Its brevity suggests that he had other occupations; but he had also satisfied himself that working for the booksellers was not the way to fortune. Moreover he had discovered that his original designs speedily became the prey of the pirate. For example, copies of his ‘Masquerade Ticket,’ he tells us, were sold at half price, while the original impressions were returned upon his hands.
Sir James Thornhill had been one of his witnesses in the Morris suit, and Hogarth and he were apparently on terms of considerable intimacy. This was interrupted by a stolen match between Hogarth and Sir James's only daughter, Jane, a handsome young woman of nineteen or thereabouts. They were married privately on 23 March 1729, at old Paddington Church. Whether they took flight from Covent Garden, from Thornhill's house in Dean Street, Soho (No. 75), or from the little country box at Chiswick, which not long afterwards became Hogarth's own residence, is still debatable. But although she married against her father's will, for it was some time before he was reconciled to her, Jane Thornhill made an admirable wife. Her comely face appears in more than one of her husband's pictures (the ‘Sigismunda’ in the National Gallery is a portrait of her), and she cherished his memory after his death with a fidelity only rivalled by that of Mrs. Garrick for her David.
Of Hogarth's private life at this time, however, little is known. ‘Soon after his marriage,’ says Nichols, ‘he had summer-lodgings at South-Lambeth’ (Genuine Works, i. 46). It was doubtless while in this neighbourhood that he made the acquaintance of Jonathan Tyers, who shortly afterwards opened the ‘New Spring Gardens’ at Vauxhall with the famous ‘Ridotto al Fresco’ of June 1732, from which the real celebrity of that place of entertainment dates. Hogarth is said to have contributed to the success of the gardens by the—for an artist—very appropriate suggestion that they should be embellished by pictures, and many of those which afterwards decorated the old supper-boxes about the Grove were vaguely attributed to his brush. He certainly transferred to Tyers a painting of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, which had been engraved in 1729, three years before the gardens were formally opened, and this for a long time hung in the portico of the Rotunda. His later series, ‘The Four Times of the Day’ (1738), was also repeated for Vauxhall by Frank Hayman [q. v.], and something of his hand is to be detected in the contemporary prints of ‘Building Houses with Cards’ and ‘Mademoiselle Catherina’ (a dwarf). But more than one of the paintings which were declared to be by him when, in 1841, the Vauxhall properties were sold, e.g. ‘The Wapping Landlady’ and ‘Jobson and Nell in the Devil to Pay,’ are plainly given to Hayman in the prints of the time, and they, besides, resemble Hayman's work. What Hogarth undoubtedly did for Vauxhall was to design several of the pass-tickets, one of which, in gold, was presented to him by Tyers ‘in perpetuam Beneficii memoriam.’ It admitted ‘a coachful,’ and in 1808 was in the possession of his wife's cousin, Mary Lewis (Genuine Works, i. 47).
Shortly after Hogarth's marriage he must have set to work upon the paintings for the first of those ‘modern moral subjects,’ in which he aimed at ‘composing pictures on canvas, similar to representations on the stage’—in other words, at connecting a sequence of imaginary ‘conversation-pieces’ by a progressive story—‘a field,’ he further says, ‘not broken up in any country or any age.’ Borrowing a hint from Bunyan, he christened his first effort ‘A Harlot's Progress,’ and traced the career of his heroine from her first false step to her tragic end. From the date on her coffin in plate vi. (2 Sept. 1731), it has been conjectured that the paintings were completed not long after his marriage. According to the received tradition, their ability was instrumental in appeasing his still hostile father-in-law. Lady Thornhill, who from the first had been on the side of the runaways, caused them to be conveyed into her husband's dining-room. He eagerly inquired the artist's name, and on learning it, rejoined that the man who could furnish such representations could also maintain a wife without a portion—a speech which was the forerunner of reconciliation. Meanwhile, Hogarth began the engravings, and in March 1732 advertisements in the ‘Daily Journal’ and ‘Daily Post,’ repeated in subsequent numbers, announced that they were then printing, and would be delivered to subscribers (of whom there were soon some twelve hundred on the books) on 10 April following. The little subscription-ticket which he etched was entitled ‘Boys Peeping at Nature.’ When at length the set were issued they met with immediate success. Theophilus Cibber turned them into a pantomime, which was acted at Drury Lane in 1733; they were later made into a ballad-opera, entitled ‘The Jew Decoy'd,’ 1735, and they prompted a poem called ‘The Lure of Venus,’ 1732, by Joseph Gay (Captain J. D. Breval [q. v.]). Besides these they gave rise to endless squibs and pamphlets, and were freely transferred to fan-mounts and chinaware. Lastly they were shamelessly pirated.
