Burke was wrong. In February 1792, his impassioned obituary for Joshua Reynolds called the painter “the first Englishman who added the praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his country.” John Constable disagreed.
“Hogarth was born twenty-six years before Sir Joshua,” Constable argued in June 1836 in a lecture at the Royal Institution, “and had published his engravings of A Harlot’s Progress when Reynolds was but eleven years’ old.”
Constable wondered if Burke had been misled by Horace Walpole. In Anecdotes of English Painting (1771), Walpole had assessed his late friend Hogarth as “a great and original genius,” but more “a writer of comedy with a pencil” than a painter.
Constable was right to question Walpole’s dismissal of Hogarth. But Constable was only half-right about Hogarth’s place in English painting. “It is, however, to Reynolds that the honour of establishing the English school belongs,” Constable concluded. “Hogarth had no school, nor has he ever been imitated with tolerable success.”
By weaving between English particularities, Hogarth defined the dilemmas of English style.
Yet no painter before Reynolds did more than Hogarth to establish an English identity in art. Reynolds may have opened the English school in the Grand Manner with his Royal Academy Discoursesin the 1770s, but it was Godfrey Kneller and James Thornhill who had broken the ground for that school in the early 1700s, and Hogarth who had laid its foundations in the 1730s and
