critics, who claim good art isn't like that. Hogarth delivers these treats by the bucketful. But there's more than this to the exhibition's word-of-mouth success. Those who go seem to be looking into an old and valued mirror. The people gazing at the pictures, and the people in the pictures, look like reflections of one another.
On the evidence of the Hogarth crowds, Englishness still means whiteness. There's little sign of the vibrant multicultural society we're told so much about. Admittedly, this is pretty true of almost any high-cultural event in London: The Man of Mode at the National Theatre, The Marriage of Figaro at the Coliseum. But it's even truer of the Hogarth show.
It's as if the English are looking back towards their origins. More and more opinion poll respondents now describe themselves as English, rather than British. The concept of Britishness is unravelling. Hogarth's images were all painted or etched between 1721 and 1764, as the tussle between Englishness and Britishness was first fought out. To pause in front of them is a pictorial equivalent of sinking on to Sigmund Freud's notorious couch. Who knows what identities from the past will come welling up?
The English are great nay-sayers, great cutters-down to size. But Hogarth's mockery is evenly directed, and unsnobbish. It's undoubtedly xenophobic, but exuberantly so. If no Frenchman is given the time of day, remember that the English had good reasons for thinking themselves much better off. And as for the derision Hogarth aims at George III's prime minister, Lord Bute, and his cabal of Scottish ministers and advisers: doesn't this pleasantly pre-echo a 21st-century regime in which a Scottish-educated prime minister simultaneously had Scotsmen as chancellor of the exchequer, as home secretary, and as secretaries of defence, trade and transport? A century ago, JM Barrie wrote that, "There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make." Hogarth would have put it less suavely.
Hogarth doesn't pussyfoot. But, equally, he chooses his sneers with care. He nearly always mocks the strong. I generally much admire the Guardian's cartoonist Steve Bell, in whom I see the lineage of Hogarth (via Gillray and Cruikshank). In a recent drawing, I noticed that Bell derided Gordon Brown for banging on about "Britishness": trying to get voters south of the border to forget he's a Scot. Bell's sarcasm was fair enough. But he also worked his cartoon round into mockery of a figure he called "Johnny Sunreader." Careful, Steve, I thought. The Sun is read by about 17 per cent of the population: eight or nine times as many people as the Guardian. Left-wing snobbery is as unappealing as that of the right. Hogarth himself, like Cobbett and Orwell, was a radical with conservative yearnings.
I was uplifted by the exhibition: an occasion for warmth and fellow-feeling. Self-indulgent? I think not. More, perhaps, a way to see ourselves as others see us. The show came to London after a triumphal stint in Paris; it moves on to Barcelona. Till then, in unique profusion, here are Hogarth's timely and luxuriant layers of meaning—to reflect on, and be reflected in.
