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THE SHRIMP GIRL.-FROM THE PAINTING BY WILLIAM HOGARTH IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON.

THE SHRIMP GIRL.

IT is a pity that the “Shrimp Girl" cannot be made the heroine of the

legend which depicts sturdy, pugnacious Hogarth as coming to the rescue of a lowly beauty in a London street, soundly thrashing her tormentor, perhaps one of the young rakes of the "Hell-fire Club," and triumphantly walking off with the tearful fair one, who afterward sat as the model for several of his pictures. But the legend itself is a dubious one, and those who accept it make the heroine the drummer girl in Hogarth's "Southwark Fair." Yet the "Shrimp Girl" belonged to a very similar class, and as she is presented here she is a reality-as exact a type of London eighteenth-century street life as her sisters, "the descendants of Orange Moll," who offered their golden fruit at the theatres as in the "Laughing Audience," "plucking the beaux by the sleeves, and simulating a pleased interest in their bald chat," or as the buxom milkmaid, carrying her pail upon her head, whose resonant call pierces the ears of "The Enraged Musician," or as the apple-woman flattered by roistering gallants at Covent Garden. This is not a painting from chic, a "made-up" picture of a pretty model, but it is what the artist saw, and it is now a page of history. No chance to study character or customs escaped him. Every face which attracted him he sketched at once with a few swift strokes of his pencil, or on his thumb-nail if there were no paper. And it was in this way no doubt that the "Shrimp Girl" came to be handed down

She appears in none of his famous compositions, like "The Rake's Progress" and "Mariage à la Mode," and although a lurking moral or satire is suspected in everything painted by this Aristophanes of the brush, here is a picture painted for love of a handsome, sparkling face. If such a face in those days were unlikely to prove a happy possession for a shrimp girl, it is for others to supply the shadows. The painter's colors are clear and bright.

The French are never weary of telling us that Hogarth was essentially a moralist painter, while Reynolds and Gainsborough, his contemporaries in art, although his juniors in years, were artists in the true sense of the word. All that can be said of Hogarth's "story-telling," his heavy, sombre manner, and weak points in color and drawing, may be granted without affecting his pre-eminent rank as a satirist, or the fact that he also painted "for art's sake," as in the "Shrimp Girl," which is doubly interesting because it illustrates a phase of Hogarth's art commonly little recognized.

Yet it would seem that little is left to be said of an artist who, in addition to the industrious crowd of commentators and cataloguers, has had so brilliant a band of eulogists as Lamb, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Thackeray, and in later years Sala and Austin Dobson. The London in which the "Shrimp Girl" lived, and of which Thackeray wrote with such intimate understanding, was well worth knowing, and one can sympathize with Dobson when he says: "It would be a pleasant task to loiter for a while in that passed-away

London of Hogarth, of Fielding, of Garrick-that London of John Rocque's famous Map of 1746, when cits' had their country boxes' and 'gazeebos' at Islington and Hackney, and fine gentlemen their villas at Marylebone and Chelsea, when duels were fought in the 'fields' behind the British Museum, and there was a windmill at the bottom of Rathbone Place. We should find the Thames swarming with noisy watermen, and the streets with trotting Irish chairmen; we should see the old dusky oil lamps lighted feebly with the oil that dribbled on the 'Rake' when he went to court, and the great creaking signs that obscured the sky, and sometimes toppled on the heads of his Majesty's lieges underneath. He gives us unromanced and unidealized 'the form and pressure,' the absolute details and accessories, the actual mise en scène, of the time he lived in. But he has done much more than this. He as peopled his canvas with vivid types of the more strongly marked actors in that cynical and sensual, brave and boastful, corrupt and patriotic age."

Like Hogarth's portraits of Peg Woffington and Garrick, the painting of the "Shrimp Girl" is not dated. It may be roughly ascribed to about the middle of the eighteenth century, for the picture appears to have been left in the artist's studio at his death in 1764. At least the picture, then entitled "Shrimps!" was in the possession of Mrs. Hogarth in 1782, when the first engraving after it was made. This was an engraving in stipple by Bartolozzi, and the result is unsatisfactory, although nearly everything which

| Hogarth painted lends itself readily to engraving. As Nichols said, however, the chief characteristic of this face is spirit rather than delicacy, and Bartolozzi, who, of course, was an engraver on metal, would have done better to work in line than in stipple. The publication line reads, "Engraving from a sketch in oil by William Hogarth in the possession of Mrs. Jane Hogarth, published by her 1782." The size of the painting is two feet one inch high by one foot eight inches wide. After various changes of ownership the picture was purchased at the Leigh Court sale in 1884, for two hundred and fifty-six guineas, and added to the National Gallery at the same time with Botticelli's "Assumption" and Poussin's "Calling Abraham." As we know, the details, the white cap, dark cloth over the head, and broad wicker tray with the little metal measure, and heap of shrimps covered with sea-weed, are all true to the time. As to the face, with its clear sparkling eyes, firmly modelled features, full lips, and strong white teeth, it will be felt that Sala should have included it in the list of pretty faces painted by Hogarth which he compiled to answer Nichols's assertion that Hogarth was "an analyzer, not a painter of beauty." Yet it was Hogarth who painted both this piquant beauty, whose red lips, let us hope, were not often stained by Billingsgate slang, and that "pretty milkmaid" whom Thackeray calls "such a girl as Steele charmingly described in the Guardian a few months before this date, singing under Mr. Ironside's window in Shire Lane her pleasant carol of a May morning."

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