For six months in 2025, Hogarth’s House in Chiswick is hosting a wonderful exhibition in collaboration with St Mary’s University in West London. It’s a long story, but after I was asked if I could lend an eighteenth century violin things got complicated and before long I was up to my neck in the delightful task of sourcing musical collections to compliment the exhibition followed by a complimentary film sponsored by Research England as part of the Royal Academy of Music’s contribution to the Knowledge Exchange program, and in collaboration with English Heritage at the neighbouring Chiswick House, Lord Burlington’s spectacular showcase of Neo-Classical architecture. The film is here, but so is a tour of the virtual exhibition that I was able to muster surrounding the theme of Hogarth’s Enraged Musician.
FILM WHEN DONE
William Hogarth is best known for his comedic paintings and engravings, and on the face of it the satirical look at ordinary life seems to be a complete rejection of the fantastical Neoclassical ideas that were happening just meters from his door at Burlington’s Chiswick House. Lord Burlington became the focal figure of Neo-Classical architecture following his publication of Vitruvius Britannicus published in three volumes between 1715 and 1725, yet Hogarth’s own 1753 Analysis of Beauty was a serious treatise that underlined his committement to the qualities of classical form and Renaissance painting as the foundations upon which he could build his satirical compositions. Hogarth’s move to Chiswick in 1749 confirms his position irrevocably within the Burlington orbit – one cannot travel from the direction of London to Chiswick House without passing his house immediately before entering Burlington’s estate. Equally, examples of Analysis of Beauty, although taken from his entire artistic experience focus on those found within Burlington’s accumulation at Chiswick House, so close to where he worked: The worlds of Burlington’s high aesthetic and Hogarth’s satire were inexorably linked.
HOGARTH AND MUSIC
Read More: Chiswick House: A musical space and a Temple to Apollo?
The narrative of Burlington’s villa, Chiswick House is to a large part clear. During his Grand Tour of Italy in 1719 he developed his passion for the architecture of Andrea Palladio which inspired the form of this building as a villa similar to the many villas that Palladio had built in his native Vicenza. Working through his designs, the Villa Almerico whose plans were published in Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture (1570) provides the closest footprint to Chiswick House.
The Villa Pisani at Bagnolo introduces the idea of Diocletian Windows (see below) that we see in the Villa Pisani at Bagnolo that feature in the tholobate (the ‘drum’ below the cupola), and in turn this is one of the many decorative elements that emerge out of the fourth of Palladio’s books on Architecture, taking inspiration from his studies of Ancient Roman buildings, in this case the colossal public baths of Diocletian obsessively documented by Palladio which seem to inspire so many of the small details in Chiswick House.
Whilst Burlington’s conception of Chiswick House seems to be exclusively styled as a villa, the idea of the building as a kind of temple is implicit especially within a basis in Palladio’s works, for the fourth of his books on architecture provides the clear lineage to the temples of Ancient Rome. The Upper Tribune (octagonal hall at the centre of the building) is most directly informed by the Temple of Vesta, itself with a cupola resembling the Pantheon on the same smaller scale of Chiswick House…
Likewise the coffering of the interior of the dome takes its reference from Palladio’s Temple of Maximitus, with scaling that is dervived from the concrete ceiling of the Pantheon.
Hence, in reaching for the influences for Chiswick House, Burlington, William Kent his architect, and their circle were as influenced by Palladio’s first book of original designs for the villas of Vicenza as they were the direct legacy of the temples of Ancient Rome directed by Palladio. The question that arises out of this architecture is to what extent the villa was deliberately synonymous with the function of a temple, indeed the presence of only one domestic room – a state bedroom – in the original setting out of the floorplan is an anomaly for the residential nature of a villa, preserving a temple-like aspect to the building.
Burlington’s ambition was to bring all of the arts together under one roof. There are galleries dedicated to painting, others to sculpture, a study for the purpose of architecture whilst the building housed a library giving significance to the literary arts. There is no obvious space for music within the building, but the acoustics of the building mean that any kind of sound production, be it musical or the spoken word has the capacity to resound throughout the interior. We found during the filming for this project that the tribune served as an acoustic space of itself and playing inside this area allowed music to travel into the adjoining rooms, but at the same time there seemed to be better places within the architectural space that refined the sound, but with everything interconnected it had the effect of making the whole interior into an interconnected acoustic space.
We know that another result of Burlington’s visit to Rome in 1719 was the commissioning of a plaster-cast of the Apollo Belvedere, celebrated as the most beautiful sculpture of antiquity. This cast survives – now at the Sir John Soane Museum, but it was Burlington’s intention to display this at Chiswick House.
The location of the statue at Chiswick House is not recorded, though given it’s colossal size and the necessity of a plinth of sclae, the only place to seriously consider it would be in the Tribune making it the centrepiece of the entire architectural endeavour as I have illustrated below.
The presence of Apollo conjecturally at the centre of the building in a space that has remarkable concordance to Rome’s Temple of Vesta contributes to the idea that the identities as villa and temple are entirely congruent. As we explore the original fabric and furnishings of Chiswick House we see the repeated iconography of Apollo, of his twin-sister Diana depicted as the face of the Apollo Belvedere in feminine form, and of Apollo’s daughters, the Muses, so that even with the absence of the Apollo Belvedere plaster-cast, the repeated imagery derived from it over and over again. Therefore we do not necessarily need to see this central sculpture to understand the reverence to Apollo, especially with different galleries representing each of the arts, however, the likeness of the marble sculptural carvings, stucco embellishments and the furniture all seems determinedly referential back to the antique prototype of the Apollo Belvedere. The abundance of this material adds great weight to the idea that the plaster-cast copy was to be encountered within the central space (the tribune) of the building where it reaches out equally to all of the galleries with their attendant representations of the arts.
With all of this in mind, it is inconceivable that music is not firmly implanted in the architectural imagination of the place – Apollo himself was the greatest of all musicians of ancient myth, and this may explain why there is no identifiable music room, because that would have the effect of isolating music as an art in of itself, as opposed to understanding it as something that comes directly from Apollo himself. If that is the case, I am struck by what seems to be my own idea (I will happily stand corrected if it isn’t) that Chiswick House relies on an intermediary prototype by Christopher Wren, and that a contributing factor to the decision to base Chiswick House on this model was due to the acoustic qualities that had already been trialed by Wren.
Christopher Wren lived on Walbrook Street in the City of London, and in consequence his parish church of St Stephen’s was of particular significance to him, not only creating a masterpiece of superlative quality (a century later, Antonio Canova is said to have marvelled at it proclaiming that “we have nothing to touch it in Rome”), but as a means of experimenting with ideas that he would eventually incorporate into other works including St Paul’s Cathedral. He built the chuech between 1672 and 1678. Although unprepossessing from the exterior as a result of it’s urban location, the interior is an astonishing example of neo-Palladianism, built on a similar square foundation, extended into an oblong so that the form of a crucifix is inhabited within it. The church has comparisons as a prototype for St Paul’s Cathedral, and has a striking similarity to the public bath-house of Diocletian, large enough to have a triforium mounted on imposing internal colonades – elements that would serve as prototypes for St Paul’s Cathedral.
For Wren the builder of churches, the concept of auditus or auditories, in which his churches were acoustically formed so that everyone would see and hear themselves as part of the congregation was a central philosophy of his architecture. Within this, St Stephen’s is the amongst most ambient of all his churches in terms of acoustics and it is clear that this was the architectural imperative that governed his design. There is a side-note to add to this, that in 1676, the year that Wren began work on the library of Trinity College Cambridge, a lay clerk in the college chapel, Thomas Mace proposed an idealised music room in his Musick’s Monument that follows a similar form, even using the Wren-like term of auditors for his intended audience (this is not the last of the seemingly casual intersections between the lives of these two men).
Christopher Wren and Thomas Mace had spent the 1670s idealising the auditory or auditus for the purpose of music and the spoken world, arriving at ideals remarkably similar to Palladio’s villas that Burlington focussed on for prototype for Chiswick House. I don’t think that this is a coincidence, for of all the Palladian prototypes that Burlington could have opted for, his eventual choice was a proven acoustic space. Whatever Chiswick House does to attend to the visual arts of sculpture and painting, and as important as its library was for representing the literary arts, when we view it through the precedent of St Stephen’s Walbrook, it is architecturally an auditory in which music and the spoken word were just as vital to the experience that it it was built for. Thus it serves all of the arts as a Temple to Apollo, and I believe it to be a space in which sound played great importance for the sences. The auditory experiences of music or recitation of poetry and literature were as equal elements of the arts as the painting, the sculpture and the fabric of the building itself.
Read More: The Enraged Musician (1741): Rethinking the image through the eyes of Hogarth’s rivalry with Burlington
In Hogarth’s time rhetoric was satirical, savage and brutal. From English theatre of Thomas Shadwell, through the writings from Dryden, to Ned Ward and Alexander Pope, or the battle of Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum – the contest between George Frederick Handel and Giovanni Bononcini, the idea of a no holds barred use of satire to make personal attacks was simply the manner of things in the decades either side of 1700. In the contest of public discourse no satirical opportunity went too far. What may seem like enmity and libel was often nothing more than an act akin to the dramatic discourse played out between fictional characters on the London stage. Savage rhetoric, to put it simply, was a sport in which Hogarth was an Olympian. Hence when we think of a rivalry between Hogarth and Burlington, we have to frame it in the context of the time and the wider cultural context. Burlington and the ideals that he represented may have suffered Hogarth’s punches without sparring back (he was an aristocrat, so perhaps expected to hold himself above such things), but that is not to suggest that there was real-life hostility between Hogarth and Burlington. When we read Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty with an eye to the painting and sculpture that Burlington had accumulated, we see how deeply reverent he was to Burlington’s artistic values and how much he regarded the good taste of them as central to his creation of comic paintings that stood their ground as high art. When in later life, Hogarth’s prints lost value, he recieved a pension from Burlington’s Royal Academy of Arts, an institution one may assume he reviled if we take his satire at face value.
In this light, the grip of rivalry is evidenced as early as 1723 when Hogarth published The Bad Taste in Town, where we find the gate to Burlington House in Piccadilly inscribed as the Academy of Art with a statue of Burlington’s favourite architect William Kent at the top of a pediment that places him above Raphael and Michelangelo. Whilst most of the engraving is dedicated to a panoply of criticisms about the dominance of foreign musicians and artists at the direct expense of Englishness, Hogarth provides a more subtle criticism of Burlington’s promotion of Kent’s Neo-Palladian ideas as the epitomy of The Bad Taste in Town to which Hogarth directs his ire, perhaps – in contradistinction to “Shakespeare’s or Ben Jonson’s Ghost” because in Kent Hogarth saw the complete adoption of foreign styles by a native-born Englishman. In parallel the image criticises The Harlequin Doctor Faustus, John Rich’s Italianate Commedia del’Arte that served as a departure from the traditions of the English stage: The barrow of “waste paper for shops” contains works of WIlliam Congreve, John Dryden, Thomas Otway, William Shakespeare, Joseph Addison and Anthony Pasquin (the later substituted for Ben Jonson in later state prints).
Towards the end of Hogarth’s life in 1762 the artist Paul Sandby – an artist whose style owed such an extraordinary debt to Hogarth that the two are easily mistaken – took to capitalising on the way that Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty placing value in the elements of Burlington’s world that contradicted his social realism, exposing it in savage rhetorical terms as a kind of hypocrisy. In The Butifyer, A Touch Upon the Times Sandy frames Hogarth, and below him the symbol of the line of beauty drawn upon an easle below him, as selling out to Burlington’s idealised world. Hogarth is illustrated with a bucket containing his pension (from Burlington) whilst accusations of whitewashing and beautifying Burlington and the Continental tastes of the English aristocracy(butifyer is just as much an allusion to buttocks as it sounds today) are forcibly put forward.
In Jeremy Barlow’s study of music in Hogarth’s paintings and engravings, entitled The Enraged Musician he identifies the identity of the violinist in the eponymous print as Pietro Castrucci. More on this presently, but we should be careful to think of Castrucci as simultaneously a proxy for his patron, Lord Burlington, and a representative of the values that drew Burlington to enticing the violinist to leave Italy for England. This idea of the proxy is just as evident in The Bad Taste of Town where the statue of KNT, i.e. the Architect William Kent is seen at the apex of the pediment at the entrance of Burlington House. Hence when I suggest that a different Italian painter brought to England by Burlington becomes the focus of Hogarth’s satirical attention, it is not because of a wish to specifically target the Venetian Sebastiano Ricci, but an acknowledgement that he stood as proxy for Burlington in the sphere of painting, as Kent was his architectural proxy and Castrucci was for music. Nevertheless, Hogarth’s reaction to Ricci is a subtle one, it even demonstrates a serious attentiveness to Ricci’s compositions and his standing in a tradition of Venetian artists descended from Titian, but it is one that can easily go unobserved to the general observer. To the connoisseur intimate with Ricci’s studio in England and his commissions for Burlington the comparisons are thinly disguised, and hence there is both a general level of satire and a level intimate comedy intended for a selected audience. Sebastiano Ricci died in 1734, so the continuing criticism of his work years after his death further supports the impersonal nature of the satire.
Once we understand this it becomes incumbent upon us to study the London paintings of Sebastiano Ricci if we are to understand Hogarth’s language. The architectural assemblage of buildingings in The Bad Taste in Town mirrors Ricci’s Prodigal Son. Presently we shall see how much the composition of The Enraged Musician is indebted to other Titianesque works completed in England by Ricci.
Once we have satisfied ourselves with Hogarth’s parody of Ricci’s Esther before Ahasuerus we end up with a firmer interpretetation of this part of The Bad Taste of Town as the celebration specifically of George Frederick Handel’s contribution – very likely the periwigged gentleman looking from the window, identified as “H… …” is Handel whose masquerade of Esther, based on the English text of John Arbuthnot and Alexander Pope was performed in 1718. The tension between the English masque, and the Italian opera is further portrayed within this vignette as we see King Ahasuerus raking up the coins given by the Israelites as a manner of transaction fitting of opera, rather than the salvation of the Jewish people through Esther’s moral virtue: Esther was never an opera, it had been devised as a masque or chamber-drama for the Duke of Chandos with its first performance in 1718, undergoing revisions over the 1720s, becoming a full Oratorio – the first English Oratorio published in 1731. The date of The Bad Taste in Town is 1724. However, this commentary is not simply Hogarth’s satire on the differences between the English and Italian musical forms, because his entire premise is based firmly on the knowledge that between 1720 and 1724 Ricci, Burlington’s Venetian painter was exploring an Italianate imagery of Esther fit for the opera stage.
This suggests intimacy with Ricci’s studio and other elements of Burlington’s world. I am struck by another concordance between Diana and Endymion which has been in-situ within the fabric of Chiswick House since 1729 when compared to the depiction of Diana Hogarth’s Actresses Dressing in a Barn from 1738. Ricci painted numerous versions of different paintings, so it is entirely possible that Hogarth was referencing a different example in a different place, but in the light of what I have written above about the centrality of Apollo and Chiswick House, as well as the duality of Apollo and Diana represented in sculptural forms at Chiswick with a reflected duality in the present in Hogarth’s engravings (Apollo with his Helios is the only male figure in the barn, attentive with his bow to drying Diana’s stockings with the heat of a dragon) I think that there is an elevated likelihood that these classical figures served as a critique of Burlington’s Chiswick vision.
When we examine Hogarth’s engravings in early state versions, the economy of shading beautifully highlights the central character of Diana, expressing the deliberate intentions of the engraving. Once we have seen this treatment of figures as it most closely relates to the engraver’s intentions, we are able to question a much more subtle figure that appears at the centre of The Enraged Musician, published three years later in 1741.
To the ordinary observer the appearance of a maid with a basket above her head is the clearest citiation of a series of printsby the artist Marcellus Laroon, entitled The Cryes of the City of London, first published in 1688 and enjoying continued popularity through Hogarth’s lifetime. One could simply imagine that Hogarth’s ideology was to restore the busy urban scenes to which such figures belonged and aside from inviting us to wonder what other parallels exist between Laroon’s engravings and those of Hogarth, such an analysis seems to be complete in itself. However, it is striking to see early state engravings of Actresses Dressing in a Barn and The Enraged Musician together, to understand the fairly direct iconography of Diana and Apollo in the latter, and to see how Hogarth deliberately illuminates the maid as the central subject matter within The Enraged Musician. For the connoisseur there is more to see.
This is complicated by Hogarth’s preparatory grissaille painting of An Enraged Musician in the Ashmolean Museum proves interesting to us at this point. It either demonstrates that the maid was an afterthought, or equally (more likely, if we think of “Diana amongst the actresses” as I like to call it), a study for the background at a point that Hogarth had already settled his intentions for the central figure.
At this point I am looking for a similar meaning within the portrayal of the maid, and having the same kind of appreciation of the Apollo Belvedere that any connoisseur who examined it within the context of Chiswick House, I begin to see significant similarities in pose. All the same, Apollo is male, she is female, Apollo and the maid are both idealised beauties but of contrasting types, evidently engraved with the greatest love and care. I may not be going too far out of the bounds of reality to suggest that the basket on her head represents the plinth beneath Apollo’s feet. We could even estimate it’s height – perhaps – by making a comparison?
Everything is in reverse. Am I going too far in my analysis? Not at all, for it is Burlington in the first place who represents a kind of gender fluidity in the personage of Apollo, through the representation of his twin sister Diana as an identically androginous – but female -variation on the idealised facial features of the Apollo Belvedere. This duality had already been explored in Actresses changing in a barn by Hogarth in 1738. If the reader may need a little more convincing than just looking at the pose taken by the maid, it is because of the multiple layers of evidence that add to this. Wait a while, and see how the evidence evolves… then you may see how a female Apollo appears as a critique specifically directed towards the iconography of Burlington’s Chiswick House.
The musical chaos of Hogarth’s Enraged Musician shares an underlying theme with the Bacchanalian paintings of Titian, which had become a focus of Sebastiano Ricci’s efforts. He made repeated compositions around the theme of The Bacchanal in honour of Pan, not least as the basis for the ceiling painting of the banqueting hall of Burlington House in Piccadilly. Of the examples painted in England, the version that is now in the Galleriea dell’Accademia in Venice seems to be the one that provoked Hogarth’s response for there are compositional parallels in the distribution of figures across the image, with the maid’s basket presenting substituting the great urn beneath which Pan is dancing.
It is not clear to me whether the oboe player in Hogarth’s grissale is intended to resemble the human playing an aulos to the left of Ricci’s painting, but the markedly hooked nose, sharpened eyebrows and pointed beard of the oboe player in the final engraving adopts the features of a satyr as depicted by Ricci following a tradition reaching back to Titian and to classical antiquity. In locating the satyr Marsyas as part of a double-group with the maid Apollo, Hogarth invokes one of the greatest contests of classical myth, and to the 18th century viewer confirms the maid as representing Apollo because of the manner in which the two characters are intertwined in history and iconography. Apollo the god is seen as transcendent, not even having to demonstrate his/her musical skills. Whilst Marsyas with his oboe adds to the kind of cacaphony that enrages the musician.
This is not the only place that Hogarth is – ahem – a piss-take of Ricci. Take the little boy exposing himself, reminiscent of Ricci’s Bachannal in honour of Pan, and Titian’s earlier prototype, the Bachannal of the Andrians.
Another confirmation of the Myth of Marsyas and Apollo is the knife-grinder to the left of the maid, for according to mythology the fate of Marsyas for challenging the Gods was to be flayed alive. In 1759 Hogarth tackled the subject of Marsyas and Apollo for a second time in a highly classical tondo study. Here again we see the moment – the judgement of the Muses / the enraging of the musician has come to pass and the executioner sharpens his blade in preparation for the final act.
Whilst I think by now we can be secure in the identity of Apollo because of the knife-grinder and Marsyas, there are inconsistencies in the mythological portrayal of the particular myth of the contest between these two mythical figures, for whilst the knife-grinder is making ready the blades to skin Marsyas alive, Apollo seems utterly content and in the context of Marsyas’s music. This is not the scene of great violence that we find in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, rather a tale of harmony between mortals and the gods, something that is remarkably relevant to Hogarth’s manner of comic painting. I will explore this a little further, but I can’t help but see a conflation of myths that supports Hogarth’s politics, for the violinist in the window – shown to be Pietro Castrucci the Italian musician under the personal patronage of Burlington serves as his proxy. I have looked at this later in this blog, with reference to Marcellus Laroon’s Cryes of London, and already made the point that given the obvious citiation of the maid, we should ask what else is derived from Laroon’s engravings. but if we question the reasons that Castrucci / Burlington is holding his ears, and perhaps indulge in the shape of the bow, we may be observing the poor judgement of King Midas, whose decision in a contest between Apollo and Pan had cursed him with the ears of an ass.
In suggesting that the violinist, though identified as Castrucci serves to offer as Burlington’s proxy, I think one of the easily-overlooked features of The Engraged Musician becomes an all too obvious commentary on Burlington’s neo-classicism once we have analysed these narratives. In the bottom left corner of The Enraged Musician we see a collection of bricks used as toy blocks to create a square architectural structure. When we have Chiswick House in mind, the satire upon Burlington’s architecture becomes obvious. Stones or broken bricks on the ground could likely represent the stone edifices of sculpture in the gardens, and a row of saplings, reflect the tree-lined avenues that came right up to the house as it was originally conceived leading to the artificial lake or in Hogarth’s case the puddle of urine. To those who were familiar with the geography of Chiswick House the satire is immediate critiquing the artificial landscape as much as the Palladian architecture, although for those who had never seen it, the bricks are just the charming product of a child’s creativity.
Hogarth did not move to Chiswick for another six years after The Enraged Musician, but when he did, his choice of brick-built home seems to fulfil the comparisons that he made in The Enraged Musician, suggesting a deliberate contest between his own conceptualisation of social realism and the classical idealism promoted by Burlington.
THE VIRTUAL EXHIBITION
Read More: The Burlington Apollo Violin by Thomas Smith and John Boson, London circa 1730-40
A violin by Thomas Smith and John Boson
London, circa 1730-40
Labelled: Made by Thomas Smith / at ye Harp & Hautboy in Pickadilly
This violin was made by Thomas Smith sometime around 1730-40 in collaboration with the carver John Boson. At the time, Smith was one of the most promient violin makers in London working at the Harp and Hautboy in Piccadilly. This was both close to Burlington’s Piccadilly residence, and to the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket, a focus of London’s musical world. Despite his importance we know relatively little about Smith. He was the junior partner to Peter Wamsley a violin maker who received a Royal Appointment to the Frederick Prince of Wales. This appears to have passed to Smith after Wamsley retired in 1741, converting in 1760 to the royal warrant of Prince Edward, Duke of York (the third son of the prince) who died in 1767. Thereafter Frederick’s first son, now King George III conferred upon him the status of Instrument Maker to the Royal Household in 1768.
John Boson (c. 1705, d. 1743) enjoyed the patronage of Burlington, establishing his workshop on lands that belonged to him in Saville Row behind Piccadilly, and also had the patronage of the Prince of Wales. He is also an elusive figure for he is principally connected to the work of William Kent, yet he died relatively young, and there are very few objects that can be unequivocally attributed to him. At Chiswick House receipts from the building work demonstrate his involvement but there are significant questions as to what he actually carved. Some experts have suggested the capitals of the pillars on the portico which have a remarkable likeness to the engraved renderings in Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture. For what it is worth, my money would be on the exquisite Cararra marble fireplaces with figures of Apollo or Diana with cherub supports as principal amongst his work for Chiswick House. The Caryatid cherubs remind me of the similar supporting figures on his funerary monument to the Duchess of Richmond that bears his signature, showing an ability in stone carving equal to that which is found in Chiswick House. Meanwhile, the altar carved for the Royal Naval Chapel at Greenwich contains a row of gilded angels that closely resemble the feminine form of the goddess Diana as derived from the Apollo Belvedere prototype. We see this elsewhere on the consul tables made for Chiswick House which we know to be by Boson, so even though it is incredibly difficult to attribute anything to Boson, I think there is a broad field of objects that indicate his hand in these particular elements. When visiting Chiswick House, I simply cannot overstate the elegance of these fireplaces. Perhaps Burlington was conscious that these were the single element of the entire building that exhibited unapologetic modernity, without appropriate prototypes, creating the need to present them in the finest possible form to restate his neo-Palladian imperative for modernity to rival antiquity.
Of all of Boson’s work, it is the altar at Greenwich that presents an Apollo-derived Caryatid angel that resembles the carved head of the violin, and the stylistic similarities of the face are remarkable, though for the feminine hair we have to call on the Diana sculptures in Chiswick House for the direct prototype. The positioning of the head on the top of the pegbox even shares something of the Caryatid posture as if supporting a great weight above it, serving as a way of resolving the iconography onto so unconventional a medium.
When I first happened upon the violin and made the identification of the Apollo Belvedere for the head, I already knew about John Boson because of his remarkable relationship with one of Garrick’s actresses, Mary Norman, daughter of the instrument maker Barak Norman, and in that vein I was already well acquainted with his work. Mary’s history, and Boson’s will that provides a legal contract equal to marriage to an actress is one of the most remarkable documents about the lives of actresses in 18th century London, and I have written a blog here about it. This drew me to a far more reliable source of Boson’s work at the chapel of the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, in which a series of Caryatid angels support the altar. Though angels, these too have the androgynous and highly sculpted form of the Apollo Belvedere. However, with the violin, the identity is certainly Apollo because it has the same hair tied above his forehead – man bun, if you will, as a consequence of being an archer in need of a clear aim, and what looks like a Victorian baby’s bonnet is the helios from when he is represented as the sun-god (see Smith’s tradecard above, or the helios of Apollo in the Actresses dressing in a barn). In understanding the Apollo prototype for both the violin and the broader decorative elements these posed a question about Boson’s ability to capture the features of the Apollo Belvedere in the round, as he achieved with the violin. As I have discussed in an earlier blog about this violin, we come to the conclusion that it needed more than the two-dimensional engravings available at the time, and require the carver to see the three-dimensional form. Boson’s only opportunity to see use the Apollo Belvedere as his prototype would have been from the plaster-cast in Chiswick House itself, and it takes the form in a compelling way. The only weakness, is that from the front it lacks the shoulders making the head seem ridiculously out of proportion, but with a more criticial eye he has been tied to the proportions of the original: From the angles where the head would be perceived by the auditor there is no fault in the carving or proportion. Hence, whatever the circumstances of this violin and its intended use, it is unquestionable that it is conceived in the context of decorative schema of Chiswick House as it adopted the identity of a Temple of Apollo, at which point logic rather favours it as being somehow inseparable as an integral element of the auditory space that Burlington intended.
You can read much more about this violin here, but there is a rather nice conclusion to this, for Jeremy Barlow’s book The Enraged Musician makes the point that the violinist in the picture is the Italian violinist Pietro Castrucci, an Italian musician so patronised by Burlington that he is in effect Burlington’s proxy within the image. He died in Dublin of Malaria in 1746 and his depiction in the Enraged Musician is the closest to his only known portrait. Here is a performance of his Sonata Op1 No.12, dedicated to Burlington, played in Chiswick House with the Burlington Apollo violin.
Read More: Cog Rattle
A Cog Rattle (Gas Rattle)
West Coast of the United States, World War Two era.
Unmarked.
The Enraged Musician has multiple layers of contrast. For the sake of this blog I have only gone into the things that I have seen that seem pertinent to my narrative of rivalry and contradiction with Burlington’s high culture, but these are the subtle private jokes that existed between Hogarth’s immediate circle, and are less relevant to the overwhelming popularity of the engravings. One of the most endearing vignettes is the little girl horrified as the boy urinates in front of her, and in her hand we see a wooden ratchet rattle. Instruments of this design go back thousands of years to ancient Greece and Rome as the Krotalon or Crotalus and ancient Judaic times as the Gragger, and have been used in early Christianity in lieu of church bells. In more recent times in England they were known as football rattles until they were banned from stadiums in the 1980s because they are such an efficient way of making an enraging noise. In more modern times huge numbers of these were made during the First World War as a way of sounding the alarm in the trenches. In the United States of America during the Second World War where there was a perceived threat of gas attack along the Pacific West Coast, an enormous number were handmade for Civil Defence in case of aerial gas attack by Japanese forces. Because these American ones were made locally from place to place, they come in all kinds of sizes and varieties inevitably we can find examples that coincidentally resemble the rattle in The Enraged Musician. This WW2 American example is just like the one held by the little girl two hundred years before. Whilst it appears in the Enraged Musician that the violinist in the window is responding to the street musician playing an oboe, if we see him through the lens of Apollo and Marsyas, his music is the most beautiful of the modern world. Instead then, it is the cog-rattle that is only capable of cacaphony that would drown out his music and enrage him.
I would love to credit Hogarth with a deeply historical reference here, to the use of the Gragger at Jewish Purim, or to the archaeological evidence of the instrument in ancient times, but I think this is a brilliant case of where you can read too much into an image. These were popular toys throughout the centuries, and simply the loudest and most obnoxious and unmusical sound-producer that an eighteenth-century child could own.
Read More: The Lamentable Ballad of the Ladies Fall & John Playford’s Introduction to the Skill of Musick
John Playford
An Introduction to the Skill of Music, 18th edition, London, printed by William Pearson for Benjamin Sprint, 1724.
A collection of old ballads. : Corrected from the best and most ancient copies extant. With introductions historical, critical, and humorous published by Ambrose Philips in three volumes in 1723 includes The Lamentable Ballad of a Lady’s Fall, sung to an older tune In Peascod Time. From the sixteenth century onwards ballad singers and musicians knew a repertoire of English tunes and different lyrics would be written to them at different times according to the politics and events of the time. Hogarth has used this ballad in a number of clever ways that ask questions about the composition.
The immediate response is that the juxtaposition is between Pietro Castrucci, perhaps the most refined Italian musician in London and the low status of the ballad singer offering a simple explanation of why the musician would be enraged in Hogarth’s engraving. Certainly the woman in ragged clothes and ill health would appear to be the ‘fallen woman’. The way that the boy is urinating freely, by comparison to the bandages around the woman’s head may relate to the difficulty in urinating that was a common symptom of syphillis. (There is a good reference, likening the boy to the urinating soldier in A Rake’s Progress who is reading an advert for Dr Rock’s cure for syphilis here: Hogarth deconstructed). … is the child Castrucci’s? At least the violinist represents the gentry within a moralising message about prositution, repeating the morals of the tavern scene of A Rake’s Progress that Hogarth had painted and published a few years before.
Yet I think there are yet more things to be taken from this discourse within the image, which becomes easier to understand when we relate this when we understand that the mythical Apollo and Marsyas are at the centre of the composition. The ballad sheet is being held out for the oboe player Marsyas to play from, and instead of containing the lyrics of the ballad, it contains the musical notation for him to read from. For the most part, ballad songs were learned by heart and transmitted orally from musician to musician, which is why there are thousands of ballad lyrics just like the one above that contain no music notation but just an instruction of what tune should be played (The website, 100Ballads.org is brilliant at investigating the hundred most significant of these tunes). Hence to the contemporaneous observer the ridcule of the notated ballad sheet without words would have been evident as the opposite of what should be. This shows that the oboe player, however lowly he looks is an art-musician who understands notation and lacks a repertoire of ballad tunes, just as Marsyas was the greatest musician of the mortal world in classical mythology. If this is the case, what is actually going on? In ancient Greek myth about the contest of Apollo and Marsyas, we are left with a paradox that Marsyas played with the greatest beauty, but the judges proclaimed Apollo the winner since he could sing and play at the same time making him the most complete musician. This paradox seems to have been apparent amongst the Renaissance and later interpreters of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, so perhaps a union of Apollo and Marsyas would render the most complete and most beautiful music. Hence, if we understand the lyrics of The Lamentable Ballad of the Ladies Fall as the story of a woman of high status who fell in love with someone of lower status then if we consider the maiden as the god Apollo in female form, then perhaps we are seeing the idealised union of Apollo and Marsyas to solve the paradox of the classical myth. If so, the violinist either as Castrucci or an emblem of Burlington’s society looks awfully like a conflation with another of Apollo’s musical contests, in which Midas disputes Apollo’s victory (deliberate conflations are all a part of the fun!). If the violinist is Burlington’s proxy, then his judgements on beauty stand to earn him a pair of asses ears as punishment.
There are a number of texts that substantiate the different ideas of the domains of practical music, and the art and science of music – what we might call folk music and classical music today, demonstrating that the definitions were much more blurred than we imagine today, but also how there was a philosophical idealisation by which all music was measured. One of the significant problems with practical music – learning by heart without musical notation was that although it was easy to play and sing tunes, if you didn’t have a theoretical grasp on harmony and other elements of music theory, it would be vastly more difficult to sing or play more complicated music. For this reason, almost a century before The Enraged Musician a London music publisher, John Playford, published An Introduction to the Skill of Musick in 1654. The work was so popular that it underwent nineteen editions up to the year 1730, and it is a very rare example in which popular ballad songs are shown in notated form, but for the purposes of teaching proficient practical musicians how familiar tunes were written down as notation in order to educate them in the science and art of music. This is the 1724 eighteeenth edition, published just one year after A Collection of Ballads from where we find The Lamentable Ballad of the Ladies Fall.
Read More: Marcellus Laroon: The Cryes of the City of London (The Bartholomew Fair Musician)
Marcellus Laroon
The Bartholomew Fair Musician
Marcellus Laroon, 1688.
The Cryes of the City of London was a collection of seventy-four drawings by Marcellus Laroon, depicting the costumes and activities of daily life in London, then the world’s largest city. These were first engraved in 1688, but became enormously popular in London, more widely in Britain, and across Europe, with several reprints and revisions by Hogarth’s time and early editions with Italian and French captions. As the century wore on, this would become the prototype for modified Cryes of London and the theme carried on into the 20th century. As artists in the early eighteenth century, the Laroon family – Marcellus (II) in particular paved the way for comic conversation pieces that were forerunners of Hogarth’s satirical style.
Much commentary has been made here and elsewhere about the apparent similarity of the young maid, in The Enraged Musician and various street vendors from The Cryes of London, and how to Hogarth’s paintings seem on one level to place familiar figures to Cryes of London into a broader environment.
If this is the case, Hogarth probably expected his clientele to be familiar with the wider themes that come from the collection of images. Knives to Grind and the Sow Gelder are both familiar to Laroon’s engravings.
This poses a question about one more figure in the engraving, the character of The Enraged Musician himself, and whether the viewer is being purposefully being drawn to make comparisons from their own knowledge of Laroon’s Cryes of London. Although Hogarth invokes the legend of the contest of Apollo and Marsyas in the central characters, we are left to believe that they have found a kind of harmony that does not exist in the myths of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Instead, the enraged musician appears to be judging them. This brings us to another of Ovid’s myths in which King Midas proved such a poor judge of music that Apollo cursed him with ears of an ass. Perhaps the Enraged musician, identifiable as Castrucci and as Burlington’s Proxy is depicted as King Midas in the moment that he is cursed, the bow in his hand echoing the shape of a donkey’s ear in a symbolism that would be clear to any viewer who knew to compare it with Laroon’s Bartholomew Fair Musician, also a string player, and this time dressed as an ass.
Read More: A violin by the painter George Romney RA (1734-1802).
A violin by George Romney
Likely made in Kendal, circa 1750-60.
George Romney (1734-1802) was amongst the next generation of British artists after Hogarth, and prospered as a portrait painter alongside Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds. Romney’s paintings are less well regarded today because he worked fast and frequently left the works unfinished for assistants to fill in the backgrounds, but in his day his speed resulted in a reputation as the most fashionable portrait painter of his day because of the huge number of people that were able to sit for his portraits.
The violin is one of just two known examples by Romney, and it was chosen for this exhibition as a juxtaposition to the Burlington Apollo violin because it represents a more intimate relationship between an artist and music than the ostentatious and public image of the arts that the Burlington Apollo violin is inevitably drawn in to. Romney played the violin from childhood, and according to his biographer had begun to experiment with violin making from childhood under the training of his cabinet-making father. Later in life he was known to keep a violin of his own making in his studio, and would play it as a means to contemplate his problems of composition of his painting. Ultimately he expressed a desire to retire to his hometown of Dalton-in-Furness and to establish it as a centre of violin making, although this never came to fruition. Amongst his contemporary painters, Thomas Gainsborough also had a fanatical interest in collecting old violins.
This violin is wonderfully autodidactic, and it seems to come from the hand of an artist who wanted to entirely rethink the lines of the violin on his own terms. Every element of the instrument is exquisitely crafted, indeed some elements such as the original fingerboard are ornamented to a degree that we rarely see on instruments made by professional makers, but to a trained eye almost every element of the violin is completely at odds with familiar traditions of violin making. Whilst many of these elements are technical and not terribly apparent, one remarkable element of making comes in the edges of the violin which are made in such a way as to give the impression of the inner dark line found on most instruments (an wooden inlay called ‘purfling’) without it actually being there. The scroll and the sides of the pegbox have no flat facets whatsoever, indeed the sides of the pegbox are formed into a soft ‘s’ shape remarkably reminiscent of the ideal curve of Hogarth’s line of beauty exposed in his Analysis of Beauty published in 1753. These elements are intended to catch the light in places and cast shadows in others so that the instrument comes alive with the continuous dancing shadows and reflections in candlelight. Hence in the ways that the violin deviates from a normal design, it forms a kind of study in chiaroscuro, a technique of painting that was central to Romney’s portraiture style and particularly a feature of his drawings. Romney and Hogarth may even have had fleeting interactions with each other, for after coming to London in 1672, in 1763 Romney moved to Charing Cross specifically to be close to Hogarth’s St Martin’s Lane Academy – Hogarth died in 1764. Some elements of his so-called “Kendal Town Hall Sketchbook” from his earliest years in London. Numerous Titianesque scenes in the sketchbook are just as likely to be observations of Sebastiano Ricci’s London works and a chiaroscuro study of the Apollo Belvedere head points strongly to Romney’s possible presence in Chiswick House (where else would he have been able to study a copy to this degree).
The violin was probably made during Romney’s time in Kendal. The reasoning for this is because of a choice of wood that is inconsistent with commercial making in London at the time, and therefore made probably around 1760. Ultimately Romney’s interest in an original ideal for the violin is not as pleasing as the Vitruvius-inspired forms of celebrated Italian violins of Amati and Stradivari. Perhaps conflicted between the originality of his own design and the beauty of these instruments, the other violin made by him retains much of this design, but is heavily embellished with the kind of Rococo relief carved decoration that we find on the furniture of Thomas Chippendale, or perhaps more significantly in many of the copperplate decorations on George Bickham’s Musical Entertainer (1737) which served as an important style-guide of their time. The resulting effect is that the beauty of the surface decoration distracts from any deficiency in the underlying design. Whilst there is a good provenance to the relief carved violin as coming from Romney’s studio and being an instrument to which he attached particular pride, this plainer and more ordinary instrument serves a more interesting purpose, and perhaps with all of the ways it casts shadows and reflects the light, it has the capacity to have served a more intimate and integrated role in Romney’s artistic process.
Read More: George Bickham’s Musical Entertainer (1727 & 1729)
The Bickham family were successful ornamental engravers working in London whose work ranged from art prints to maps and tradecards. George Bickham the elder (1684-1758) is particularly noted for The Universal Penman in which he collected samples from writing masters around London in order to create engraved examples of different kinds of business documents and to show off different styles of lettering and engraving. In 1715 he was one of the engravers, specialising in script, who contributed to Burlington’s publication of Colen Campell’s architectural tect, the Vitruvius Britannicus. George Bickham junior (1706-1771) was the author of The Musical Entertainer one of the most remarkable feats of publishing of the Eighteenth century.
The Musical Entertainer was published over two volumes in 1727 and 1729, consisting of entirely engraved songs that varied from Handel and Purcell all the way to lighter tunes and English folk songs. Each song was engraved on a copper plate, mostly embellished with pastoral scenes derived from the French Rococo style, although some of the classicised scenes seem to draw their inspiration from sources suspiciously close to the court of the Prince of Wales at Kew and specifically to Burlington’s world at Chiswick House. Hence we see classical sculpture in the form of Herms, much like those we see in the gardens of Chiswick carved by Giovanni Baptista Guelfi in some of the images – there are few places in England at the time where similar statuary would be encountered, so as occurs so often, all roads point back to Burlington’s Chiswick House, and the bucolic atmosphere of so many of the engravings provides the same idyllic fantasy that Burlington was trying to achieve in the laying out of his gardens.
Burlington’s fingerprints are firmly on the publication, for in order to defray the extraordinary costs of producing 275 engraved plates, Bickham had divvied them up, with different members of the gentry and nobility funding the production of typically four songs each. An exception to this is The Merry Gregs, Hogarth’s only contribution to the work, adapted from his engraving of a Chorus of Singers, and which honours the Society of Gregorians, a group with links to early freemasonry and suggesting he may have been a member. The first set of songs in volume one was dedicated to Lord Burlington, and the last group of songs in volume two was dedicated to his wife, suggesting that they had taken a leading role in the patronage of the project.
With any form of copper plate printing the best impressions are made early on, as the plate wears out over time. With a freshly engraved plate, a more careful printing process yields better results and it benefits from expensive high quality thick paper. For music printing of the time early editions on “Roman Paper” carried a heavy premium and given the cost of the process were often published by subscription, so that the publisher had covered their costs by upfront payments before having to outlay for the printing. Amongst the ballad sheets, On Mira’s Singing and Beauty is an early-state printing, that has been cut out of a bound edition by a later print seller. The other engraved ballad sheets on display show a myriad of worn states of the printing plate, and a variety of qualities of paper. Greyish smudges, and scratches are all evidence of copper plates being used that were far past their best. None of these were ever in book form, but are individual song sheets cheaply printed from the original plates in their thousands but because these were flimsy, for singing and playing, today they are probably rarer than the early impressions that were bound into volumes of Bickham’s Musical Entertainer.
Read More: On Mira’s Singing and Beauty: Burlington and the Jacobites.
Burlington’s fingerprint is all over Bickham’s 1728 Musical Entertainer but perhaps most visibly in the first four ballads, humbly inscribed to him, and the last of the second volume inscribed to his wife. Hence the Burlington family are first and last within the book version of the printed ballads. As we go through the pastoral scenes throughout the engravings there are constant scenes that seem in keeping with Burlington’s idyll. At Chiswick for example Burlington employed Giovanni Battista Guelfi from 1720 to 1734 in London, comissioning 33 Herm statues (half pillar, half man) for Chiswick House which seem not only to be curiously congruent, but few other places in England would have similar statuary by 1738.
In 1700 the poet and critic John Dryden published Fables, Ancient and Modern in 1700, translating the works of Ovid, Homer, Boccaccio and Chaucer, and subtly adapting them to apply to modern times. Ovid’s tale of King Cinyras and his daughter Myrahh is a complicated one in which the girl fell madly in love with her father, eventually seducing him to unwittingly sleep with her, thus – to cut a long story extremely short – her incest throws the succession of a royal lineage into dissarray.
Dryden had been a political supporter of James II and had lost his official positions as a result of the end of his reign, and this was his subtle, if provocative, analogy for a different disarray in which the fate of a woman had caused irreparable damage to the line of Stuart Succession. From one point of view, Mary Stuart’s marriage to her first cousin Prince William of Orange was sufficiently close to be considered incestuous, just as Myrahh’s relationship was to her father. Had this incest not taken place the framework that dismantled the Stuart dynasty in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 would not have existed – a tenuous, but politically expedient critique.
In the layer-upon-layer of meanings it should not be lost that the Sun-God Helios – Apollo under another identity is regarded in some versions of the myth as the cause of Myrahh’s urge to seduce her father, so there is an extent to which Burlington’s veneration of Apollo (who appears with a Helios in both Hogarth’s Actresses dressing in a barn, and in John Boson’s carving of the head of the violin), may relate to the nature of Burlington’s conceptualisation of Apollo as something of the kind of ‘singing and beauty’ that aroused a passion so great as to transgress taboos and pull a succession into turmoil. Mixing metaphors and tropes, as we see in the female Apollo of the Enraged Musician is all a part of the eighteenth-century way of commanding ancient myth.
Hence in the first verse we discover the idyll set for singing and love and in the second verse we hear about Mira’s singing and beauty as the title suggest, “Mira” drawing a similarity, being somewhere between the ancient Myrahh, and the modern Mary in pronunciation, it depends on how it leaves the mouth as you sing it.
In the third verse we hear about the act of incest, the “Savage nature” conquered, if we chose to read it so. This brings me to the final verse. “Let the Viol and Harp hang and molder till they warp” can be seen as relatively modern instruments. In the 1720s the viol was still being made in London (Barak Norman, John Boson’s prospective father-in-law was the last of the English viol makers, dying in St Paul’s Churchyard in 1724). After the English Civil War, the viol had increasingly represented a musical throwback to the age of Elizabeth I and James I and a golden period of English history to which many aspired. In a link to the ancient world, the flute (a difficult word as it has transient meanings) coupled with the ancient lyre is very much the two instruments of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, so linking Mira to King Cinyras and Myrahh. And so the worlds of the Jacobethan Golden Age, and the time of Ovid are united in the final line as “shatterd by a vocal sharp”, which when we return to the title of the song is the singing (and beauty) – the seductive qualities of Myrahh / Mira / Mary.
Singing charme ye Bless’d above;
Angels sing & Saints approve:
All we below of Heav’n can know,
Is that they both Sing and Love.
Is that they both Sing and Love.
Mira hath an Angel’s air;
Sweet her Notes, her face as fair
Vasals and Kings,
Feel when she Sings,
Charms of warbling Beauty near.
Savage Nature conquer’d lyes,
All is Wonder and Surprise,
Souls Expiring,
Hearts a fireing,
By her charming Notes & Eyes.
Let the Viol and the Harp,
Hang and molder till they warp:
Let the Flute and Lyre,
In Dust Expire,
Shatter’d by a Vocal Sharp.
There are great questions about Burlington’s Jacobite tendencies, which have never properly been resolved and lead to difficult speculation surrounding Chiswick House, potentially the palace built to greet the restored Jacobite King upon an eventual arrival to reclaim his throne. It is not just what we can make of these lyrics, but seeing them dedicated to Burlington as the very first of all the songs in Bickham’s Musical Entertainer, which would appear to make the strongest and most overt case for his Jacobite. An expert on Heraldry may be able to make a case for the Lion Rampant protected by the tree and the leopard by it, for there are interchangable and complext symbolism metween the two – is the lion waiting whilst the not-lion is in the foreground? What looks at first like an Orpheus-like taming of the beasts might have had further layers of meaning to a Jacobite of the 1720s. That is speculation, I just I don’t know.
