 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
The Four Times of the Day: Noon
1738
17 11/16” X 14 7/8” (H X W)
View the full resolution plate here.
The depravity and dichotomy worsen in "Noon" where the scene becomes more cluttered and claustrophobic. Shesgreen notes, "This print sets the boisterous, robust lives of the English proletariat against the artificial conduct of the fashionable, affected French ...”(43). While there is certainly a positing of differences in the plate, neither alternative is glorified. The public groping of the interracial servant couple is rendered satirical by their positioning below the "Good Eating" sign. Even early commentators Ireland and Nichols note the comic nature of the scene, remarking that the "good eating is carried on to the lower part of the picture" (223). The roast beef, symbolic of England, is thrown into the kennel which is "choked," a dead cat emphasizing the decay. The erotic fumblings of the servants are contrasted with the stilted kissing of the elderly couple in the opposite corner. Although Uglow comments that Hogarth prefers the more natural actions of the English over the false, affected behavior of the French (306), neither sexual extreme is useful, and the lack of balance is as stagnant to England as the kennel which divides the two realities.
The Four Times of the Day: Noon
Shesgreen, Sean. Engravings by Hogarth. (1973)
This print sets the boisterous, robust lives of the English proletariat against the artificial conduct of the fashionable, affected French residing in England. It is 11:30 on the spire of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. From the church on the right (believed to be an historical church patronized by French refugees), the congregation skills out into the street. Beside a dead cat in the kennel, a beau dressed in an ornamented coat and vest, an oversized bow, velvet breeches and buckled shoes postures affectedly in the direction of a lady. He wears a sword and carries a cane. The lady, dressed every bit as elaborately, returns his gestures in the same stiff, pretentious manner.
In front of them stands what appears to be a diminutive adult but is actually a little boy dressed in the same ostentatious fashion as the beau, even to the point of wearing a bag wig and miniature sword. He seems to be glancing conceitedly at his dress. Another little boy wearing an outlandish wig shapes like a beehive walks in the opposite direction with a girl taller than he. Those in the congregation who faces are not affected wear either dour looks or grotesque expressions.
The scenes on the other side of the kennel, set not against a church but against two taverns and an eating house, without a trace of artificial politeness, are marked instead by natural crises and conflicts. Across from the little beau a disheveled boy scratches his full head of hair and cries at his blunder. A girl stuffs one piece of the broken pie in her mouth and grabs for another. Across from the couple expressing their affection with awkward formality, an attractive girl responds to the fondling and kissing of a companion. Her pie is about to fall from her control. Above the inn door two figures quarrel over dinner and lose it. The sign above the door portrays a woman without a head which proverbially signified “The Good (i.e. Quiet) Woman.” The sign in front of the eating house shows the head of John the Baptist; its inscription, “Good Eating” (enclosed in two parenthetical teeth), appears directly above the lovers (43).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon
Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth: His Life, Art and Times. (1971)
In the second scene, Noon, a church and a tavern are again contrasted: the street, divided down the middle by the gutter, juxtaposes churchgoers with their pious faces or (alternatively) French customs and fashions, and the eating, lusting, sloppy people who ignore the church. Beyond piety and impiety, they are the structured and the unstructured. In each plate there is a sturdy, buxom, attractive girl with a man’s hand in her bosom . . . (There is much symbolic play in these plates: for example, the squeezing of the girl’s breast in Noon, which causes her to tip and overflow a stream from the dish she is holding, finds a parallel in the pair of hands milking the prominent udder in Evening; and perhaps grows into the torrents of gin and urine in Night) (vol. 1 404)..
The Four Times of the Day: Noon
Uglow, Jenny. Hogarth: A Life and a World. (1997)
In Noon, the pagan Venus, Cupid and Apollo lounge among the midday crowds in the guise of an English maid with her son and African “sunburnt” lover, “outfacing the churchgoers.” (303).
In Noon, anarchy erupts beneath the signs of good eating and tavern flagons. Appetites of all kinds are pounding, and are often frustrated. An angry houswife hurls her husband’s lunch, a leg of lamb, straight through the window. A black servant, a “natural” part of this overly physical crowd, nuzzles the maid’s cheek and squeezes her breasts; she throws her head back dreamily, “her pye-dish tottering like her virtue, and with the most precious parts of its contents running over”. Stunned by the sudden stream from the pie’s nipple, the baker boy breaks his plate, bangs his head, screws up his face and exploded with absurd, howling distress, leaving the quick neat-fingered girl to snap up his fallen food. Chaotic as it may be, but this side of the road is certainly lusty, hungry and alive. Opposite, where the congregation leave the French Church, daintily avoiding a dead cat in the gutter, that is not the case.
The Huguenots had done well in London, and Hogarth suggests that although the righteous elders stick to their old ways, appearing in dark clothes with downturned mouth, the next generation, flourishing their simpering smiles, have become mannered and affected. Their faith, we are asked to think, is as limp as the heaven-bound kit, drooping sadly from the rooftop. Their children are overstuffed dolls who mimic their elders: indeed they may even outreach them, for one has the air of a lord, and the other the wig of a judge. In this kind of company the kiss of “politeness”—directly opposite, and thus burlesquing the real kiss of the young couple—is the embrace of two ugly old crones. There is no need to ask where the artist’s sympathies lie (305-306).
. . . the head of the little boy crying in Noon is taken from Poussin’s Rape of the Sabines (83).
Noon shows the Baptist’s Head (“Good Eating”) with its two mutton chops, and behind it the tavern board of a headless woman, known as “The Silent Woman”: as well as being comic, both are almost cannibalistic in their greed, anti-religious, misogynistic, loaded (39-40).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon
Ireland, John and John Nichols. Hogarth’s Works. (1883)
Among the figures who are coming out of church, an affected, flighty Frenchwoman, with her fluttering fop of a husband, and a boy, habited à-la-mode de Paris, claim our first attention. In dress, air and manner, they have a national character. The whole congregation, whether male or female, old or young, carry the air of their country in countenance, dress and deportment. Like the three principal figures, they are all marked with some affected peculiarity. Affectation in a woman is supportable upon no other ground than that general indulgence we pay to the omnipotence of beauty, which in a degree sanctifies whatever it adopts. In a boy, when we consider that the poor fellow is attempting to copy what he has been taught to believe praiseworthy, we laugh at it—the largest portion of ridicule falls upon his tutors; but in a man, it is contemptible!
The old fellow in a black periwig has a most vinegar-like aspect, and looks with great contempt at the frippery gentlewoman immediately before him. The woman with a demure countenance seems very piously considering how she can contrive to pick the embroidered beau’s pocket. The two old sibyls joining their withered lips in a chaste salute, is nauseous enough, but, being a national custom, must be forgiven. The divine seems to have resided in this kingdom long enough to acquire a roast-beef countenance. A little boy, whose woollen night-cap is pressed over a most venerable flowing periwig, and the decrepid old man, leaning upon a crutch-stick, who is walking before him, I once considered as two vile caricatures, out of nature, and unworthy the artist. Since I have seen the peasantry of Flanders and the plebian youth of France, I have in some degree changed my opinion, but still think them rather outré.
Under a sign of the Baptist’s Head is written “Good Eating;” and on each side of the inscription is a mutton chop. In opposition to this head without a body, unaccountably displayed as a sign at an eating-house, there is a body without a head, hanging out as the sign of a distiller’s. This, by common consent, has been quaintly denominated “The Good Woman.” At a window above, one of the softer sex proves her indisputable right to the title by her temperate conduct to her husband, with whom having had a little disagreement, she throws their Sunday’s dinner into the street.
A girl, bringing a pie from the bakehouse, is stopped in her career by the rude embraces of a blackamoor, who eagerly rubs his sable visage against her blooming cheek.
Good eating is carried on to the lower part of the picture. A boy (This boy is copied from a figure in a picture of The Rape of the Sabines, by N. Poussin. ), placing a baked pudding upon a post with rather too violent an action, the dish breaks, the fragments fall to the ground; and while he is loudly lamenting his misfortune, and with tears anticipating his punishment, the smoking remnants are eagerly snatched up by a poor girl. Not educated according to the system of Jean Jacques Rousseau, she feels no qualms of conscience about the original proprietor, and destitute of that fastidious delicacy which destroys the relish of many a fine lady, eagerly swallows the hot and delicious morsels with all the concomitants.
The scene is laid at the door of a French chapel in Hog Lane,--a part of town at that time almost wholly peopled by French refugees or their descendants.
A kite blown from an adjacent field, being entangled on the roof of the chapel, hangs pendant on the wall. One of Mr. Hogarth’s commentators asserts that, “this is introduced only to break the disagreeable uniformity of a wall” (Mr. Nichols, in his Anecdotes). It certainly has that effect; but Hogarth so rarely presents any object without a particular and pointed allusion, that I am inclined to think he had some other meaning. May it not be designed to intimate that the good people who compose the congregation, after being blown out of their own country by a religious storm, found a peaceful harbour under this roof, safely sheltered from the hurricanes of enthusiasm and the blasts of superstition?
By the dial of St. Giles’ Church, in the distance, we see that it is only half-past eleven. At this early hour, in those good times, there was as much good eating as there is now at six o’clock in the evening. From twenty pewter measures, which are hung up before the houses of different distillers, it seems that good drinking was considered as equally worthy of their serious attention.
The dead cat and choked kennels mark the little attention shown to the streets by the scavengers of St. Giles’. At that time noxious effluvia was not peculiar to this parish. The neighbourhood of Fleet Ditch, and many other parts of the city, were equally polluted.
Even at this refined period, there would be some use in a more strict attention to the medical police of a city so crowded with inhabitants. We ridicule the people of Paris and Edinburgh for neglecting so essential and salutary a branch of delicacy, while the kennels of a street in the vicinity of St. Paul’s Church are floated with the blood of slaughtered animals every market day. Moses would have managed these things better: but in those days there was no physician in Israel! (221-225)
The Four Times of the Day: Noon
Quennell, Peter. Hogarth’s Progress. (1955)
This insular episode [in the plate Evening] is preceded by and impression of London’s foreign colony. Since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, it had been steadily increasing; the exiled French Protestants had their own chapel in Hog Lane, close to St. Giles’s Church; and Noon shows a procession of Huguenot worshippers filing through the chapel door, led by two fashionable middle-aged persons with a stout and equally fashionable child, both gesturing largely and chattering vivaciously, regardless of the filth of the street—a dead kitten has been tossed into the gutter—and the proletarian English crowd carrying dishes from a cook-shop. The weeping urchin, who has broken the plate he holds, is said to have been noticed by Hogarth while he was seated in a barber’s chair: at which he rushed to the window, shaving-soap on his chin and a napkin still around his neck, and immediately jotted the incident down. A paper kite has been caught on the roof of the chapel—one of those details that he was apt to record without ulterior symbolic motive, but merely because, as he walked and observed, they had happened to attract his fancy (151-152).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon
Trusler, Rev. J. and E.F. Roberts. The Complete Works of William Hogarth. (1800)
The day is marching on, and the “time” is indicated with sufficient exactness by the people coming out of the chapel, even if the clock of St. Giles’s church did not point out the hour. We have a contrast—one which the artist was especially fond of making—between the plump rosy beauty of our own women, and the fade look, and affected smirking, of a superbly-dressed lady representing a rival nation. Look at the girl whom Sambo is saluting with such gusto; and look at the true devotee opposite—and hesitate, if you can, about that golden apple you have to bestow on the fairest. London, at this time, was overrun with French refugees; and at so early a period that they had taken possession of Leicester Fields, and colonised the surrounding region. Several districts of the metropolis were denominated “Petty France,” from the fact of the poor Huguenot refugees aggregating in such spots, in greater or lesser numbers; and, to Hogarth, their manners and habits afforded much amusement, and ample scope for a study of their idiosyncracies. But let us to the picture (118).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon
Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth’s Graphic Works. (1965)
In the background is St. Giles'-in-the-FieIds (its clock shows 12:30), and the street is probably Hog Lane, now part of Charing Cross Road. The hanging flagons (and the flagon on a post) indicate two taverns within easy reach of the congregation. The tavern which closes the perspective has a diagonal crack running across its face. The chapel, according to J. Ireland (I, 142), is French—in "a part of the town at that time almost wholly peopled by French refugees, or their descendants" (the Soho district). This would explain the French mode in the dress of the beau, his wife, and (presumably) his son. Ireland also takes the women kissing to be an expression of a French custom. The presence of the kite hanging from the church roof may be explained by the fact that there was a windmill at this time at the bottom of Rathbone Place (near Charing Cross). Ireland perhaps goes a little far in thinking that the kite intimates "that the good people who compose the congregation, after being blown out of their own country by a religious storm, found a peaceful harbour under this roof, safely sheltered from the hurricanes of enthusiasm, and the blasts of superstition" (ibid.).
The scene is divided down the middle by the kennel (gutter), in which lies a dead cat. If the right half has to do with going to church, the left is devoted to eating and drinking; the foppish French couple on the right is contrasted with the lusty, red-blooded English folk on the left. The sign of the Baptist’s Head (“Good Eating,” with two mutton chops for decoration) complements the sign of the Good (or silent) Woman: the one on an eating house, the other on a tavern. The running-over of the buxom girl’s pie-dish reflects her own situation, as perhaps the Negro’s kiss parallels the kiss of the two old women on the other side of the picture. The crying boy’s head is taken from Poussin’s The Rape of the Sabines (Metropolitan) (179-180).
The Four Times of the Day
Paulson, Ronald. Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth. (1979)
I wonder what a Londoner felt if he stopped and considered instead of once again merely passing, a sign of the “Good Woman” on a tavern. Such a sign is represented in Hogarth’s Times of the Day: Noon, and two versions of it were hung in the Sign Painters’ Exhibition of 1762. The woman is headless; that is, has no tongue, is no longer the conventional “scolding woman,” the shrew, that popular effigy of the skimmington. In retrospect, as your sense of the sign accumulates, you may realize that this is a man’s sign, in front of a man’s tavern, and that to him a woman is not just is omitted in the sign—head, tongue, mind—but what is included, that is, a body. This becomes the subliminal image of woman for one basic impulse in man, expressible at this popular level of consciousness: the “good woman” is all body, without head, tongue, mind, or spirit.
It was no doubt for this reason that Hogarth juxtaposed the “Good Woman,” in his representation of it, with a “John the Baptist’s Head” on a charger inscribed “Good Eating”—the woman’s equivalent fantasy of her husband (or rather the man’s fantasy of the woman’s fantasy). This signboard design also hung in the Sign Painter’s Exhibition (no. 33). It is only in the context of these signs for tavern and eating house that we come to see the strange kite hanging off the roof of the Huguenot chapel across the way as the sign of the church: a mode of ascension into the sky. In this case Hogarth has set up three parallel signs, as he has contrasts the opposite sides of the street on a Sunday noon. Two actual signboards lead us to assimilate the third object into the same category (31-32).
. . . we see that Hogarth has divided the composition between Somebodies and Nobodies between the sign of the “Good Woman” (Somebody) and “John the Baptist” (Nobody, as a sign for an eating house) and between the two sides of the street—the eaters, drinkers, and lechers on one side, the respectable, pious churchgoers on the other, with their sign of the stranded kite (40).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon
Dobson, Austin. William Hogarth. (1907)
The second [plate features] a congregation issuing at noon, on Sunday, from the French chapel in Hog Lane, St. Giles’s (now Crown Street).
The unspeakable but uproarious misery of the lad in Noon (who has broken his pie-dish by resting it too heavily upon a post) . . .[is] excellent (58-59).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon
Lichtenberg, G. Ch. Lichtenberg’s Commentaries on Hogarth’s Engravings. (1784-1796). Translated from the German by Innes and Gustav Herdan (1966)
All the interpreters agree that this Plate represents the French Chapel in Hog Lane, St Giles, London. That street, as well as part of the adjoining district, was at that time inhabited almost exclusively by French émigrés and their descendants. That is why the paper kite which is hanging down from the church has been interpreted as symbolizing the people who were blown across the Channel by a religious storm and found here a safe harbour. But more of the kite later. It must have been greatly to the satisfaction of our good Hogarth that fate, without any help from him, had driven the French just where he himself would certainly have put them had it been in his power—into Sow's Street. For France cannot have had a more outright enemy than Hogarth; a pig-sty and Lutetia Minor were synonymous to him. Altogether, things must then have been highly Lutetic in the whole of St Giles' parish. It should be noted that the floor of a church there which had been built in the year 1625 was by 1730 eight feet lower than the street, through mere piggery. This necessitated its being built afresh.
Of Hogarth's hatred of the French there are certainly traces enough in this Plate; indeed, it is all in all a rather murderous attack upon French faces, figures and attire. When he starts on this subject he knows no moderation, and that, alas, is the case here too.
According to the tower clock in the background it is now eleven o'clock and the service has ended. The door of the French chapel stands open and the spiritual flock is streaming through, laden with the Word. Most of the members are so drawn and marked that one would think some travelling charlatan has held his healing session here and has just dismissed the walking sick. The chief male figure is evidently a dancing master, in accordance with Hogarth's conviction that the main part of the French nation consists of dancing masters. If he is not, he deserves to be one. He wears a richly gallooned coat and a waistcoat, like a heavily ornamented saddle-cloth, which almost reaches to his knees. The whole figure exhales an incredible degree of tenderness and sweetness, in temperament at least. He is posed in a pas de minuet; the left hand inclined slightly downwards, and bent back at the wrist, is in harmony with the unmistakable expression of submissiveness towards the lady. On the right wrist hangs a modish Spanish cane. The tip of the index finger curves daintily towards the tip of the thumb so that they form a circle far too delicately joined for even the finest pinch of tobacco, and rather as if someone were to look at uncut diamonds against the light. Very fine and expressive. He is trying with these fingers to spin the words still finer as they issue from his somewhat broad, full and altogether not very charming mouth. The gesture is not uncommon in pulpits and on platforms where they try to impart to the useless coal-dust thrown out by the mouth, while it is still in flight, the appearance of uncut diamonds, or to the yam which they are spinning the appearance of spun silk.
The lady with the delicately though rather widely slit mouth, through the intentional contraction of her somewhat extensive speech organ, would seem to give her thoughts the appearance which her lover—or maybe even her newly-affianced—would fain give his words with thumb and finger. Though hardly two steps away from the church door, she already rests her right arm upon his shoulder. This throws some light upon various things which the crinoline is meant to obscure. Its rather queer and singular cut seems in fact to have been chosen not so much for the sake of appearances as to give relief through expansion, and to render equivocal the perhaps only-too-visible increasing natural expansion, which is not in need of further elucidation. The garment would fit any sort of waist, and again it would accord with the ebb as well as the flow. It is also possible that it was meant to cover a slight abnormality in walking, which the little heir from her first marriage cannot disguise so well. I am speaking here of that highly-decorated young person of diminutive size who, conspicuous with hair-bag, solitaire, stick and sword, struts ahead of them. Or the dancing master might be his father, who in that case could expect little assistance in his business from his son's frame. But this is the way of the world: Heroum filii nequam. That the dwarf, moreover, should derive so much pleasure from the silver facing of his sleeve shows a spirit in keeping with the body.
On these engravings, the fashions of 1738 deserve special attention, for Hogarth is said to have observed them very meticulously. On our lady the arrangement of the ribbon bow is specially remarkable. I do not recollect ever having seen one placed so low, especially without a trace of a sash. Is she perhaps wearing the three-coloured emblem of equality? It looks rather dark behind that bright vanguard. The old head, which together with the youthful heads of the two lovers forms a sort of blunt pyramid, is beautifully contrasted with them. The expression seems to betoken some justified righteous indignation at the behaviour of the pair so near the door of the sheep-fold together with some unrighteous indignation at her own in- capacity for anything of the sort. All seven heads are true emblems of an impregnable iron dogmatism and an unction which has eaten right down into the bones. With such as these let anyone try to dispute. It would be like trying to turn back The Flood with a fan. Their faith, if it was ever a living one, is now, at least, petrified. We need only look at the face close behind the dancing master's shoulder, at the expression of the 'Dominie' at the church door, and the woman in front of him hanging her head. One would be mistaken in thinking that a hang-dog denotes a man who hangs his head. No! those are often very honest people, but it denotes the sly, rarely honest listener who carries his head on one side, with one ear pricked to overhear his unsuspecting neighbour or to hear the little angels sing.
On the right-hand side, two matrons are exchanging a loving kiss, and how fervently! Their souls seems to be quite fused with one another, and their noses would follow suit if only they were less tough and corporeal.
Immediately behind these two matrons, a saint has posted himself close to the wall. The sermon was rather a long one, and he still has not finished. The troop of cripples who move into the street there turn their backs on us, and so we will let them go. The boy or dwarf in the wig and beehive-shaped cap with his little sister are really exaggerated, and a touch like that is only tolerable if it is sparingly used and is besides accompanied by other touches which prove that one is able to do better. But this is the least reproach to be levelled against Hogarth's presentation of that community. French people are not all like that. Quite impossible! And least of all, French Protestant émigrés of 1738. Hogarth had certainly no knowledge of that class of people. Wherever I have seen them, I have never noticed a single trait which could have occasioned anyone to depict them in corpore like this. On the contrary, they were everywhere an ornament to society, and even the matrons were paragons, who taught how decent mirth befits old age, and how mirth itself could become venerable thereby. They are English people whom Hogarth has drawn here, Methodists or members of some other religious sect; English-melancholic bigots, drawn in chapel where the dark sectarian sky weighs heavily upon the earth. Here is nothing of the rosy-coloured sky of the French nation, a sky which, worthy of adoration in that colour too, as promoting a rosy-coloured view of life—yet keeps the distance necessary for brightening up a life which in it- self gives little enough.
If it was a Methodist chapel just after the sermon, on which the kite is hanging, another interpretation would be possible. These religious fanatics of great spiritual mobility are lifted up by every little pulpit breeze and float upon it to the Deity, with whose essence they believe they are uniting themselves; they tremble and glow and hear inexpressible things, but no sooner does the breeze give out, than they drop down and remain stuck at the next street corner.
On the opposite side of the engraving the artist returns to his element and there we follow him with delight. First comes a house with a sign- board displaying John the Baptist's head on a charger and the inscription, 'Good Eating'. The two dog-teeth of the lion or wolf which seem to serve as brackets for the motto are here not so much symbols of parenthesis as the parenthesis itself; good eating (for teeth like that, that is). In the London of that time, most of the houses had signboards, often without the slightest reference to the standing or the occupation of the inhabitants. Perhaps a restaurant keeper settled in the house when John's head was already there. Close beside it on the house of a distiller, as indicated by the jug upon the post and the wooden jars hanging round the wall, is a signboard with a headless woman, and the inscription, 'The Good Woman’. Thus, there a head without a body and here a body without a head. How in England where, as in Germany, the best women always have the best heads such a thing could have been tolerated, and still is tolerated, I fail to understand.! The idea is not Hogarth's invention, for in fact this type of representation is quite common in London and, as Ireland remarks, is used especially by those who trade in paints. This I do not understand. A man without a head, on the other hand, would characterize a distillery not at all badly; for liquor puts spirit in place of the head, and spirits cannot be painted. But this is not enough for Hogarth. In that house where people eat according to the true time, he causes a little dispute about the food to arise between the man and his good woman. This is taken by her goodness in so bad part that even on a Sunday she throws a leg of mutton together with the vegetables upon the saints in the street. This is quite right. For even if the food gets no better through the transfer, still they will eat more peaceably up there. It is amusing to see how some passers-by who either hear the solid blessing coming down from above, or because they had been advised of it by the liquid blessing already upon their clothes, suddenly take refuge below in the house, either to demand damages for stains or to wait until the shower is over. One of them, happily enough, has a broom on him as if he had come to sweep up the good food.
In the foreground, to the left, just under the influence of the ominous head, there is still more of the good food on and above the pavement. A boy has planted an earthenware dish containing a baked pudding some- what too firmly upon a wooden post. It breaks in half, and in that moment the pudding becomes good eating for a healthy English street girl, who forms an excellent contrast with the French dwarf. The figure of the poor devil who suffers this misfortune, Hogarth has taken from a picture by Poussin on the Rape of the Sabines, which is said to be in the collection of a Mr Hoare of Stourhead. Behind is a somewhat sensual coalition between Africa and Europe. The girl, whose plumpness is evidently meant to offset the flatness of the French lady, just as the vulgar sensuality of the negro the platonic whispering of the dancing master, has just fetched a pie from the bakery. Through the yielding opposition with which she meets the efforts of her coloured friend, part of the pie spills out on to the street. This, then, is good eating for the third time, and he would show a poor understanding of Hogarth's roguishness who did not see at the first glance that the kiss here is served as the fourth course. It is not for nothing that these two heads stand so directly under the motto 'Good Eating'. Quite in the foreground lies a cat that has been stoned to death—meant apparently as a cut at the filthiness of Hog Lane; perhaps also meant to symbolize good eating, for the fifth and last time (282-286).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Chamber Pot
Ireland
At a window above, one of the softer sex proves her indisputable right to the title by her temperate conduct to her husband, with whom having had a little disagreement, she throws their Sunday’s dinner into the street (223).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Crying
A bewigged boy screams over the loss of his pie. He is an interesting contrast to the well-behaved, but conceited French boy. Neither extreme is useful.
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Crying
Ireland
A boy (This boy is copied from a figure in a picture of The Rape of the Sabines, by N. Poussin. ), placing a baked pudding upon a post with rather too violent an action, the dish breaks, the fragments fall to the ground; and while he is loudly lamenting his misfortune, and with tears anticipating his punishment, the smoking remnants are eagerly snatched up by a poor girl. Not educated according to the system of Jean Jacques Rousseau, she feels no qualms of conscience about the original proprietor, and destitute of that fastidious delicacy which destroys the relish of many a fine lady, eagerly swallows the hot and delicious morsels with all the concomitants (223).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Crying
Quennell
The weeping urchin, who has broken the plate he holds, is said to have been noticed by Hogarth while he was seated in a barber’s chair: at which he rushed to the window, shaving-soap on his chin and a napkin still around his neck, and immediately jotted the incident down (152).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Crying
Lichtenberg
A boy has planted an earthenware dish containing a baked pudding some- what too firmly upon a wooden post. It breaks in half, and in that moment the pudding becomes good eating for a healthy English street girl, who forms an excellent contrast with the French dwarf. The figure of the poor devil who suffers this misfortune, Hogarth has taken from a picture by Poussin on the Rape of the Sabines, which is said to be in the collection of a Mr Hoare of Stourhead (286).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: French
Shesgreen notes, "This print sets the boisterous, robust lives of the English proletariat against the artificial conduct of the fashionable, affected French ..." (43). While there is certainly a positing of differences in the plate, neither alternative is glorified.
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: French
Shesgreen
This print sets the boisterous, robust lives of the English proletariat against the artificial conduct of the fashionable, affected French residing in England. It is 11:30 on the spire of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. From the church on the right (believed to be an historical church patronized by French refugees), the congregation skills out into the street. Beside a dead cat in the kennel, a beau dressed in an ornamented coat and vest, an oversized bow, velvet breeches and buckled shoes postures affectedly in the direction of a lady. He wears a sword and carries a cane. The lady, dressed every bit as elaborately, returns his gestures in the same stiff, pretentious manner (43).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: French
Uglow
The Huguenots had done well in London, and Hogarth suggests that although the righteous elders stick to their old ways, appearing in dark clothes with downturned mouth, the next generation, flourishing their simpering smiles, have become mannered and affected. Their faith, we are asked to think, is as limp as the heaven-bound kit, drooping sadly from the rooftop. Their children are overstuffed dolls who mimic their elders: indeed they may even outreach them, for one has the air of a lord, and the other the wig of a judge (306).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: French
Ireland
Among the figures who are coming out of church, an affected, flighty Frenchwoman, with her fluttering fop of a husband, and a boy, habited à-la-mode de Paris, claim our first attention. In dress, air and manner, they have a national character. The whole congregation, whether male or female, old or young, carry the air of their country in countenance, dress and deportment. Like the three principal figures, they are all marked with some affected peculiarity. Affectation in a woman is supportable upon no other ground than that general indulgence we pay to the omnipotence of beauty, which in a degree sanctifies whatever it adopts. In a boy, when we consider that the poor fellow is attempting to copy what he has been taught to believe praiseworthy, we laugh at it—the largest portion of ridicule falls upon his tutors; but in a man, it is contemptible!
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: French
Quennell
Since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, it had been steadily increasing; the exiled French Protestants had their own chapel in Hog Lane, close to St. Giles’s Church; and Noon shows a procession of Huguenot worshippers filing through the chapel door, led by two fashionable middle-aged persons with a stout and equally fashionable child, both gesturing largely and chattering vivaciously, regardless of the filth of the street (151-152).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: French
Trusler
We have a contrast—one which the artist was especially fond of making—between the plump rosy beauty of our own women, and the fade look, and affected smirking, of a superbly-dressed lady representing a rival nation. Look at the girl whom Sambo is saluting with such gusto; and look at the true devotee opposite—and hesitate, if you can, about that golden apple you have to bestow on the fairest. London, at this time, was overrun with French refugees; and at so early a period that they had taken possession of Leicester Fields, and colonised the surrounding region. Several districts of the metropolis were denominated “Petty France,” from the fact of the poor Huguenot refugees aggregating in such spots, in greater or lesser numbers; and, to Hogarth, their manners and habits afforded much amusement, and ample scope for a study of their idiosyncracies (118).
The old fellow in a black periwig has a most vinegar-like aspect, and looks with great contempt at the frippery gentlewoman immediately before him. The woman with a demure countenance seems very piously considering how she can contrive to pick the embroidered beau’s pocket (221-222).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: French
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
The chapel, according to J. Ireland (I, 142), is French—in "a part of the town at that time almost wholly peopled by French refugees, or their descendants" (the Soho district). This would explain the French mode in the dress of the beau, his wife, and (presumably) his son (179).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: French
Lichtenberg
Of Hogarth's hatred of the French there are certainly traces enough in this Plate; indeed, it is all in all a rather murderous attack upon French faces, figures and attire. When he starts on this subject he knows no moderation, and that, alas, is the case here too.
According to the tower clock in the background it is now eleven o'clock and the service has ended. The door of the French chapel stands open and the spiritual flock is streaming through, laden with the Word. Most of the members are so drawn and marked that one would think some travelling charlatan has held his healing session here and has just dismissed the walking sick. The chief male figure is evidently a dancing master, in accordance with Hogarth's conviction that the main part of the French nation consists of dancing masters. If he is not, he deserves to be one. He wears a richly gallooned coat and a waistcoat, like a heavily ornamented saddle-cloth, which almost reaches to his knees. The whole figure exhales an incredible degree of tenderness and sweetness, in temperament at least. He is posed in a pas de minuet; the left hand inclined slightly downwards, and bent back at the wrist, is in harmony with the unmistakable expression of submissiveness towards the lady. On the right wrist hangs a modish Spanish cane. The tip of the index finger curves daintily towards the tip of the thumb so that they form a circle far too delicately joined for even the finest pinch of tobacco, and rather as if someone were to look at uncut diamonds against the light. Very fine and expressive. He is trying with these fingers to spin the words still finer as they issue from his somewhat broad, full and altogether not very charming mouth. The gesture is not uncommon in pulpits and on platforms where they try to impart to the useless coal-dust thrown out by the mouth, while it is still in flight, the appearance of uncut diamonds, or to the yam which they are spinning the appearance of spun silk.
The lady with the delicately though rather widely slit mouth, through the intentional contraction of her somewhat extensive speech organ, would seem to give her thoughts the appearance which her lover—or maybe even her newly-affianced—would fain give his words with thumb and finger. Though hardly two steps away from the church door, she already rests her right arm upon his shoulder. This throws some light upon various things which the crinoline is meant to obscure. Its rather queer and singular cut seems in fact to have been chosen not so much for the sake of appearances as to give relief through expansion, and to render equivocal the perhaps only-too-visible increasing natural expansion, which is not in need of further elucidation. The garment would fit any sort of waist, and again it would accord with the ebb as well as the flow. It is also possible that it was meant to cover a slight abnormality in walking, which the little heir from her first marriage cannot disguise so well. I am speaking here of that highly-decorated young person of diminutive size who, conspicuous with hair-bag, solitaire, stick and sword, struts ahead of them. Or the dancing master might be his father, who in that case could expect little assistance in his business from his son's frame. But this is the way of the world: Heroum filii nequam. That the dwarf, moreover, should derive so much pleasure from the silver facing of his sleeve shows a spirit in keeping with the body (282-284).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: French Boy
A little French boy, dressed as a miniature dandy, proudly looks at his clothes. His behavior contrasts the screaming English brat—neither extreme is useful.
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: French Boy
Shesgreen
In front of them stands what appears to be a diminutive adult but is actually a little boy dressed in the same ostentatious fashion as the beau, even to the point of wearing a bag wig and miniature sword. He seems to be glancing conceitedly at his dress (43).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: French Boy
Uglow
Their children are overstuffed dolls who mimic their elders: indeed they may even outreach them, for one has the air of a lord, and the other the wig of a judge (306).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: French Boy
Lichtenberg
that highly-decorated young person of diminutive size who, conspicuous with hair-bag, solitaire, stick and sword, struts ahead of them. Or the dancing master might be his father, who in that case could expect little assistance in his business from his son's frame. But this is the way of the world: Heroum filii nequam. That the dwarf, moreover, should derive so much pleasure from the silver facing of his sleeve shows a spirit in keeping with the body (283-284).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Good Eating
The public groping of the interracial servant couple is rendered satirical by their positioning below the "Good Eating" sign. The sign features John the Baptist’s head on a platter.
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Good Eating
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
If the right half has to do with going to church, the left is devoted to eating and drinking; The sign of the Baptist’s Head (“Good Eating,” with two mutton chops for decoration) complements the sign of the Good (or silent) Woman: the one on an eating house, the other on a tavern (180).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Good Eating
Paulson, Popular and Polite Art
It was no doubt for this reason that Hogarth juxtaposed the “Good Woman,” in his representation of it, with a “John the Baptist’s Head” on a charger inscribed “Good Eating”—the woman’s equivalent fantasy of her husband (or rather the man’s fantasy of the woman’s fantasy). This signboard design also hung in the Sign Painter’s Exhibition (no. 33). It is only in the context of these signs for tavern and eating house that we come to see the strange kite hanging off the roof of the Huguenot chapel across the way as the sign of the church: a mode of ascension into the sky. In this case Hogarth has set up three parallel signs, as he has contrasts the opposite sides of the street on a Sunday noon. Two actual signboards lead us to assimilate the third object into the same category (31-32).
. . . we see that Hogarth has divided the composition between Somebodies and Nobodies between the sign of the “Good Woman” (Somebody) and “John the Baptist” (Nobody, as a sign for an eating house) and between the two sides of the street (40).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Good Eating
Lichtenberg
First comes a house with a sign- board displaying John the Baptist's head on a charger and the inscription, 'Good Eating'. The two dog-teeth of the lion or wolf which seem to serve as brackets for the motto are here not so much symbols of parenthesis as the parenthesis itself; good eating (for teeth like that, that is). In the London of that time, most of the houses had signboards, often without the slightest reference to the standing or the occupation of the inhabitants. Perhaps a restaurant keeper settled in the house when John's head was already there (285).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Headless Woman
Ireland
In opposition to this head without a body, unaccountably displayed as a sign at an eating-house, there is a body without a head, hanging out as the sign of a distiller’s. This, by common consent, has been quaintly denominated “The Good Woman” (222).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Headless Woman
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
If the right half has to do with going to church, the left is devoted to eating and drinking; The sign of the Baptist’s Head (“Good Eating,” with two mutton chops for decoration) complements the sign of the Good (or silent) Woman: the one on an eating house, the other on a tavern (180).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Headless Woman
Paulson, Popular and Polite Art
I wonder what a Londoner felt if he stopped and considered instead of once again merely passing, a sign of the “Good Woman” on a tavern. Such a sign is represented in Hogarth’s Times of the Day: Noon, and two versions of it were hung in the Sign Painters’ Exhibition of 1762. The woman is headless; that is, has no tongue, is no longer the conventional “scolding woman,” the shrew, that popular effigy of the skimmington. In retrospect, as your sense of the sign accumulates, you may realize that this is a man’s sign, in front of a man’s tavern, and that to him a woman is not just is omitted in the sign—head, tongue, mind—but what is included, that is, a body. This becomes the subliminal image of woman for one basic impulse in man, expressible at this popular level of consciousness: the “good woman” is all body, without head, tongue, mind, or spirit (31).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Headless Woman
Lichtenberg
Close beside it on the house of a distiller, as indicated by the jug upon the post and the wooden jars hanging round the wall, is a signboard with a headless woman, and the inscription, 'The Good Woman’. Thus, there a head without a body and here a body without a head. How in England where, as in Germany, the best women always have the best heads such a thing could have been tolerated, and still is tolerated, I fail to understand.! The idea is not Hogarth's invention, for in fact this type of representation is quite common in London and, as Ireland remarks, is used especially by those who trade in paints. This I do not understand. A man without a head, on the other hand, would characterize a distillery not at all badly; for liquor puts spirit in place of the head, and spirits cannot be painted. But this is not enough for Hogarth. In that house where people eat according to the true time, he causes a little dispute about the food to arise between the man and his good woman. This is taken by her goodness in so bad part that even on a Sunday she throws a leg of mutton together with the vegetables upon the saints in the street. This is quite right. For even if the food gets no better through the transfer, still they will eat more peaceably up there. It is amusing to see how some passers-by who either hear the solid blessing coming down from above, or because they had been advised of it by the liquid blessing already upon their clothes, suddenly take refuge below in the house, either to demand damages for stains or to wait until the shower is over. One of them, happily enough, has a broom on him as if he had come to sweep up the good food (285-286).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Kennel
The roast beef, symbolic of England, is thrown into the kennel which is "choked," a dead cat emphasizing the decay.
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Kennel
Ireland
The dead cat and choked kennels mark the little attention shown to the streets by the scavengers of St. Giles’. At that time noxious effluvia was not peculiar to this parish. The neighbourhood of Fleet Ditch, and many other parts of the city, were equally polluted.
Even at this refined period, there would be some use in a more strict attention to the medical police of a city so crowded with inhabitants. We ridicule the people of Paris and Edinburgh for neglecting so essential and salutary a branch of delicacy, while the kennels of a street in the vicinity of St. Paul’s Church are floated with the blood of slaughtered animals every market day. Moses would have managed these things better: but in those days there was no physician in Israel! (224-225)
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Kennel
Quennell
a dead kitten has been tossed into the gutter (152).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Kennel
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
The scene is divided down the middle by the kennel (gutter), in which lies a dead cat (179-180).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Kennel
Lichtenberg
Quite in the foreground lies a cat that has been stoned to death—meant apparently as a cut at the filthiness of Hog Lane; perhaps also meant to symbolize good eating, for the fifth and last time (286.)
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Lovers
The public groping of the interracial servant couple is rendered satirical by their positioning below the "Good Eating" sign. Even early commentators Ireland and Nichols note the comic nature of the scene, remarking that the "good eating is carried on to the lower part of the picture" (223).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Lovers
Shesgreen
Across from the couple expressing their affection with awkward formality, an attractive girl responds to the fondling and kissing of a companion. Her pie is about to fall from her control (43).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Lovers
Uglow
A black servant, a “natural” part of this overly physical crowd, nuzzles the maid’s cheek and squeezes her breasts; she throws her head back dreamily, “her pye-dish tottering like her virtue, and with the most precious parts of its contents running over” (305).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Lovers
Trusler
We have a contrast—one which the artist was especially fond of making—between the plump rosy beauty of our own women, and the fade look, and affected smirking, of a superbly-dressed lady representing a rival nation. Look at the girl whom Sambo is saluting with such gusto; and look at the true devotee opposite—and hesitate, if you can, about that golden apple you have to bestow on the fairest. London, at this time, was overrun with French refugees; and at so early a period that they had taken possession of Leicester Fields, and colonised the surrounding region. Several districts of the metropolis were denominated “Petty France,” from the fact of the poor Huguenot refugees aggregating in such spots, in greater or lesser numbers; and, to Hogarth, their manners and habits afforded much amusement, and ample scope for a study of their idiosyncracies (118).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Lovers
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
If the right half has to do with going to church, the left is devoted to eating and drinking; the foppish French couple on the right is contrasted with the lusty, red-blooded English folk on the left . . . perhaps the Negro’s kiss parallels the kiss of the two old women on the other side of the picture (180).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Lovers
Lichtenberg
Behind is a somewhat sensual coalition between Africa and Europe. The girl, whose plumpness is evidently meant to offset the flatness of the French lady, just as the vulgar sensuality of the negro the platonic whispering of the dancing master, has just fetched a pie from the bakery. Through the yielding opposition with which she meets the efforts of her coloured friend, part of the pie spills out on to the street. This, then, is good eating for the third time, and he would show a poor understanding of Hogarth's roguishness who did not see at the first glance that the kiss here is served as the fourth course. It is not for nothing that these two heads stand so directly under the motto 'Good Eating' (286).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Old Couple
Shesgreen
Across from the couple expressing their affection with awkward formality, an attractive girl responds to the fondling and kissing of a companion. Her pie is about to fall from her control (43).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Old Couple
Uglow
In this kind of company the kiss of “politeness”—directly opposite, and thus burlesquing the real kiss of the young couple—is the embrace of two ugly old crones. There is no need to ask where the artist’s sympathies lie (306).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Old Couple
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
Ireland also takes the women kissing to be an expression of a French custom (179).
If the right half has to do with going to church, the left is devoted to eating and drinking; the foppish French couple on the right is contrasted with the lusty, red-blooded English folk on the left . . .perhaps the Negro’s kiss parallels the kiss of the two old women on the other side of the picture (180).
The Four Times of the Day: Noon: Old Couple
Lichtenberg
On the right-hand side, two matrons are exchanging a loving kiss, and how fervently! Their souls seems to be quite fused with one another, and their noses would follow suit if only they were less tough and corporeal (284).