Four Times of the Day

The paintings of Four Times of the Day (clockwise from top left: Morning, Noon, Night, and Evening)

Four Times of the Day is a series of four paintings by William Hogarth from 1736, reproduced as a series of four engravings published in 1738. They are humorous depictions of life in the streets of London, the vagaries of fashion, and the interactions between the rich and poor of the capital. Unlike many of Hogarth's other series, such as A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress, Industry and Idleness and The Four Stages of Cruelty, it does not depict the story of an individual, but instead focuses on the society of the city. Hogarth intended the series to be humorous rather than instructional; the pictures do not offer a judgement on whether the rich or poor are more deserving of our sympathies: while the upper and middle classes tend to provide the focus for each scene there are fewer of the moral comparisons seen in some other of his works.

The four pictures depict scenes of daily life in various locations in London as the day progresses. Morning shows a prudish spinster making her way to church in Covent Garden past the revellers of the night before; Noon shows two cultures on opposite sides of the street in St Giles; Evening depicts a dyer's family returning hot and bothered from a trip to Sadler's Wells; and Night shows a drunken freemason staggering home from a night of celebration in Rummer Street.

Background

Four Times of the Day was the first set of prints that Hogarth had published since his two great successes, A Harlot's Progress (1732) and A Rake's Progress (1735). It was among the first of his prints to be published after the Engraving Copyright Act 1734 (which Hogarth had helped push through Parliament) had come into force; A Rake's Progress had taken early advantage of the new law. Unlike Harlot and Rake, the four prints did not form a consecutive narrative, and none of the characters appear in more than one scene. Hogarth conceived them as "representing in a humorous manner, morning, noon, evening and night."

Hogarth's inspiration was the classical satire of Horace and Juvenal, via the Augustan satires, particularly John Gay's "Trivia" and Jonathan Swift's "A Description of a City Shower" and "A Description of the Morning". He took his artistic models from other examples of series of "Times of Day", "The Seasons" and "Ages of Man", such as those by Nicolas Poussin and Nicholas Lancret, and from pastoral scenes, but executed them with a twist by transferring them to the city. The temporal and urban nature of the images is emphasised by the main characters depicted walking through the city street scenes. The Flemish "Times of Day" style known as points du jour, in which the gods floated above pastoral scenes of idealised shepherds and shepherdesses, also played a part, but Hogarth recast the gods as his central characters: the churchgoing lady, a frosty Aurora in Morning; the pie-girl, a pretty London Venus in Noon; the pregnant woman, a sweaty Diana in Evening; and the freemason, a drunken Pluto in Night.

William Hogarth
Self portrait (1758)

Hogarth designed the series after an original commission by Jonathan Tyers in 1736 for a number of paintings to decorate supper boxes at Vauxhall Gardens. Hogarth is believed to have suggested to Tyers that the supper boxes at Gardens be decorated with paintings as part of their refurbishment; among the works that featured when the work was completed was Hogarth's picture of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. The originals of Four Times of the Day were sold to other collectors, but the scenes were reproduced by Francis Hayman, and two of them, Evening and Night, hung at Vauxhall until at least 1782.

The engraved images are mirror images of the paintings (since the engraved plates are copied from the paintings the image is reversed when printed), which leads to problems ascertaining the times shown on the clocks in some of the scenes. The images are sometimes seen as parodies of middle class life in London at the time, but the moral judgements are not as harsh as in some of Hogarth's other works and the lower classes do not escape ridicule either. Often the theme is one of over-orderliness versus chaos. The four plates depict four times of day, but they also move through the seasons: Morning is set in winter, Noon in spring, and Evening in summer. However, Night, sometimes misidentified as being in September, takes place on Oak Apple Day in May rather than in the autumn.

Evening was engraved by Bernard Baron, a French engraver who was living in London, and, although the designs are Hogarth's it is not known whether he engraved any of the four plates himself. The prints, along with a fifth picture, Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn from 1738, were sold by subscription for one guinea, half payable on ordering and half on delivery. After subscription the price rose to five shillings per print, making the five print set four shillings dearer overall. Although Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn was not connected to the other prints, it seems that Hogarth always envisaged selling the five prints together, adding the Strolling Actresses as a complementary theme just as he had added Southwark Fair to the subscription for The Rake's Progress. Whereas the characters in Four Times play their roles without being conscious of acting, the company of Strolling Actresses are fully aware of the differences between the reality of their lives and the roles they are set to play. Representations of Aurora and Diana also appear in both.

Hogarth advertised the prints for sale in May 1737, again in January 1738, and finally announced the plates were ready on 26 April 1738. The paintings were sold individually at an auction on 25 January 1745, along with the original paintings for A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress and Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn. Sir William Heathcote purchased Morning and Night for 20 guineas and £20 6s respectively, and the Duke of Ancaster bought Noon for £38 17s and Evening for £39 18s. A further preliminary sketch for Morning with some differences to the final painting was sold in a later auction for £21.

Series

Morning

Morning (Painting I)

Morning (Plate I)

In Morning, a lady makes her way to church, shielding herself with her fan from the shocking view of two men pawing at the market girls. The scene is the west side of the piazza at Covent Garden, clearly indicated by a part of Palladian portico of the Inigo Jones' Church of St Paul visible behind Tom King's Coffee House, a notorious venue that was known throughout London and celebrated in pamphlets. Henry Fielding mentions it in both The Covent Garden Tragedy and Pasquin. At the time Hogarth produced this picture, the coffee house was being run by Tom's widow, Moll King, but its reputation had not diminished. Moll opened the doors once those of the taverns shut, allowing the revellers to continue enjoying themselves from midnight until dawn. The mansion house with columned portico, No. 43 King Street, is attributed to architect Thomas Archer (later 1st Baron Archer) and occupied by him at the date of Hogarth's works. It was situated on the north side of the piazza, while the coffee house was on the south side, as depicted in Hogarth's original painting. It is early morning and some revellers are ending their evening: a fight has broken out in the coffee house, and a wig flies out of the door. Meanwhile, stallholders set up their fruit and vegetables for the day's market. Two children who should be making their way to school have stopped, entranced by the activity of the market, in a direct reference to Swift's "A Description of the Morning" in which children "lag with satchels in their hands". Above the clock is Father Time and below it the inscription Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.^[a] The smoke rising from the chimney of the coffee house connects these portents to the scene below.

Hogarth replicates all the features of the pastoral scene in an urban landscape. The shepherds and shepherdesses become the beggars and whores, the sun overhead is replaced by the clock on the church, the snow-capped mountains become the snowy rooftops. Even the setting of Covent Garden with piles of fruit and vegetables echoes the country scene. In the centre of the picture the icy goddess of the dawn in the form of the prim churchgoer is followed by her shivering red-nosed pageboy, mirroring Hesperus, the dawn bearer. The woman is the only one who seems unaffected by the cold, suggesting it may be her element. Although outwardly shocked, the dress of the woman, which is too fashionable for a woman of her age and in the painting is shown to be a striking acid yellow, may suggest she has other thoughts on her mind. She is commonly described as a spinster, and considered to be a hypocrite, ostentatiously attending church and carrying a fashionable ermine muff while displaying no charity to her freezing footboy or the half-seen beggar before her. The figure of the spinster is said to be based on a relative of Hogarth, who, recognizing herself in the picture, cut him out of her will. Fielding later used the woman as the model for his character of Bridget Allworthy in Tom Jones.

The spinster is assaulted by St. Francis in Battle of the Pictures

A trail of peculiar footprints shows the path trodden by the woman on her pattens to avoid putting her good shoes in the snow and filth of the street. A small object hangs at her side, seen variously as a nutcracker or a pair of scissors in the form of a skeleton or a miniature portrait, hinting, perhaps, at a romantic disappointment. Although clearly a portrait in the painting, the object is indistinct in the prints from the engraving. Other parts of the scene are clearer in the print: in the background, a quack is selling his cureall medicine, and while in the painting the advertising board is little more than a transparent outline, in the print, Dr. Rock's name can be discerned inscribed on the board below the royal crest which suggests his medicine is produced by royal appointment. The salesman may be Rock himself. Hogarth's opinion of Rock is made clear in the penultimate plate of A Harlot's Progress where he is seen arguing with Dr Misaubin while Moll Hackabout dies unattended in the corner.

Hogarth revisited the picture in his bidding ticket, Battle of the Pictures, for the auction of his works in held in 1745. In this, his own paintings are pictured being attacked by ranks of Old Masters; Morning is stabbed by a work featuring St. Francis as Hogarth contrasts the false piety of the prudish spinster with the genuine piety of the Catholic saint.^[b]

Noon

Noon (Painting II)

Noon (Plate II)

The scene takes place in Hog Lane, part of the slum district of St Giles with the church of St Giles in the Fields in the background. Hogarth would feature St Giles again as the background of Gin Lane and First Stage of Cruelty. The picture shows Huguenots leaving the French Church in what is now Soho. The Huguenot refugees had arrived in the 1680s and established themselves as tradesmen and artisans, particularly in the silk trade; and the French Church was their first place of worship. Hogarth contrasts their fussiness and high fashion with the slovenliness of the group on the other side of the road; the rotting corpse of a cat that has been stoned to death lying in the gutter that divides the street is the only thing the two sides have in common.^[c] The older members of the congregation wear traditional dress, while the younger members wear the fashions of the day. The children are dressed up as adults: the boy in the foreground struts around in his finery while the boy with his back to the viewer has his hair in a net, bagged up in the "French" style.

The crying boy is based on an infant in the foreground of Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women

At the far left, a black man fondles the breasts of a woman, distracting her from her work, her pie-dish "tottering like her virtue". Confusion over whether the law permitted slavery in England, and pressure from abolitionists, meant that by the mid-eighteenth century there was a sizeable population of free black Londoners; but the status of this man is not clear. The black man, the girl and bawling boy fill the roles of Mars, Venus and Cupid which would have appeared in the pastoral scenes that Hogarth is aping. In front of the couple a boy has set down his pie to rest, but the plate has broken spilling the pie onto the floor where it is being rapidly consumed by an urchin. The boy's features are modelled on those of a child in the foreground of Poussin's first version of the Rape of the Sabine Women (now held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art), but the boy crying over his lost pie was apparently sketched by Hogarth after he witnessed the scene one day while he was being shaved.

The composition of the scene juxtaposes the prim and proper Huguenot man and his immaculately dressed wife and son with these three, as they form their own "family group" across the other side of the gutter. The head of John the Baptist on a platter is the advertisement for the pie shop, proclaiming "Good eating". Below this sign are the embracing couple, extending the metaphor of good eating beyond a plate of food, and further down still the girl greedily scoops up the pie carrying the theme to the foot of the picture. Gordon sees the vertical line of toppling plates from the top window downwards as a symbol of the disorder on this side of the street. The man reduced to a head on the sign, in what is assumed to be the woman's fantasy, is mirrored by the "Good Woman" pictured on the board behind who has only a body, her nagging head removed to create the man's ideal of a "good woman". In the top window of the "Good Woman", a woman throws a plate with a leg of meat into the street as she argues, providing a stark contrast to the "good" woman pictured on the sign below. Ronald Paulson sees the kite hanging from the church as part of a trinity of signs, the kite indicating the purpose of the church, an ascent into heaven, just as the other signs for "Good Eating" and the "Good Woman" indicate the predilections of those on that side of the street; but he also notes it as another nod to the pastoral tradition: here instead of soaring above the fields it hangs impotently on the church wall.

The time is unclear. Allan Cunningham states it is half past eleven, and suggests that Hogarth uses the early hour to highlight the debauchery occurring opposite the church, yet the print shows the hands at a time that could equally be half past twelve, and the painting shows a thin golden hand pointing to ten past twelve.

In this scene more than any of the others Hogarth's sympathies seem to be with the lower classes and more specifically with the English. Although there is disorder on the English side of the street, there is an abundance of "good eating" and the characters are rosy cheeked and well-nourished. Even the street girl can eat her fill. The pinch-faced Huguenots, on the other hand, have their customs and dress treated as mercilessly as any characters in the series. A national enmity towards the French, even French refugees, may explain why the English are depicted somewhat more flatteringly here than the figures in the preceding scenes. Hogarth mocked continental fashions again in Marriage à-la-mode and made a more direct attack on the French in The Gate of Calais which he painted immediately upon returning to England in 1748 after he was arrested as a spy while sketching in Calais.

Evening

Evening (Painting III)

Evening (Plate III)

Unlike the other three images, Evening takes place slightly outside the built up area of the city, with views of rolling hills and wide evening skies. The cow being milked in the background indicates the time of day, around 5pm. While winter cold pervades the scene in Morning, Evening is oppressed by the heat of the summer. A pregnant woman and her husband attempt to escape from the claustrophobic city by journeying out to the fashionable Sadler's Wells — the stone entrance to Sadler's Wells Theatre is shown to the left. By the time Hogarth produced this series the theatre had lost any vestiges of fashionability and was satirised as having an audience consisting of tradesmen and their pretentious wives. Ned Ward described the clientele in 1699 as:

Butchers and bailiffs, and such sort of fellows,

mixed with a vermin train'd up for the gallows,

As Bullocks and files, housebreakers and padders,

With prize-fighters, sweetners, and such sort of traders,

Informers, thief-takers, deer stealers, and bullies.

The husband, whose stained hands reveal he is a dyer by trade, looks harried, carrying his exhausted youngest daughter. In earlier impressions, his hands are blue, to show his occupation, while his wife's face is coloured with red ink. The placement of the cow's horns behind his head in the composition is no accident; it represents him as a cuckold and suggests the children are not his. Behind them their children replay the scene: the father's cane protrudes between the son's legs, doubling as a hobby horse, while the daughter is clearly in charge, demanding that he hand over his gingerbread. A limited number of proofs missing the girl and artist's signature were printed; Hogarth added the mocking girl to explain the boy's tears.

The heat is made tangible by the flustered appearance of the woman as she fans herself (the fan itself displays a classical scene — perhaps Venus, Adonis and Cupid), the sluggish pregnant dog that looks longingly towards the water and the vigorous vine growing on the side of the tavern. As is often the case in Hogarth's work, the dog's expression reflects that of its master. The family rush home, past the New River and a tavern with a sign showing Sir Hugh Myddleton, who bankrupted himself financing the construction of the river to bring running water into London in 1613 — a wooden pipe lies by the side of the watercourse. Through the open window other refugees from the city can be seen sheltering from the oppressive heat in the bar. While they appear more jolly than the dyer and his family, Hogarth pokes fun at these people escaping to the country for fresh air only to reproduce the smoky air and crowded conditions of the city by huddling in the busy tavern with their pipes.

Night

Night (Painting IV)

Night (Plate IV)

The final print in the series, Night, shows a scene in Rummer Street. In the background is the large equestrian statue of Charles I of England by Hubert Le Sueur at Charing Cross. The day is May 29, Oak Apple Day, which celebrated the Restoration of the monarchy, demonstrated by the oak boughs above the barber's sign and on the hats of the some of the subjects, recalling the oak tree at Boscobel in which Charles II hid in 1651 after losing the Battle of Worcester. The street leads down to Charing Cross, and was a popular route for coaches, but the narrowness of the road and the congestion meant it was a frequent scene of accidents. Here, the bonfire and barrels in the street have forced the Salisbury Flying Coach to overturn; a house fire lights the sky in the distance. In the painting the moon is full, but in the print it appears as a crescent.

On one side of the road is a barber-surgeon, who undertakes shaving, bleeding and tooth extraction; his sign claims Shaving, bleeding, and teeth drawn with a touch. Ecce signum!. Inside the shop the barber haphazardly shaves a customer, holding his client's nose like a pig, while spots of blood darken the cloth under his chin. Shesgreen suggests the barber is blind drunk. The surgeons and barbers had been a single profession since 1540 and would not finally separate until 1745 when the surgeons broke away to form the Company of Surgeons. Bowls on the windowsill contain blood from the day's patients. Below, a pair of homeless people make a bed for the night under a bench, and a link-boy blows on the flame of his torch. In the distance, a cartload of furniture passes Charles' statue, perhaps penurious tenants escaping from their landlord under the cover of darkness.

In the foreground an intoxicated freemason, who can be identified by his apron and set square medallion, is supported by a companion, oblivious to the contents of a chamber pot being emptied on his head from a window. Standing back from the window a woman looks on, suggesting that the soaking the man received was not accidental. The freemason is traditionally identified as Sir Thomas de Veil, a judge who was Henry Fielding's predecessor at Bow Street and a member of Hogarth's first Lodge. He was unpopular for his stance against alcohol, deemed to be hypocritical as he was known to be an enthusiastic drinker. He was the model for Henry Fielding's character Justice Squeezum in The Coffee-House Politician (1730). Masonic historian George W. Speth suggests the supporting figure, in Tyler's regalia with sword, key and lamp, is Brother Montgomerie, the Grand Tyler. Masonic lodges met in the two taverns in the street during the 1730s, the Rummer Tavern on the left (its sign shows a rummer, a short wide brimmed glass for drinking rum) and the Earl of Cardigan on the right. John Ireland suggests that the overturned carriage below the sign was a gentle mockery of the 4th Earl of Cardigan, George Brudenell, later Duke of Montagu, who was renowned for his reckless carriage driving, but it also mirrors the ending of Gay's "Trivia" in which the coach is overturned wrecked at night. Either side of the street are signs for The Bagnio and The New Bagnio. Originally the name for a coffeehouse that offered Turkish baths, bagnio had come to mean a house where rooms could be taken for the night with no questions asked.

Reception

Four Times of the Day was the first series of prints that Hogarth had issued since the success of the Harlot and Rake (and would be the only set he would issue until Marriage à-la-mode in 1745), so it was eagerly anticipated. George Faulkner wrote from Dublin that he would take fifty sets on hearing of its imminent issue. The series lacks the moral lessons that are found in the earlier series and Marriage à-la-mode, and its lack of teeth meant it failed to achieve the successes of the two preceding series or Marriage à-la-mode, though it has found an enduring niche as a snapshot of the society of Hogarth's time. At the auction of 1745 the paintings of Four Times of the Day raised more those of the Rake, and Night, which is generally regarded as the worst of the series, fetched the highest single total. Cunningham comments sarcastically: "Such was the reward then, to which the patrons of genius thought these works entitled". While Horace Walpole praised the accompanying print, Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn, as being the finest of Hogarth's works, he had little to say of Four Times of the Day other than that it did not find itself wanting in comparison with Hogarth's other works.

Morning and Night are now in the National Trust Bearsted Collection at Upton House, in Warwickshire. The collection was assembled by Walter Samuel, 2nd Viscount Bearsted and gifted to the Trust, along with the house, in 1948. Noon and Evening remain in the Ancaster Collection at Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire.

Notes

a. ^{^} Ireland and Paulson both put the clock at 6.55am, though the original painting shows 7.05am. The difference is due to the reversal of the image.

In 1708, E. Hatton recorded the inscription below the clock as Ex hoc Momento pendat Eternitas in his New View of London and did not mention a figure above it. The date 1715 is shown on the clock-case in the 1717 volume of Vitruvius Britannicus, so perhaps indicates the clock had been replaced and the inscription changed to Sic transit gloria mundi as shown here.

b. ^{^} Battle of the Paintings is Hogarth's take on Swift's The Battle of the Books.

c. ^{^} Hogarth's works indicate that cats were not common pets in London during his lifetime. They are often depicted suffering the consequences of the life of a vagabond on the streets, in contrast to dogs which are normally shown reflecting the feelings of their masters or good-naturedly testing the limits of society (one notable exception is the first plate of the The Four Stages of Cruelty in which the cruelty of society is reflected by the torture of the faithful dog).

References

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