About two of my favorite people, who hated each other.
The Bruiser by William Hogarth (created and printed in 1763).
William Hogarth (1697 – 1764) Painter/printmaker/social critic/editorial cartoonist/pioneer of western sequential art paints and the Old King Cole of English pictorial satire, depicter of riotous taverns and surging mobs, syphilitic trollops and debauched dandies, corrupt politicians and hearty squires, unravelling corsets, impish dogs and brimming chamber pots, before-and-after tableaux in which everything goes to hell in a hand-basket, vigorous moralizer against vices.
Charles Churchill (1732 – 1764) Priest/poetaster/ladies boarding school teacher/theatre enthusiast/rake, ordained cleric in the Church of England, coarse and wildly popular political satirist, astonishingly prolific lampooner and polemic.
In the last years of his life, and firmly entrenched in the Establishment he had relentlessly satirized his entire career, William Hogarth published a caricature of his former friend, the radical journalist and politician John Wilkes, during his trial for seditious libel (Wilkes as a leering monster, sitting irreverently in a wig of horn-like locks, a “cap of liberty” on a staff). The unfortunate melding of journalism and satire administered a fatal blow to Hogarth as Wilkes’ supporters assumed ownership of the caricature, Hogarth unwittingly providing them an image to reproduce over and over again. Worse, Wilkes – an impostor of ingenuity who encouraged Charles Churchill to add faction to profligacy, and create enemies by reviling every person of rank or distinction of his choosing – released his chief attack dog/poetaster on Hogarth, who described the beleaguered artist at Wilkes’ trial thus:
Virtue, with due contempt, saw
Hogarth stand
His poisonous pencil in his
palsied hand.
Hogarth riposted by replacing his own self-portrait with that of a drunk bear in torn clerical bands, hugging a pot of ale and a club made of lies and North Britons. The pug dog from Hogarth’s The Artist and His Pug of 1745, sits pissing on Churchill’s poems. The 2 satirical geniuses/idiots bickered on (between Churchill’s debilitating bouts of syphilis), until both men died, within a few weeks of each other. Hogarth died first, Churchill’s camp asserting with malicious satisfaction, that Churchill’s poem had accelerated his death. Churchill, only 32, keeled over a few weeks later, muttering on his deathbed:
“What a fool I have been”.
