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The exhibition is divided between two galleries at the top and bottom of the building. Best to ascend to the top gallery first, where the greater part of the show is disposed around the museum-red walls, interspersed with furniture from the Holburne’s permanent collection. The first painting is by Jonathan Richardson, of the ten-year-old Garton Orme wearing a blue coat and seated at a vaguely Cubisty spinet. Down the left side of the painting undulates an apparently supererogatory silver curtain, but its role is in fact precise, to indicate opulence. Garton looks quite the little innocent, yet grew up to be a rake and a spendthrift. So how illusory is this notion of childish innocence? Hogarth, in his 1753 treatise The Analysis of Beauty, has this to say: ‘There is but little to be seen in children’s faces, more than that they are heavy or lively.’ How then to paint youthful character? For we are told that the basic personality is fixed by the age of five. It is surely far more difficult to spot the character which may be formed but not yet emergent than to depict the characteristics which mark a face of 50.
Two paintings by Hogarth himself come next: a pair of oddities which seem to depict a tragedy, ‘Before’ and ‘After’. A child is missing from the second scene, and it is doubtless his death that is mourned here. (The black pug in the foreground of ‘Before’ is traditionally associated with bad luck.) But what is so odd about these pictures is the overlarge heads placed on the little bodies, bringing to the picture more than a touch of Vel
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