Hogarth’s ‘country box’ is brought back to life a la mode
The Times, 12 November 2011
Simon Tait visits the 18th century artist’s house in Chiswick that has reopened after a £400,000 restoration
The portrait hanging in the hall of Hogarth’s House in Chiswick, West London, is not the famous self-portrait, that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. In this context, it is more significant.
This one is a copy, painted by a local bookbinder called John Leighton in the 1890s as part of a campaign to save the house from developers. It is a signifier for the local determination over two centuries of Chiswick residents, the latest manifestation of which is responsible for it opening on Tuesday, November 8, a couple of days before the painter’s 314th birthday. The picture was found by present day local volunteers – led by museum consultant Val Bott – in store, torn, its frame broken and badly in need of restoration and conservation.
£400,000 has been spent on restoring the cottage, £287,000 coming from the Heritage Lottery Fund, researching its original appearance and the families that lived here before and after the Hogarths, and refurbishing it so that it can reopen, free of admission charge.
The Queen Anne house was built in 1715 and bought and extended in 1749 by a newly prosperous Hogarth to be his “little country box by the Thames”, the last house in the village of Chiswick before the rolling fields and copses of Middlesex. The lane, now part of one of the busiest thoroughfares in the country where the Great West Road becomes the Hogarth Roundabout, was probably not even named. The house was known simply as North End, and all that is left of an orchard planted then is one crazily gnarled mulberry tree which has survived iron clamps, blight and even the Blitz. Hogarth and his wife Jane were to spend the summer months here for the next 15 years until his death aged 66. He is buried in St Nicholas churchyard nearby, the headstone legend written by his friend David Garrick.
Its acquisition was a mark of Hogarth’s arrival at the pinnacle of his career after an uncertain start. Self-taught, his father was a schoolmaster who opened a coffee shop in Clerkenwell where only Latin was to be spoken. It failed and he found himself bankrupt and in the Fleet while his wife supported a family of seven children by selling patent medicines. William was apprenticed to a silver plate engraver, and began to make a name for himself with book illustrations, most notably for Samual Butler’s Hudibras. He met James Thornhill, creator of the ceiling paintings in Greenwich’s Painted Hall, who introduced Hogarth to painting, and to his daughter with whom he eloped in 1729.
They were childless but Jane continued living here with her cousin, Mary Lewis, until her own death, and the family connection ended when Mary died in 1808. It was bought by Henry Carey, poet, cleric and associate of the Romantics. In the 1860s it was the home of a celebrated melodramatic actor, Newton Treen “Brayvo” Hicks, but it was falling into disrepair. The studio Hogarth built in the garden disappeared, and recent paint scrapings have revealed many layers of Victorian grime as well as paint.
The next door neighbour, a well-to-do printer, bought the house and restored it, but towards the end of the 19th century it was scheduled for redevelopment. A campaign by the artists and writers who had drifted to Chiswick in Hogarth’s wake mounted a campaign to save it, but failed. The house was put up for auction.
Happily, it was bought by a local magnate called Robert Shipway who restored it, collected the engravings to display on the walls, and had furniture made, copied from the engravings by the Chsiwick Artweorkers’ Guild. He even took the photographs for the first guide book, and opened the house to the public in 1904.
Shipway gave the house to the local authority in 1909, and it was kept by custodians who lived there rent-free provided they admitted the public when required. In 1940 it was badly damaged by a parachute mine, but was repaired and reopened in 1951.
In 1984 Hounslow Council, which still owns it, decided to sell the house and another local campaign was launched, this time by the local history society and Val Bott, who has guided the latest restoration. They won the day, and the house returned to being, effectively, a gallery for the display of Hogarth engravings. In 1997 Bott was called in again to fund-raise for a refurbishment to mark Hogarth’s tercentenary, but before long it needed more fundamental repair and recasting.
“Local people who came to events here told us they wanted more than serried ranks of framed prints on the wall, fascinating as they are,” Bott says. “They yearned to understand the place as a home, so we’ve presented the house so as to make sense of its building phases, and we’ve added some domestic details.”
She assembled a committee of local scholars, academics and specialists into a charitable trust to oversee the restoration, and they remain as an advisory council.
Much of Col. Shipway’s furniture has been reassembled, and crockery from the period has been acquired, mostly at the personal expense of the volunteers. Hogarth-related objects have been loaned by other museums around the country. A suit of clothes based on Hogarth’s own has been made to hang in his bedroom closet, and copies of some of his own books, such as his lavishly illustrated The Analysis of Beauty, published in 1753. There is an engraving plate from Hudibras, and, discovered discarded in a cupboard, the Latin primer Hogarth’s father had written and published in 1712. Bott found original shutters painted in at one of the first floor parlour windows.
The HLF funding has allowed the employment of an outreach officer, John Collins, who had been in post two weeks in 2009 when the half-complete refurbishment was set back by a freak electrical fire. “It’s been frustrating,” he says, “but it’s meant that we could do some important extra research for the new displays, and to connect the house with the community that has done so much to ensure its survival.”
