Page:Chats on old prints (IA chatsonoldprints00haydiala).pdf/262

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as the March to Finchley, was engraved alone by Luke Sullivan. Louis Gérard Scotin engraved Plate I., The Contract; Louis Barron, Plate II., The Breakfast Scene; François Simon Ravenet executed Plate IV., The Toilet Scene, and Plate V., Death of the Earl, all from the same series of prints, The Mariage à-la-Mode. We reproduce a portion of his large print, Southwark Fair, engraved by Hogarth, and published in 1733 after a painting by himself.

A satirist of manners lives for success in his own day, and Hogarth achieved it to the full. His prints became so popular that copies of them were sold as his. His set of the Harlot's Progress was issued by one Kirkall before Hogarth could get out his own engravings. And he had the discomfiture of having Masquerades and Operas returned on his hands as unsold, while a pirated edition was selling at half-price in the shops. In 1735 he "applied to Parliament for redress," and obtained an Act (8 Geo. II. Cap. 13) which vested an exclusive right in designers, and restrained the multiplying of their works without the consent of the artist.

Hogarth was a typical Londoner, and he knew every inch of the square half-mile with Temple Bar as its centre, from the day when he begged his father, the Grub Street writer and proof-corrector, of Ship Court, Old Bailey, to apprentice him to "Mr. Ellis Gamble, silver-plate engraver, at the sign of the Golden Angel, Cranbourne Street or Alley, Leicester Fields." From engraving silver tankards and salvers with heraldic devices he came to engrave on copper.