to be remembered by posterity rather for his fraud than his poetry.
He found time to paint some other subjects as well. An “Ascension” on the ceiling over the altar of the Episcopal chapel in the Cowgate of Edinburgh—a wild and ungraceful work according to Cunningham, speaking of it from recollection, though Runciman thought very highly of it. But he had patrons and critics very loud in their applause. In his picture of “The Princess Nausicaa and her Nymphs surprised at the riverside by Ulysses,” one connoisseur detected “the fine drawing of Julio Romano,” another, “the deep juicy lustre of Tintoret,” and a third “a feeling and air altogether the painter’s own,” which last is probable. In 1772 he exhibited some pictures in London. At all events, there was no bill in Widow Hogarth’s window then, for the lodgings were let, and Alexander Runciman was the lodger.
“She let lodgings for subsistence,” so runs the story. The demand for William Hogarth’s prints had nearly died out. Still they must have brought in some little income. But twenty years after his death the copyrights had expired—the poor woman’s hope from this source was clean gone. She was then absolutely living by her lodgings, and it was not until three years more “that the King interposed with the Royal Academy, and obtained for her an annuity of forty pounds.” Poor Widow Hogarth! Yet she would not sell her William’s pictures left in his house!
Much of the untamed, unmanageable, heterodox nature of Runciman’s art pertained to his life generally. Gay, free-thinking, prankish—with a tendency to late-houred habits that must have often scandalised his landlady—and a talent for conversation rare amongst artists, who, as a rule, express their thoughts better by their brushes than their speech; kind-hearted, sociable, never behind in passing the bottle, no wonder he gathered round him a group of eminent men of his day, most of them with attributes much like his own, who did not flinch from strong outspeaking, who were not shocked by many things. Kames, Monboddo, Hume, and Robertson knocked at the late William Hogarth’s door, and paid their respects to Widow Hogarth’s lodger. Did she ever stand before his easel and contemplate his works? Doubtless often enough when the painter was out firing off his smart cracker sayings, and making away with his port wine. And what did she think of his art? How different to William’s! She could understand him always. There was always nature on his canvass, and meaning and common sense—there was always a story plainly, forcibly told. But Mr. Runciman’s meanings were not so clear. What was all the smoke about, and the waving arms, and the distorted features, and the Bedlamite faces, and, oh! the long legs and the flying draperies? Surely draperies never did fly like that—at least, William never painted them so. And then—really this was too much—he, Alexander Runciman, in that house had presumed to paint a “Sigismunda weeping over the heart of Tancred,” with William’s treatment of the same great subject actually in the house! To bed, Widow Hogarth, in a rage.
Of course Runciman had his opinion about Hogarth and his art, despising both, no doubt, and agreeing with Fuseli in deeming him a caricaturist merely, and his works “the chronicle of scandal and the history book of the vulgar.” It was so much nobler to pourtray wild contortions from Ossian, demoniac nightmares and lower region revelations, than to paint simply the life around they had only to stretch out a hand to grasp. Yet with all their talk, in the humbler merits of colour, expression, and handling, they were miles behind Hogarth. He has been so praised as a satirist, there is a chance of his technical merits as a painter being overlooked. One only of the “Marriage a la Mode” pictures, for all that is really valuable in art, might be safely backed against all that was ever done by both Fuseli and Runciman put together. Yet they looked upon him as rather a bygone sort of creature—a barbarian blind to poetic art. Well, even a greater William, the playwriter, born at Stratford-on-Avon, was considerably underrated a century ago. Could William Hogarth have seen Fuseli’s works, I warrant he would have had something to say about them!
After a time, Runciman was back again at Pennyciuck. Perhaps his fervour about his subject had a little cooled, or the incessant discussions in regard to it undermined his faith; in fact, the Ossian swindle was getting to be in common phrase a little blown upon. His health was failing him; his mode of life had never been very careful; he fell ill; he neglected himself; he worked on steadily, but with a palpable failure of heart in the business. He achieved his task. Yet the painting of the great ceiling, to effect which he had to lie on his back in an almost painful position, brought on an illness from which he never fairly recovered. Some time he lingered, growing very pale and wan, and his strength giving way until he could barely crawl along. On the 21st of October, 1785, he fell down dead at the door of his lodgings in West Nicholson Street.
Four years more of life to Widow Hogarth—still, as ever, true to William and herself. Horace Walpole sought to buy forgiveness for his attack on the “Sigismunda,”—he called it a “maudlin fallen virago,”—by sending to the widow a copy of his “Anecdotes,” but she took no heed of him or his gift. Four years more, and then another interment in the Chiswick sepulchre. The widow’s earthly sorrows are at an end, and beneath the name of “William Hogarth, Esq.,” they now engrave on the stone, “Mistress Jane Hogarth, wife of William Hogarth, Esq. Obit. 13th of November, 1789. Ætat. 80 years.” In 1856, on the restoration of the monument which from the sinking of the earth threatened to fall in pieces, the grave was opened, and there were seen the “little” coffin of the painter and the larger coffin of his widow. There too was seen, literally, “the hand” Johnson wrote of in his projected epitaph:—
The hand of him here torpid lies,
That drew the essential forms of grace;
Here closed in death the attentive eyes,
That saw the manners in the face.
