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The Four Times of the Day: Evening
1738
17 7/8” X 14 5/8” (H X W)
View the full resolution plate here.
Although lustful public groping is portrayed negatively, the situations in some marriages are no improvement, as evidenced by the couple in the "Evening" plate. Here, a couple and their children make their way through a town. The wife has typically been seen as the dominant figure in the family. Shesgreen notes that the "traditional dominance roles have been reversed" in the relation and that the woman is a "formidable personality" who "tyrannizes" her husband (44). Ireland and Nichols bemoan the husband's loss of power, equating it with a loss of manhood, crying, "God made him, and he must pass for a man" (222). The two children behind the couple enact, as Shesgreen notes, the roles of the parents (44). The boy's walking stick is strategically placed between his legs, and his tears suggest the fear of castration, the physical manifestation of his father's psychical emasculation. The castration image is continued with the broken tree at the forefront of the plate. This reversal of roles is a disruption of the natural order where the father's governance of the family is a microcosmic model for the nation's control, through government, of its citizens. Sexual intercourse, aside from being implied by the pregnancy and the presence of children, is suggested by the husband's expression. Shesgreen states that his look is "helpless, almost hypnotized," but his appearance is all too reminiscent of Hogarth's displays of sexual exhaustion (44). In effect, this husband, trapped by his children, has become his wife's sexual slave. The unhappy pregnant dog also reflects the burden of childbearing. The wife is maternal and sexual-a threatening combination in the eighteenth century. Ruth Perry describes the separation of motherhood and sexuality in the era, stating that "Motherhood as it was constructed in the early modern period is a production-geared phenomenon" (186). Perry cites Anna Darvin who states that this "utilitarian" idea established women as "natural resources" who were to produce children "for the Empire" (186). The importance of this task "dictated that 'nonproductive' forms of sexuality were increasingly displaced and devalued" and, ultimately, motherhood served to "repress women's sexuality" (186). The sexual mother here is not only rendering her husband exhausted, but is entertaining other lovers as well. This infidelity is evidenced by the cow's horns over the husband's head indicating his status as cuckold. Thus, even marriage is unsafe; infidelity and female tyranny plague the once-sacred union. The public fondling in the first two plates and the role reversal in the third culminate in the chaos of the fourth, “Night.”
The Four Times of the Day: Evening
Shesgreen, Sean. Engravings by Hogarth. (1973)
This plate depicts the “entertainment” of a middle-class family in which the traditional dominance roles have been reversed. A London dyer (in the second state the man’s hands were blue to indicate his trade) and his family have left the city to visit “Sadlers Wells,” an amusement center of popular appeal. The center of the print is the coarse, oversized and very pregnant wife who is suffering from the evening’s heat. In contrast to her prosaic dress and appearance she affects gloves and a fan with a pretentious mythological subject on it (Venus detaining Adonis from the chase). A formidable personality, she not only tyrannizes her husband but has cuckolded him; the horns of the cow appear above him. He walks by her side, a small, thin figure, obediently carrying their youngest child (whose shoe has fallen off to expose an undarned hold in her sock). The husband bears a helpless, almost hypnotized expression on his face.
In front of the couple slouches their pregnant dog gazing at its appearance in the water. Behind the couple their children act out the relationship of their parents. A fierce-looking little girl demands her bother’s gingerbread figure as she threatens him with her fan; he responds passively with tears (although he has his father’s oversized walking stick between his legs). Behind the children their nurse unties one of their shoelaces.
To the right of the nurse a figure milks a cow, indicating the time of day (about 5 P.M.). At the extreme right a group of people sit in a tavern garden, while inside, in one of Hogarth’s most peaceful tavern scenes, another set of Londoners, come to enjoy the country, crowd together in the smoky room and drink. The tavern sign bears the portrait of “Sr Hugh Middleton.” This personal brought water into the City of London from the surrounding countryside. The little canal in the foreground is probably intended as his work. The contrasting landscape in the background presents a quiet pastoral scene (44).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening
Uglow, Jenny. Hogarth: A Life and a World. (1997)
In Evening, a fierce (but unchaste) Diana, carrying a fan which tells her mythic story, drags her hen-pecked, cuckolded husband back from a day out in the “groves” of Sadler’s Wells (303).
After the vitality of Noon, Evening has all the genuine exhaustion and edgy nerves of the end of a summer outing. This too is a variation on the theme of affectation. Hogarth shows a family trailing crossly back from their trip to the mill and the inn and the milk-rich bow at Sadler’s Wells, the wife imitating the excursions and airs of her betters. The theatre is behind them, and the tavern on the left, its sign bearing the portrait of the philanthropic Sir Hugh Middleton, who brought fresh water to London through conduits from the reservoir at Islington. Hogarth’s wit embraces the “middling folk,” the shopkeepers and carpenters who traipse out to the country on a boiling day, only to crowd inside a pub and blow smoke from their pipes into each other’s faces, while the women in the garden eagerly eavesdrop on the conversation. But for his principal subjects the pastoral excursion has been far from refreshing. Even the dog looks as if he has had enough. The heat has made the stout woman’s face as red as sunset (in the print Hogarth used a red ink to make his point) and if she is Diana, she is not a virgin goddess but the lusty deity of procreation, as her pregnancy and the cow’s horns, peering over their husband’s head, suggest. Her daughter, with a fan to match her mother’s, seems to follow her lead, pointing forcefully at the king-shaped gingerbread man held by her little brother, who howls, almost tripped up by the knob-headed cane that his father has lent him for a hobby-hose.
There are plenty of old jokes here about masterful women and emasculated men, and perhaps some topical allusion too, since there was much talk of the Queen’s influence over her strutting little husband. But there is a sweet realism and tenderness too in Hogarth’s image—look at the accuracy with which he paints the tired father carrying his small daughter, his hands clasped around her ruched-up skirt, as she rests her head on his shoulder and clutches his cravat in a tiny fist, letting her feet loll free (306-309).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening
Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth’s Graphic Works. (1965)
The couple, a dyer and his wife, have walked north from London to escape the heat, apparently visiting "SADLERS WELLS" Theater on the bank of the New River (the wooden pipe was used in the waterworks). Sadler's Wells was a resort of the London middle class, famous for its burletta and rope-dancers. Hogarth's laying his scene here is an interesting touch since the paintings were intended for Vauxhall; as a contemporary poet put it, "In gay Vauxhall now saunter beaux and belles, / And happier wits resort to Sadler's Wells."
Heat and futile attempts to escape from it are the main themes. The husband in the foreground has fled the city but cannot escape the heat, or the overpowering presence of his wife, or the fact that he is a cuckold (as we see from the position of the cow behind him), or the burden of the child he carries. The wife's fan shows "Venus detaining Adonis from the Chase" (according to Stephens, BM Sat.). The addition of the scolding girl, besides offering a cause for the boy's tears, creates a parallel with the adults, a typically Hogarthian comment. Both males are henpecked, each with his infant and his fan-shaking shrew. As there is no escape into the country, there is no escape into the future either. In the same way, the men in the tavern try to escape the heat by shutting themselves in a smoky room (as opposed to the women and the man in a bag-wig who sit outdoors); the cow swishes its tail at flies and the dog looks longingly at the cool water. Even the luxuriance of the foliage which covers the windows of the tavern indicates the heat. Although it is evening (milking-time) there seems to be little abatement. Johnson later used this print as the basis for his Idler No. 15 (July 22, 1758).
Hugh Middleton was a seventeenth-century philanthropist who was instrumental in bringing water into London from the north; he chose a spring in the parish of Amwell in Hertfordshire, and one near Ware, each about twenty miles from London. He brought the two streams together and piped their water into London, into the Islington reservoir, which was completed in 1613 (180-181).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening
Trusler, Rev. J. and E.F. Roberts. The Complete Works of William Hogarth. (1800)
Despite the covert cynicism observable in this picture—despite the ample beauties of the buxom matron, and the mild, inoffensive, and hen-pecked air of her husband, who toils under his duties, he seems quite disposed to make the best of his Sunday ramble. The breezy hills of Highgate lie in the distance, and a noble breadth and sweep of thoroughly English sky gives air and amplitude to the whole. It is by no means difficult to imagine the charm of a rural walk to him, who, from week’s end to week’s end, is in “the populous city pent.” Then, indeed, the suburbs of London must have been delightful—their pure rural character untouched by any rascal hand pretending to taste, and reveling in stucco and veneer. The, indeed, there were “quick freshets,” purling brooks and “bourned,” pellucid streams, broad meadows, and noble pasture-fields—pleasant of a morn in May; or in the soft stillness of a summer’s evening; fragrant with the odour of the new-mown hay, they were worth a journey out to see.
The introduction of tea into the metropolis, as a beverage that exhilarates (I don’t feel much exhilarated by it, to be candid), created a new form of relaxation and amusement; a made the bond between neighbours, friends, and families all the closer, because there soon sprung up places of resort in the suburbs, which added the charm of rurality—and a vision of green fields and the country to Cockney eyes—to those habits of association that are known as conviviality; and which, through the medium of this harmless beverage, brought them together in larger parties; and very merry and very moral junkettings naturally resulted. It is conjectured that some quarter of a million of Londoners went forth every Sunday to these tepid and harmless guinguettes, and that £25,000 a-day may be estimated as the outlay. Fields, “tea-gardens,” and ancient cottages, where “hot water for twopence” might be got, were much affected. These were Sadler’s Wells, the “Prospect House,” near Islington; “Jenny’s Whim,” at Chelsea (is that the defunct “Monster,” I wonder?); Spring Gardens, at Newington and at Stepney; the “Castle,” at Kentish Town; the “Angel,” at Upper Holloway—not to speak of the remore “Elephant and Castle,” “Jack Straw’s Castle,” “Bagnige Wells,” “White Conduit Gardens,” and others preceding and following; and keeping up the pretty fancy of suburban excursions and innocent festivities—the only relaxation the toil-worn thousands of London have as a compensation for their dreary imprisonment in the midst of the brick and smoke of this enormous Babel.
But a suburban trip out of London now! What can that possibly mean? Five or ten miles by omnibus is necessitated, at the very least, as a simple condition of getting out of London, and then you only hover about the outskirts of grim black carcasses, and the eye is assailed by bricks, brick-fields, and other indications of building. More building! Ten, twenty, or thirty miles by train, and then the country begins to smile wooingly and refreshingly upon you. The cool, grateful aspect of the grass and the foliage, after the blistering familiarity one has with glaring brickwork, hot and arid, is unspeakably delicious. Nature puts on her sweetest smiles to welcome us in field or forest. The blood runs quicker in the veins of children: their laugh is a carol; their shoutings a jubilee of joy. It is a white-letter day. Let us enjoy it (119-120).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening
Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth: His Life, Art and Times. (1971)
The third and fourth plates offer one alternative each: order or anarchy, wifely control or husbandly escape to the Freemasons’ lodge, drink, Jabobite fantasies (Restoration Day), and saturnalia. If the problem of Morning is how the stave off the cold, in Evening it is how to escape the heat. Warmth, no longer absent, has become oppressive. It is the crushing heat of the London afternoon, of marriage, of responsibility, perhaps of maturity (vol. 1 404).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening
Ireland, John and John Nichols. Hogarth’s Works. (1883)
It is not easy to imagine fatigue better delineated than in the appearance of this amiable pair. In a few of the earliest impressions, Mr. Hogarth printed the hands of the man in blue, to show that he was a dyer, and the face and neck of the woman in red, to intimate her extreme heat. The lady’s aspect lets us at once into her character; we are certain she was born to command. As to her husband, “God made him, and he must pass for a man;” what his wife has made him is indicated by the cow’s horns, which are so placed as to become his own. The hope of the family, with a cockade in his hat, and riding upon papa’s cane, seems much dissatisfied with female sway. A face with more of the shrew in embryo than that upon the girl, it is scarcely possible to conceive. Upon such a character, the most causal observer pronounces with the decision of Lavater.
Nothing can be better imagined than the group in the alehouse. They have taken a refreshing walk into the country, and, being determined to have a cooling pipe, seat themselves in a chair-lumbered closet with a low ceiling; where every man pulling off his wig and throwing a pocket-handkerchief over his head, inhales the fume of hot punch, the smoke of half a dozen pipes, and the dust from the road. If this is not rural felicity, what is? The old gentleman in a black bag-wig, and the two women near him, sensibly enough, take their seats in the open air.
From a woman milking a cow, we conjecture the hour to be about five in the afternoon; and from the same circumstances, I am inclined to think this agreeable party are going to their pastoral bower rather than returning from it.
The cow and dog appear as much inconvenienced by heat as any of the party: the former is whisking off the flies; and the latter creeps unwillingly along, and casts a longing look at the crystal river in which he sees his own shadow. A remarkably hot summer is intimated by the luxuriant state of a vine creeping over an alehouse window. On the side of the New River, where the scene is laid, lies one of the wooden pipes employed in the waterworks. Opposite Sadler’s Wells there remains a sign of Sir Hugh Middleton’s head [London goldsmith and projector who was essential in developing reservoirs], which is here represented.
This print is engraved by Baron, but some touches of Mr. Hogarth’s burin are visible on the faces.
Dr. Johnson, I think it is, who observes that an ardent pursuit of pleasure generally defeats its own purpose; for when we have wasted days and nights, and exhausted our strength in the chase, it eludes our grasp, and vanishes from view (227-229).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening
Quennell, Peter. Hogarth’s Progress. (1955)
Beside the first and last of the series, Hogarth’s Noon and Evening seem comparatively prosaic works. Evening takes us to the Sir Hugh Middleton, a suburban public house near Sadler’s Wells, whither a harassed citizen—a dyer by trade—and his fat, sweating, bad-tempered wife have brought their three children for a breath of country air. The eighteenth-century equivalent of that familiar Bank Holiday admonition—“Enjoy yourselves, can’t you!”—has evidently just been uttered. But one little girl has fallen fast asleep; the little boy, dressed up like an adult beau, indulges in a fit of tantrums, and is savagely reprimanded by his shrewish sister. Their parents are foot-sire and tired and cross; and the artist, with somewhat ponderous humour, has arranged the horns of a grazing cow so that they appear to sprout from the citizen’s wig. This insular episode is preceded by and impression of London’s foreign colony (151).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening
Lichtenberg, G. Ch. Lichtenberg’s Commentaries on Hogarth’s Engravings. (1784-1796). Translated from the German by Innes and Gustav Herdan (1966)
A sultry evening in September in the district of Islington, a large village near the northern outskirts of London. Among several places of public entertainment for the inhabitants of London proper, there is in that district a building known as Sadler's Wells, where in the summer plays of all kinds—comedies, tight-rope walking, acrobatics, ladder dances and gymnastics—are performed before large and hilarious audiences. The company, of course, is not brilliant, and it is not in order to be seen that the man of standing will frequent it, but more often in order to look and to find amusement, while his fine clothes remain hanging in his ward- robe and he, in his workaday coat, removed from all doing and suffering in the world of compliments, takes his ease here. There is something very refreshing about the country-side, and the interpreter of these engravings hardly ever takes up this Plate without being charmed by the memory of the few summer evenings he has spent under that sky with his friends.
The main group with which our artist has tried to animate that little paradise consists of a middle-class family, a London dyer and his wife, who neither by their physical nor—as we shall hear presently—their moral qualities are specially suited to revive in our imagination our first ancestors. They have three children with them, and our artist has raised great hopes of a fourth. In front of them slowly waddles the family dog, with strong indications of similar happy expectations. Everything is tired, lazy and heavy, and—oh, how warm! The housewife feels this most. She is, as one sees, nourished somewhat beyond the limits of the good and the beautiful. Bosom à la Montgolfière, happy expectations à la Montgolfière. Oh my goodness! how heavy! Shakespeare once made a spring morn hang a dew pearl on every cowslip's ear. With our cauliflower here, the sultry evening has essayed a similar experiment, and has hung a pearl close to the ear, beneath the hair. But this seems to have been a mere mistake, which is just about to be rectified; in a moment the pearl will be hanging on the ear lobe. In one hand she carries the hat and gloves of her dear husband, who in exchange carries the child, and even a part of the wife herself, who has been weighed out to him by Heaven with so generous a turn of the scales; for she really leans with the hand in which she holds the fan upon her husband's shoulder. On the fan we see a group from ancient times which, if we include the little urchin here in the braided hat, bears some resemblance to the present group. It is Venus and Adonis with Cupid; only there they have made themselves somewhat more comfortable. Our little city Cupid bestrides Papa's stick and expresses his indignation at his sister who, with a face already old and a temper and language even older, grudges him his little gingerbread man and wants to snatch it away from him.
What sort of children's faces these are! If it is true that early marked traits in children's faces are the precursors of ugliness in maturity, what will happen to children who were fated to be deprived already in their mother's womb of that innocent and charming vacuity of feature, so full of promise of everything good and beautiful? Cupid rides here upon the stick of Adonis and wears a cockade in his hat. The idea of giving Cupid the role of an ensign is not bad, only our young man here is a rather uncomely ensign. Briefly, the boy is not a soldier and never will be. How would he come to that so early in a country where, in addition to holy baptism, there is no sacrament of the red cravat? It is merely a childish game.
Just behind the married couple a cow is being milked whose udder à la Montgolfière is an eloquent symbol of the abundance of that district and the happy countryside But here occurs a sad and ominous circumstance which will evoke the pity of every feeling husband For that cow bestows her head ornament on our Adonis in so sisterly a fashion that one begins to wonder whose property it really is--the dyer's or the cow’s. Oh madam, madam! The poor fellow, a tame, good-natured drudge, is not author but only editor. In what mood must he be, in this hot weather, even if he is only half aware of it, especially with the little issue upon his arm who clutches him so violently by the necktie that his face seems to swell up. The child has lost a shoe which lies on the ground below, apparently with the object of showing the naked heel which has come right through the stocking; a lively proof of the value of our Venus as housewife, just as the cow's ornament testifies to her value as wedded wife.
Close by stands an inn, with a luxurious vine heavy with grapes, and a signboard over which we must linger a few moments.
The man whose likeness hangs there is Sir Hugh Myddelton, a London goldsmith and one who has deserved well of that city. He achieved a feat which had been considered almost impossible, that is, to provide London with fresh water from the countryside. Between he years 1608 and 1613 he built a canal from Hertfordshire twenty miles long, the so-called New River; and that is just the water which flows past here and upon which the thirsty bitch gazes with longing yet irresolute indolence. He lost his fortune in that enterprise. His whole reward was a new burden; title without fortune. I do not know whether he has been awarded any other Monument apart from the portrait which hangs in the Guidhall the Goldsmiths' Company in London, and--this inn-sign. And this leads to some profitable reflections.
One would be very much mistaken in imagining that every well-deserving person in England eats from silver dishes while alive and after death rests under a marble slab. How many of them eat out of their hands all their, as they walk the streets, and find their monument in the end, if they find one at all, upon a signboard! Though, of course, it is not such a bad memorial, if the man himself was not bad. If the houses feel that the name upon the signboard does them honour, it will be there for all eternity. Stone monuments are not restored once they have decayed; signboards are renovated again and again and then replaced by completely new ones, till the end of time. I really think that this is a way to immortality, and since 'German' was always a synonym for 'good and cheap', a Pantheon on signboards could truly be called a German Pantheon. You may smile at this, but I am quite serious. What could be more honourable than to look down through the centuries from an inn signboard upon posterity passing in and out beneath, or to be looked up to by them? I can foresee, of course, that the idea will be ridiculed, but that is only because it is a good one. Few people can make a clever face when they look into the sun. Would it be any worse to lodge in the 'Herr von Leibniz' than in the 'King of Prussia'? Or would the place up there above the door or on the pole itself be less suited to the scholar than to the king? I should like to hear somebody tell me that, if he has the courage, and I should like to see the learned man who would feel ashamed to fill the place which up to now even the emperors and kings of the earth with their crown princes and crowns; which the golden angels; the sun, the moon and the stars; the kings of the animals and of the countryside; the eagle with single and double head, the lion with single and double tail, and the horse sometimes with none at all; which the rose and the lily of the field, as well as the French ones, in all their magnificence, have not disdained to occupy. Did they not hang up whole towns, London, Paris and Constantinople, to honour them with all their inhabitants? One should not object here that signboards also show waves, oxen, goats and Moors, who obviously belong among the apes; snakes and dragons and geese,' who, even if they were made of gold, still remain geese. This is no objection for this was ever the way of the world with all marks of honour--with marble monuments and order ribbons, with letters of nobility and doctor diplomas, with titles and surrogate titles, and will ever be until the end of recorded time, who is the mother of us all. Did not the Devil himself in the shape of the last Duke of Orleans wear the Order of the Holy Ghost? Perhaps in this way the German inns will improve a little, at last. Some of them are still in a pretty bad state. What we need is a German Howard who will do for inns what the English Howard1 has done for prisons.
A few more words about the German Pantheon in general. I would not advise a marble one: one can foresee that eventually it would become a stony company of Germans which would not be of much more value than our papery one; even less, for it seems to me it is quite a question whether there are any other monuments at all in the world except papery ones, since tradition has ceded all her privileges to the printing presses, and now in its second childhood carries on a not quite honest traffic on the principle that one hand washes the other. I think the question must be answered in the negative. Even the eternal monuments which our fellow men have erected to themselves upon the rocks of the moon and the borders of the universe through new planets with new satellites, and on the path of the planets and comets, would be nothing without their paper certificates attached. Alexander would be forgotten like every other highway robber, had it not occurred to a writer to make him a testimonial about his commonplace exploits which, constantly renewed and embellished, continues to circulate throughout the world. On the road to the temple of eternal fame, a man may help himself along to the first few post-stations by means of gold and silver, etc., but whoever would continue his journey cannot do so without genuine paper money. Now let us keep in mind what paper signifies! A field of flax, what a prospect! What is not latent here, as a physicist would say! Oh! whoever goes past such a field, be it on horse- back or on foot, he should doff his hat and ponder, not only on latent cuffs for his shirts, but on immortality too. If one wants to do something more, then I should advise signboards, for besides the publicity of marble, they possess all the imperishableness of paper. So much for the signboard of this inn, and now a few words about the inn itself.
Through the raised window we see that it is not a very brilliant company which is here, with one accord, employing Dr Johnson's remedy against suicide. The droll aspect of it is (for Hogarth does nothing without point) that these people have left a smoky town with the express intention of enjoying the country air, and have now shut themselves up in a smoky room. Those at the window have certainly the best seats here; one may reckon on a dozen others being behind them. For even at the cool window they feel so hot that they have taken off their wigs and have tied their handkerchiefs round their shaved heads. Outside the house is a man in such a position near the vine that he has drawn upon himself the attention of an inquisitive laundry girl. This class of people, the whole world over, will always poke their noses into things which have nothing to do with laundering, and which they do not understand. The meaning of the woman with the shoe in the background is, to tell the truth, not quite clear to me. The interpreters all glide over it, as if they had not noticed her, with the exception of Trusler, and he makes a remark which is not very plausible as far as I can see, namely 'that the woman behind is stretching the shoe of the girl (the elder daughter), shows that she is just as tired as the boy'. The reader will feel that there is nothing whatever to this. But there is surely something behind it. The English speak of a horseshoe, and, if a horse has already been mentioned, of just a shoe. If now, in addition, they had a certain saying, very common in German, about the horseshoe and its loss, then this female shoe may well have been lost, and such a thing could easily happen at Sadler's Wells, especially if one is accustomed to wear one's shoes somewhat lightly (287-292).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening
Dobson, Austin. William Hogarth. (1907)
The third [plate features] a citizen and his wife returning from Sadler’s Wells on a sultry summer’s evening.
. . . the delightful coxcombry of the Frenchman in his ailes-de-pigeon and solitaire; the much enduring dyer and his melting wife in Evening . . . are excellent (58-59).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Bossy
The two children behind the couple enact, as Shesgreen notes, the roles of the parents (44). The boy's walking stick is strategically placed between his legs, and his tears suggest the fear of castration, the physical manifestation of his father's psychical emasculation. The castration image is continued with the broken tree at the forefront of the plate. This reversal of roles is a disruption of the natural order where the father's governance of the family is a microcosmic model for the nation's control, through government, of its citizens.
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Bossy
Shesgreen
Behind the couple their children act out the relationship of their parents. A fierce-looking little girl demands her bother’s gingerbread figure as she threatens him with her fan; he responds passively with tears (although he has his father’s oversized walking stick between his legs). Behind the children their nurse unties one of their shoelaces (44).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Bossy
Uglow
Her daughter, with a fan to match her mother’s, seems to follow her lead, pointing forcefully at the king-shaped gingerbread man held by her little brother, who howls, almost tripped up by the knob-headed cane that his father has lent him for a hobby-hose (306).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Bossy
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
The addition of the scolding girl, besides offering a cause for the boy's tears, creates a parallel with the adults, a typically Hogarthian comment. Both males are henpecked, each with his infant and his fan-shaking shrew (180).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Bossy
Ireland
The hope of the family, with a cockade in his hat, and riding upon papa’s cane, seems much dissatisfied with female sway. A face with more of the shrew in embryo than that upon the girl, it is scarcely possible to conceive. Upon such a character, the most causal observer pronounces with the decision of Lavater (227).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Bossy
Lichtenberg
Our little city Cupid bestrides Papa's stick and expresses his indignation at his sister who, with a face already old and a temper and language even older, grudges him his little gingerbread man and wants to snatch it away from him.
What sort of children's faces these are! If it is true that early marked traits in children's faces are the precursors of ugliness in maturity, what will happen to children who were fated to be deprived already in their mother's womb of that innocent and charming vacuity of feature, so full of promise of everything good and beautiful? Cupid rides here upon the stick of Adonis and wears a cockade in his hat. The idea of giving Cupid the role of an ensign is not bad, only our young man here is a rather uncomely ensign. Briefly, the boy is not a soldier and never will be. How would he come to that so early in a country where, in addition to holy baptism, there is no sacrament of the red cravat? It is merely a childish game (288-289).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Cuckold
Although lustful public groping is portrayed negatively, the situations in some marriages are no improvement, as evidenced by the couple in the "Evening" plate. Here, a couple and their children make their way through a town. The wife has typically been seen as the dominant figure in the family. Shesgreen notes that the "traditional dominance roles have been reversed" in the relation and that the woman is a "formidable personality" who "tyrannizes" her husband (44). Ireland and Nichols bemoan the husband's loss of power, equating it with a loss of manhood, crying, "God made him, and he must pass for a man" (227).
Sexual intercourse, aside from being implied by the pregnancy and the presence of children, is suggested by the husband's expression. Shesgreen states that his look is "helpless, almost hypnotized," but his appearance is all too reminiscent of Hogarth's displays of sexual exhaustion (44). In effect, this husband, trapped by his children, has become his wife's sexual slave. The sexual mother here is not only rendering her husband exhausted, but is entertaining other lovers as well. This infidelity is evidenced by the cow's horns over the husband's head indicating his status as cuckold. Thus, even marriage is unsafe; infidelity and female tyranny plague the once-sacred union.
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Cuckold
Shesgreen
This plate depicts the “entertainment” of a middle-class family in which the traditional dominance roles have been reversed. A London dyer (in the second state the man’s hands were blue to indicate his trade) and his family have left the city to visit “Sadlers Wells,” an amusement center of popular appeal.
A formidable personality, [the wife] not only tyrannizes her husband but has cuckolded him; the horns of the cow appear above him. He walks by her side, a small, thin figure, obediently carrying their youngest child (whose shoe has fallen off to expose an undarned hold in her sock). The husband bears a helpless, almost hypnotized expression on his face (44).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Cuckold
Uglow
In Evening, a fierce (but unchaste) Diana, carrying a fan which tells her mythic story, drags her hen-pecked, cuckolded husband back from a day out in the “groves” of Sadler’s Wells (303).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Cuckold
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
The husband in the foreground has fled the city but cannot escape the heat, or the overpowering presence of his wife, or the fact that he is a cuckold (as we see from the position of the cow behind him), or the burden of the child he carries (180).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Cuckold
Trusler
Despite the covert cynicism observable in this picture—despite the ample beauties of the buxom matron, and the mild, inoffensive, and hen-pecked air of her husband, who toils under his duties, he seems quite disposed to make the best of his Sunday ramble (119).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Cuckold
Ireland
It is not easy to imagine fatigue better delineated than in the appearance of this amiable pair. In a few of the earliest impressions, Mr. Hogarth printed the hands of the man in blue, to show that he was a dyer, and the face and neck of the woman in red, to intimate her extreme heat. The lady’s aspect lets us at once into her character; we are certain she was born to command. As to her husband, “God made him, and he must pass for a man;” what his wife has made him is indicated by the cow’s horns, which are so placed as to become his own (227).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Cuckold
Quennell
a harassed citizen—a dyer by trade—and his fat, sweating, bad-tempered wife have brought their three children for a breath of country air. The eighteenth-century equivalent of that familiar Bank Holiday admonition—“Enjoy yourselves, can’t you!”—has evidently just been uttered. But one little girl has fallen fast asleep (151).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Cuckold
Lichtenberg
The main group with which our artist has tried to animate that little paradise consists of a middle-class family, a London dyer and his wife, who neither by their physical nor—as we shall hear presently—their moral qualities are specially suited to revive in our imagination our first ancestors.
. . .here occurs a sad and ominous circumstance which will evoke the pity of every feeling husband For that cow bestows her head ornament on our Adonis in so sisterly a fashion that one begins to wonder whose property it really is--the dyer's or the cow’s. Oh madam, madam! The poor fellow, a tame, good-natured drudge, is not author but only editor. In what mood must he be, in this hot weather, even if he is only half aware of it, especially with the little issue upon his arm who clutches him so violently by the necktie that his face seems to swell up. The child has lost a shoe which lies on the ground below, apparently with the object of showing the naked heel which has come right through the stocking; a lively proof of the value of our Venus as housewife, just as the cow's ornament testifies to her value as wedded wife (287-288).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Milking
A cow is being milked, the horns displaying behind the husband’s head to hint that he is a cuckold.
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Milking
Shesgreen
To the right of the nurse a figure milks a cow, indicating the time of day (about 5 P.M.) (44).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Milking
Ireland
From a woman milking a cow, we conjecture the hour to be about five in the afternoon; and from the same circumstances, I am inclined to think this agreeable party are going to their pastoral bower rather than returning from it (228).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Milking
Lichtenberg
Just behind the married couple a cow is being milked whose udder à la Montgolfière is an eloquent symbol of the abundance of that district and the happy countryside (289).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Pregnant Dog
The unhappy pregnant dog also reflects the burden of childbearing.
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Pregnant Dog
Shesgreen
In front of the couple slouches their pregnant dog gazing at its appearance in the water (44).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Pregnant Dog
Uglow
Even the dog looks as if he has had enough (306).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Pregnant Dog
Ireland
The cow and dog appear as much inconvenienced by heat as any of the party: the former is whisking off the flies; and the latter creeps unwillingly along, and casts a longing look at the crystal river in which he sees his own shadow (228).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Pregnant Dog
Lichtenberg
In front of them slowly waddles the family dog, with strong indications of similar happy expectations (287).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Sadlers
Uglow
In Evening, a fierce (but unchaste) Diana, carrying a fan which tells her mythic story, drags her hen-pecked, cuckolded husband back from a day out in the “groves” of Sadler’s Wells (303).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Sadlers
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
The couple, a dyer and his wife, have walked north from London to escape the heat, apparently visiting "SADLERS WELLS" Theater on the bank of the New River (the wooden pipe was used in the waterworks). Sadler's Wells was a resort of the London middle class, famous for its burletta and rope-dancers. Hogarth's laying his scene here is an interesting touch since the paintings were intended for Vauxhall; as a contemporary poet put it, "In gay Vauxhall now saunter beaux and belles, / And happier wits resort to Sadler's Wells" (180).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Sadlers
Quennell
Evening takes us to the Sir Hugh Middleton, a suburban public house near Sadler’s Wells (151).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Sadlers
Lichtenberg
Among several places of public entertainment for the inhabitants of London proper, there is in that district a building known as Sadler's Wells, where in the summer plays of all kinds—comedies, tight-rope walking, acrobatics, ladder dances and gymnastics—are performed before large and hilarious audiences. The company, of course, is not brilliant, and it is not in order to be seen that the man of standing will frequent it, but more often in order to look and to find amusement, while his fine clothes remain hanging in his ward- robe and he, in his workaday coat, removed from all doing and suffering in the world of compliments, takes his ease here. There is something very refreshing about the country-side, and the interpreter of these engravings hardly ever takes up this Plate without being charmed by the memory of the few summer evenings he has spent under that sky with his friends (287).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Sign
Shesgreen
The tavern sign bears the portrait of “Sr Hugh Middleton.” This personal brought water into the City of London from the surrounding countryside. The little canal in the foreground is probably intended as his work. The contrasting landscape in the background presents a quiet pastoral scene (44).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Sign
Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works
Hugh Middleton was a seventeenth-century philanthropist who was instrumental in bringing water into London from the north; he chose a spring in the parish of Amwell in Hertfordshire, and one near Ware, each about twenty miles from London. He brought the two streams together and piped their water into London, into the Islington reservoir, which was completed in 1613 (180-181).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Sign
Ireland
Opposite Sadler’s Wells there remains a sign of Sir Hugh Middleton’s head [London goldsmith and projector who was essential in developing reservoirs], which is here represented (228).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Sign
Quennell
Evening takes us to the Sir Hugh Middleton, a suburban public house near Sadler’s Wells (151).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Sign
Lichtenberg
Close by stands an inn, with a luxurious vine heavy with grapes, and a signboard over which we must linger a few moments.
The man whose likeness hangs there is Sir Hugh Myddelton, a London goldsmith and one who has deserved well of that city. He achieved a feat which had been considered almost impossible, that is, to provide London with fresh water from the countryside. Between he years 1608 and 1613 he built a canal from Hertfordshire twenty miles long, the so-called New River; and that is just the water which flows past here and upon which the thirsty bitch gazes with longing yet irresolute indolence. He lost his fortune in that enterprise. His whole reward was a new burden; title without fortune. I do not know whether he has been awarded any other Monument apart from the portrait which hangs in the Guidhall the Goldsmiths' Company in London, and--this inn-sign (289).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Wife
Although lustful public groping is portrayed negatively, the situations in some marriages are no improvement, as evidenced by the couple in the "Evening" plate. Here, a couple and their children make their way through a town. The wife has typically been seen as the dominant figure in the family. Shesgreen notes that the "traditional dominance roles have been reversed" in the relation and that the woman is a "formidable personality" who "tyrannizes" her husband (44). Ireland bemoans the husband's loss of power, equating it with a loss of manhood. He cries, "God made him, and he must pass for a man" (227).
The wife is maternal and sexual-a threatening combination in the eighteenth century. Ruth Perry describes the separation of motherhood and sexuality in the era, stating that "Motherhood as it was constructed in the early modern period is a production-geared phenomenon" (186). Perry cites Anna Darvin who states that this "utilitarian" idea established women as "natural resources" who were to produce children "for the Empire" (186). The importance of this task "dictated that 'nonproductive' forms of sexuality were increasingly displaced and devalued" and, ultimately, motherhood served to "repress women's sexuality" (186). The sexual mother here is not only rendering her husband exhausted, but is entertaining other lovers as well. This infidelity is evidenced by the cow's horns over the husband's head indicating his status as cuckold. Thus, even marriage is unsafe; infidelity and female tyranny plague the once-sacred union.
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Wife
Shesgreen
The center of the print is the coarse, oversized and very pregnant wife who is suffering from the evening’s heat. In contrast to her prosaic dress and appearance she affects gloves and a fan with a pretentious mythological subject on it (Venus detaining Adonis from the chase). A formidable personality, she not only tyrannizes her husband but has cuckolded him; the horns of the cow appear above him (44).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Wife
Uglow
In Evening, a fierce (but unchaste) Diana, carrying a fan which tells her mythic story, drags her hen-pecked, cuckolded husband back from a day out in the “groves” of Sadler’s Wells (303).
The heat has made the stout woman’s face as red as sunset (in the print Hogarth used a red ink to make his point) and if she is Diana, she is not a virgin goddess but the lusty deity of procreation, as her pregnancy and the cow’s horns, peering over their husband’s head, suggest (306).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Wife
Trusler
Despite the covert cynicism observable in this picture—despite the ample beauties of the buxom matron, and the mild, inoffensive, and hen-pecked air of her husband, who toils under his duties, he seems quite disposed to make the best of his Sunday ramble (119).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Wife
Ireland
It is not easy to imagine fatigue better delineated than in the appearance of this amiable pair. In a few of the earliest impressions, Mr. Hogarth printed the hands of the man in blue, to show that he was a dyer, and the face and neck of the woman in red, to intimate her extreme heat. The lady’s aspect lets us at once into her character; we are certain she was born to command. As to her husband, “God made him, and he must pass for a man;” what his wife has made him is indicated by the cow’s horns, which are so placed as to become his own (227).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Wife
Quennell
a harassed citizen—a dyer by trade—and his fat, sweating, bad-tempered wife have brought their three children for a breath of country air. The eighteenth-century equivalent of that familiar Bank Holiday admonition—“Enjoy yourselves, can’t you!”—has evidently just been uttered. But one little girl has fallen fast asleep (151).
The Four Times of the Day: Evening: Wife
Lichtenberg
The main group with which our artist has tried to animate that little paradise consists of a middle-class family, a London dyer and his wife, who neither by their physical nor—as we shall hear presently—their moral qualities are specially suited to revive in our imagination our first ancestors. Everything is tired, lazy and heavy, and—oh, how warm! The housewife feels this most. She is, as one sees, nourished somewhat beyond the limits of the good and the beautiful. Bosom à la Montgolfière, happy expectations à la Montgolfière. Oh my goodness! how heavy! Shakespeare once made a spring morn hang a dew pearl on every cowslip's ear. With our cauliflower here, the sultry evening has essayed a similar experiment, and has hung a pearl close to the ear, beneath the hair. But this seems to have been a mere mistake, which is just about to be rectified; in a moment the pearl will be hanging on the ear lobe. In one hand she carries the hat and gloves of her dear husband, who in exchange carries the child, and even a part of the wife herself, who has been weighed out to him by Heaven with so generous a turn of the scales; for she really leans with the hand in which she holds the fan upon her husband's shoulder. On the fan we see a group from ancient times which, if we include the little urchin here in the braided hat, bears some resemblance to the present group. It is Venus and Adonis with Cupid; only there they have made themselves somewhat more comfortable (287-288).