If you study History of Art, people generally assume you’re a nice, conscientious, plummy-voiced girl. Sometimes, people are right. It is the only subject I can think of that requires a student to describe what is already printed on the exam sheet. ‘In the foreground of the picture is a tree — in full leaf! — and on the horizon, a tower.’ It feels a little basic. But with art history podcasts description is everything. And to do it well is a real art in itself.
The presenters of the Art Newspaper’s The Week in Art podcast were superb last week in their exploration of a portrait by William Hogarth. Considered one of his finest, the painting hangs in the Foundling Museum in London and shows a flushed-cheeked Thomas Coram (1668–1751), founder of the hospital for abandoned children.
Coram was in many ways the dream subject for Hogarth, and thus for the imaginative listener, too. Delightfully crude, he once compared an acquaintance who failed to send a thank-you letter to ‘the baser sort of horses when they have eaten up their Provender turn their Tailes and Shi-te in the Manger’. I know what he means. Host Ben Luke might have quoted Coram’s equally curt complaint that the upper classes would not give him their time were he to ‘putt down their breeches and present their Backsides to the King and Queen…’
Waldy and Bendy looked at how tediously regressive the Pre-Raphs became
As the museum’s director Caro Howell explained, this was a problem, for as a former shipbuilder — he went to sea aged just 11 — Coram needed people of influence to help him secure a royal charter. It took him more than 17 years to gain the support of anyone respectable enough to prevail upon the king. He marked his success by having Hogarth paint him in the ‘grand manner’.
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