![\"\"](\"http:\/\/teensleuth.com\/hauntedlibrary\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/thebruiser.jpg\" "\\"thebruiser\\"")
<\/a>The Bruiser b<\/em>y William Hogarth\u00a0(created and printed in 1763).<\/p>\nWilliam Hogarth (1697 \u2013 1764)\u00a0Painter\/printmaker\/social critic\/editorial cartoonist\/pioneer of western sequential art paints and\u00a0the 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,\u00a0before-and-after tableaux in which everything goes to hell in a hand-basket,\u00a0vigorous moralizer against vices.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201ccap of liberty\u201d on a staff). The unfortunate melding of journalism and satire administered a fatal blow to Hogarth as Wilkes\u2019 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\u2019 trial thus:<\/p>\n
Virtue, with due contempt, saw
\nHogarth stand
\nHis poisonous pencil in his
\npalsied hand.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nHogarth riposted by replacing\u00a0his 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<\/em> of 1745, sits pissing on Churchill\u2019s poems. The 2 satirical geniuses\/idiots bickered on (between Churchill\u2019s debilitating bouts of syphilis), until both men died, within a few weeks of each other. Hogarth died first, Churchill\u2019s camp asserting with malicious satisfaction, that Churchill’s poem had accelerated his death.\u00a0Churchill, only 32, keeled over a few weeks later, muttering on his deathbed:<\/p>\n
“What a fool I have been”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
About two of my favorite people, who hated each other. The Bruiser by William Hogarth\u00a0(created and printed in 1763). William Hogarth (1697 \u2013 1764)\u00a0Painter\/printmaker\/social critic\/editorial cartoonist\/pioneer of western sequential art paints and\u00a0the Old King Cole of English pictorial satire, depicter … Continue reading