SOURCE: Macey, Samuel L. “Hogarth and the Iconography of Time.” In Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Volume 5, edited by Ronald C. Rosbottom, pp. 41-53. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976.

[In the following essay, Macey discusses Hogarth's representation of time and timekeeping devices in his graphic art.]

If, in Maynard Mack's terms, we think of the City in contradistinction to the Garden, then Hogarth is clearly the artist of the City. As one might expect, both the denotation and the connotation in Hogarth's work reflect the radical changes taking place in London life. The most influential technological change was probably the achievement of mechanical timekeeping sufficiently accurate for the needs of modern urban man. Related to this were the batch production and division of labour methods then being introduced into the manufacture of clocks and watches. Some of the key dates are the use of the pendulum in clocks from 1657, and the use of the balance spring in watches from about 1674.

Until the third quarter of the seventeenth century, clocks and watches were expensive and decorative toys. The pendulum clock provided the first reasonably accurate method of mechanical timekeeping at a point in history ready for accelerated urbanization. Britten's Old Clocks and Watches introduces its chapter on the period as follows:

The present chapter covers perhaps the most important period in horological history. In the space of a quarter of a century accurate timekeeping became a possibility and to a very large extent it was actually achieved. In 1655 a clock did well to keep time to within five minutes a day; in 1675 its error might, under favourable circumstances, be only as many seconds. Similarly watches were brought from an almost entirely unpredictable performance to within two or three minutes' accuracy a day or even less with reasonable luck.¹

Some clocks certainly could keep time “within five minutes a day”; for general purposes, Ward's statement that “clocks could not be relied on to keep time more closely than to about a quarter of an hour per day”² is probably a better reflection of the standard of technology before the advent of the pendulum clock. The revolutionary factor is that for the first time in man's history, it was possible to produce timekeepers accurate enough for any normal domestic purposes of urbanized man. The use of minute and second hands in clocks or watches—previously a rarity—now became common. The modern mechanical age had arrived and the techniques as well as the thoughts of men would never be quite the same again.

In 1675, Wycherley ridicules Sir Jasper Fidget, the City knight, when he is obliged to leave his wife in the home of Horner because his watch shows him that it is “a quarter and a half quarter of a minute past eleven,” but the influence of watches and clocks was to permeate all areas of London life. Tompion, the father of English clockmaking, had produced no less than six thousand watches and five hundred clocks by the time that he died in 1713. (Both he and his successor, Graham, are buried in Westminster Abbey.) In the following year, the British Government offered by Act of Parliament the unprecedented prize of twenty thousand pounds for an accurate method of determining the longitude at sea. (The impetus for the greatest horological inventions came frequently from the needs of astronomy and navigation.) The Act set off a spate of invention not unlike our own advances in interplanetary technology that have recently pushed timekeeping to an accuracy of one second in thirty thousand years. It has been claimed—by Commander Waters and Bruton among others—that this prize “was in many ways responsible for the Industrial Revolution that followed.”³ Harrison's marine chronometer H3 was ready by 1760, and led to his ultimate receipt of the award. That was the year (shortly before the death of Hogarth) when our schoolbooks tell us that the Industrial Revolution began. Though steam power was ultimately essential to the Industrial Revolution, Lewis Mumford has claimed with some justification that “The clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age.” As Carlo Cipolla puts it, “the construction of high precision timekeepers presupposed the solution of basic problems of mechanics that were at the very heart of the Scientific Revolution.”⁴ Insofar as the clock was concerned, the essential inventions belong to the “horological revolution” of 1660-1760.

This paper is not concerned with the many advances in metallurgy, mechanical invention, precision engineering, machine tools, and production methods that are directly attributable to the London centered “horological revolution.” We should, however, be aware of the use of the clock analogy for the body, traceable from the “mechanistic” philosophy of Descartes through to Hartley and our modern behavioral sciences; the use of clock analogies during the horological revolution by such essentially different philosophers as Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, Shaftesbury, and the early Berkeley; and the use of the clockmaker-clock analogy for God and his universe by such eminent scientists as Boyle and Newton.

It is the nature of language to explain difficult abstract concepts through an analogy with aspects of a topical concrete phenomenon readily understood by author and audience. During the horological revolution, clocks and watches frequently supplied this metaphor, but they were also of interest for their own intrinsic value. Defoe's Moll Flanders demonstrates remarkably well the importance of watches in the developing urban economy. It is worth noting that when his accomplice produced a gold watch taken during church from a lady's side, Defoe's Colonel Jack was “amaz'd at such a thing, as that in a Country Town.” Yet, as Moll said of herself and her first fellow thief, before the latter was executed, “we had at one time one-and-twenty gold watches in our hands.”

After 1675, men's watches disappeared into the waistcoat or the fob of the breeches, but ladies' watches were a most important piece of jewellery that hung from the waist, often with winding key, seal, and much else. Gulliver is made fast with “chains, like those that hang from a lady's watch in Europe, and almost as large.” As Moll tells us more than once, “I had very good clothes on and a gold watch by my side, as like a lady as other folks.” Hogarth's best example of a lady with her watch is his portrait of Miss Mary Edwards.⁵ There are more equivocal and probably not unconnected examples in Taste à la Mode and Marriage à la Mode, Plate 4. Mother Needham in Harlot's Progress, Plate 1, and Young Squanderfield's mistress in Marriage à la Mode, Plate 3, demonstrate the use of the watch by low life aspiring above its station. Since Tompion's standard price was “£23 for an ordinary watch in a gold case” or “£70 for a gold repeating watch,”⁶ and Moll was eventually caught by an unusually honest servant who earned three pounds annually, we can readily understand the temptation to “take a watch” reflected throughout the literature of the period.

For reasons that I am unable entirely to explain, the artist most directly concerned with the artifacts for measuring time was not a poet but a caricaturist and painter. The life of Hogarth (1697-1764) runs concurrently with the latter part of the horological revolution, and is almost exactly suited to the portrayal of its impact on society. The works of James Gillray (1757-1815) and Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827), who took over the mantle of Hogarth, differ in nothing so much as the almost total absence from their works of clocks, watches, and sandglasses.⁷ Much the same is true of Joseph Wright of Derby, “the first professional painter directly to express the spirit of the industrial revolution.” In fact Klingender's valuable study, Art and the Industrial Revolution, finds no need either to mention or to portray clocks and watches. Steam engines and forges—whether as objects for pride or antagonism—provided a much more compelling metaphor through which to depict an industrial age. In a comparable manner, Sussman—though he has a whole chapter on Dickens in Victorians and the Machine—avoids horology. As he puts it: “machine technology did not truly engage the literary imagination until the coming of the railway.”⁸

There had of course been illustrations of clocks and watches before the time of Hogarth. But these had been exceptional cases rather than themes found throughout the whole corpus of an artist's work. Of the earlier major artists, in any way comparable to Hogarth, one might have expected that Dürer would have treated symbolically the question of time. With one exception, there is a marked absence of clocks, watches, and sandglasses from Dürer's works. The hourglass is not only portrayed but it is essential to the symbolism of Dürer's three most famous copper engravings: Knight, Death, and the Devil; St. Jerome in his Study; and Melancholia I. (The hourglass after its invention early in the Renaissance was added to the iconography of Time and Death.)⁹

Like Dürer, Hogarth was trained as an engraver, but the nature of the times had added a new dimension to that trade. As George Vertue reported of Hogarth, he was “bred up to small gravings of plate work & watch workes.”¹⁰ Hogarth seems to have been conscious of the value of time for planning his own work. In his later portraits, he “sometimes painted little more than faces,” and proposed to Wilson “to paint a Portrait in four sittings, allowing only a quarter of an hour to each.” Hogarth extended his ingenious work-study methods to the sale as well as the paintings of pictures. Vertue reports on his auction of paintings—that included A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress, and The Four Times of the Day—“by a new manner of sale … to bid Gold only by a Clock, set purposely by the minute hand—5 minutes each lott … and by this suble means. [sic] he sold about 20 pictures of his own paintings [sic] for near 450 pounds in an hour.” When Hogarth is defending himself from the suggestion that he is vain, he turns to watchmaking for his exemplum. “Vanity,” he maintains, “consists chiefly in fancying one doth better than one does”; but if a watchmaker claims that he can make a watch as good as any man, and demonstrates that he really can, “the watchmaker is not branded as infamous.”¹¹

It is in the nature of Hogarth's age that, unlike Dürer, he is generally concerned with mechanical timekeeping. A sermon glass is prominently displayed in The Sleeping Congregation, and a vertical sundial in the country scene of Chairing the Member; but these reflect the pulpit and the country in which such methods of timekeeping continued to prevail throughout the eighteenth century. In Hogarth's work, they are the exception rather than the rule. He is essentially an urban artist, a painter of the City. We have noted how the originals of A Harlot's Progress and A Rake's Progress were sold “by a Clock.” Like Hogarth's other great progress, Industry and Idleness, they are both concerned, at one point, with the important “low life” occupation of “taking a watch.” Ronald Paulson suggests that “It may have been Moll Flanders that first planted in Hogarth's mind the image of a harlot as one who, like Moll, simply wants to be a ‘gentlewoman.’” Certainly, in Plate 3 we see Hogarth's harlot sitting on the edge of her bed with one breast exposed, and holding up a stolen watch. In Fielding's Covent Garden Tragedy “Plate 3 is alluded to when Stormandra reminds Bilkum ‘Did I not pick a pocket of a watch, / A Pocket pick for thee?’”¹² In exactly the same structural position as the Harlot's Progress (the third plate out of six), the taking of a watch is once again the central motif for the Rake's Progress. In this case, the protagonist is the dupe who sits dallying with the inmates of a bordello. Industry and Idleness shows, in twelve plates, the very different progresses of two apprentices who start with equal opportunity. In much the same structural position as the Harlot and the Rake, the idle apprentice is disclosed in bed with “a common Prostitute”; she has stolen watches (complete with keys and seals) in front of her (Plate 7). The reverse side of life's coin is illustrated in Plate 8, “The Industrious ‘Prentice grown rich, & Sheriff of London.” This is in sharp contrast with Plate 9, “The Idle Prentice betray'd by his Whore, & taken in a Night Cellar with his Accomplice.” They are caught red handed; the watches are between the men in the front center of the plate.

But Hogarth goes beyond Defoe; his horological allusions are not limited to the taking of a watch. In addition, he uses clocks for both denotation and connotation. In terms of denotation, Four Times of the Day indicate both morning and noon by means of the clock. In much the same way, The Battle of the Pictures uses a clock to denote the time of Hogarth's auction, to which reference has already been made. The Battle of the Pictures—whose theme is reminiscent of Swift's Battle of the Books—was to be used as the ticket of admission “on the last Day of Sale.”¹³

In Masquerade Ticket (second state), the large clock at top center shows 1:30. Heidegger's face is so placed that the hour hand marked “Wit” looks like a riband over his left shoulder. But Impertinence on the minute hand and Nonsense on the pendulum dangle indecently beneath, flanked on each side by a pair of “Lecherometers” and the clearly suggestive notices “Supper below.” On the left, as Paulson indicates, “masqueraders are killing ‘Time’” at the altar of Priapus.¹⁴

The clock face in the top left corner of The Times (hanging outside the home of the Government) seems relatively innocuous in the scene of fire and chaos. But The Times takes on new connotations when one has “read” the engraving across to the bottom right hand corner. There a destitute child is playing with an almost identical clock. In the third of the four Stages of Cruelty, the gruesome murder of Ann Gill (who has become a thief for her seducer, Tom Nero) uses an iconography of stolen watches in the same climactic position as Industry and Idleness, The Harlot, and The Rake. The scene's graveyard atmosphere is emphasized by the clock. The woodcut (though not the engraving) shows a winged hourglass,¹⁵ suggests the year 1750, and has enough lettering for one to decipher the message: “memento mori.” It may be of significance that there is a full clock only in the engraving; it is cut in half by the outer edge of the woodcut. The same is true as between the clocks in the painting and engraving of Hogarth's Morning. In Southwark Fair, the clock in the clock-tower at the centre is also cut in half, this time by the large picture of the Trojan Horse.

Hogarth is, above all, a producer of character portraits; for this, too, he can make use of the watch. In Analysis of Beauty, Plate 2, the weakness of the apparently cuckolded husband, at the ball, is emphasized by the way that he points to his watch; in the drawing of Thomas Morell, the clock above the head of the protagonist serves a similar purpose to the hourglass above Jerome's head in Dürer's St. Jerome in his Study. The hourglass could be used as a general symbol of Temperance, Time, or Death. But the precise mechanical measurement of time and the widespread use of the minute hand began only in the second half of the seventeenth century. The extra possibilities for symbolism that the clock now offered provided Hogarth with a tool unavailable to his predecessors, and never fully exploited by subsequent artists.

The denotation and connotation of time that a clock could provide is perhaps exemplified as well as anywhere in Hogarth's delightful study in seduction, The Lady's Last Stake. The ornate clock on the mantlepiece is probably French, but it has an English-type dial and Hogarth has symbolically put Father Time's scythe into the hands of Cupid. At 4:55, with the moon rising through the window, the clock is about to show sunset, and there is very little time left for the lady to resolve the titillating dilemma. Hogarth describes the subject of the painting as “a virtuous married lady that had lost all at cards to a young officer, wavering at his suit whether she should part with her honour or no to regain the loss which was offered to her.” The clock adds to the piquancy of the situation; Cupid with his scythe is mounted above it on a pedestal inscribed: “NUNC NUNC.” Some seventeen years earlier, Hogarth had painted The Graham Children with Cupid and his scythe similarly (and perhaps even prophetically) placed. Here Hogarth depicts an English striking and probably also repeating clock of the type that is now very highly prized by collectors.

An even more ornate clock than the one in The Lady's Last Stake stands above the head of the dissipated husband in Marriage à la Mode, Plate 2. Even without considering the specific symbolism of the clock, in which fish and foliage are juxtaposed, one can readily observe how the over-dressed nobleman and the over-ornate clock emphasize each other's excesses. By way of contrast, in Plate 6, his City alderman father-in-law stands beneath a simple weight-driven clock that emphasizes frugality and punctuality.

In discussing the two states of A Midnight Modern Conversation, Paulson says: “By comparing these two pictures, it is easy to see how Hogarth moved from a portrait group, a ‘conversation’ in that sense, to a picture with moral overtones as well as portraits.”¹⁶ The same point is further stressed by the change in the position and nature of the clocks. The relatively small bracket clock on the right of the picture becomes a towering grandfather clock in the subsequent version. From the left hand rear corner of the room, it unmistakably points out the lateness of the hour to revellers and readers alike. Here, as elsewhere, there may be an intentional “pun” in the denotation of time. What at first seems to be twenty past midnight, appears on closer inspection to be three or four o'clock in the morning.

Not surprisingly, there is also a grandfather clock at the rear of Hogarth's Frontispiece for Tristram Shandy. This has a symbolic value of its own, but Sterne's clock (among other things) already symbolizes some of the negative qualities that came to be associated with the mechanical aspects of clockwork. Hogarth's own awareness of a negative quality in clockwork is demonstrated by his emphasis on the stiff and mechanical attributes of Vaucanson's duck, when he refers to this famous automaton in the Analysis of Beauty (1753).¹⁷ Time is clearly involved in the complex and sinister symbolism of The South Sea Scheme (first state). There, Father Time has become the Devil himself. In his shop set up in the Guildhall, he uses his scythe to hack flesh from the golden haunches of the goddess Fortune (Hogarth has here reverted to the older iconography of Saturn-Time who consumed human flesh and was occasionally portrayed with Fortune and her wheel.)¹⁸ Above Father Time, beside the clock, stands God or Magog. It is past 6:00 p.m. and the storm clouds are gathering. Just as the pillar at which Honour is being beaten is artistically related to the London Monument, so the wheel on which Honesty is being castigated is related to the South Sea merry-go-round and the clock.

In the same year as the Frontispiece for Tristram Shandy, Hogarth produced his provocative The Cockpit (1759). Paulson perceptively relates this to the influence of Dante and the circular structure of Inferno. But if it is a picture of hell and the apocalypse, it is one over the very center of which there falls the highly symbolic shadow of a condemned man holding up a watch. Klingender gives a valuable demonstration of the influence of contemporary iron mines, iron works, and railway tunnels on the haunting illustrations that John Martin made for the hell of Paradise Lost during the industrial revolution.¹⁹ It is possible that Hogarth used the watch as a comparable metaphor for hell in his Cockpit. Certainly, he makes an ominous statement about time in the Tailpiece.

Hogarth used a complex symbolism of time for his last and perhaps most haunting work, Tailpiece, or the Bathos (1764). The title of the engraving, The Bathos, or Manner of Sinking in Sublime Paintings makes clear the debt to Pope's Peri Bathous: or the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1727). The subject cannot help but remind one of the end of Dunciad IV (1742-43), when the corruption in the arts has polluted all phases of existence: chaos is come again, “And Universal Darkness buries All.”

But Hogarth's tailpiece, also produced at the end of his life, relies heavily on symbols of time. Father Time (so often and so variously represented in Hogarth's canon) rests on a broken column in the middle of the work. He had appeared three years earlier in Time Smoking a Picture. But now the word Finis is written in the smoke that comes from Time's mouth after he has removed his broken pipe. Among the debris lying around, are a broken palette, musket, crown, and bottle. The last page of a play shows the words Exeunt Omnes; a statute of bankruptcy—sealed with the rider on a white horse (from Revelation)—indicates that Nature is bankrupt; and a flame is just about to consume a picture entitled The Times. In the hand of Father Time, lies his last will and testament; he bequeaths his world, “all and every Atom thereof to [an erased lacuna] Chaos whom I appoint my sole Executor.” The witnesses to the document are the three fates, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Hogarth's message is further stressed by the broken building, the ruined tower, the gibbeted man, the ominous gravestone, the sinking ship, and the falling inn sign that is entitled “The World's End” and shows an orb in flames.

All these are symbols indicating the passage of time. But there are also precise allusions to time reminiscent of the roles that the sun, the moon, the seasons, the bell, the hourglass, and the clock respectively had played in their contributions to time measurement. In Hogarth's great “Apocalypse,” the sun chariot of Phaeton is falling from the sky, the moon is overcast, the autumnal scythe of time is broken, the great bell is cracked, the sand-glass is splintered, and the clock has no hands. In the original drawing, Time had been leaning against a much larger clock face which came between himself and the gravestone. Time's wing partly covered the clock, and the clock partly covered the skull and crossbones at the top of the gravestone.

Apart from the fact that he lived through London's horological revolution and was “bred up to small gravings of plate work and watch workes,” it is difficult to suggest why Hogarth is the only plastic artist of the first rank to have demonstrated so wide an interest in mechanical clocks. One might argue that until the horological revolution clocks and watches were neither as numerous, as accurate, nor as readily marketable as Hogarth's symbolism required. The De Horologiis in Arte of Alfred Chapuis curiously illustrates nothing by Hogarth; Holbein and Jan Breughel are the two painters from whom he draws most examples.²⁰ But in these artists the iconography of time through clocks and watches is far less pervasive than in Hogarth. After the horological revolution, mechanical timekeeping probably lost some of its topical appeal. There is an almost total absence of clocks, watches, and sand-glasses in the works of James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson who took over the mantle of Hogarth. As has also been previously noted, Klingender neither mentions nor illustrates clocks and watches in his standard work, Art and the Industrial Revolution. In addition, after the horological revolution, certain connotations—like “mechanical art” and “clockwork automations”—were to put a different emphasis on the clock than is generally evident in Hogarth.

It has, I think, been widely recognized that his City and his times are inextricably bound up in the denotation and connotation of Hogarth's work. My purpose has been to demonstrate how true this is in respect of clocks and watches that made so remarkable an impact on London life during the horological revolution of 1660-1760.

Notes

1. G. H. Baillie and C. A. Ilbert, Britten's Old Clocks and Watches and Their Makers, 7th ed. (New York: Bonanza Books, 1956), p. 66.

2. F. A. B. Ward, Time Measurement: Historical Review (London: Science Museum, 1970), pp. 1, 17.

3. D. W. Waters, “Time, Ships and Civilization,” Antiquarian Horology, 4 (June 1963), 85; and Eric Bruton, Clocks and Watches (Feltham: Hamlyn, 1968), p. 84.

4. Carlo M. Cipolla, European Culture and Overseas Expansion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 133, 135.

5. Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971), I, 336. I am indebted throughout this study both to the Life and to Paulson's other definitive work: Hogarth's Graphic Works, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). All Hogarth references are to Paulson's Life and Works unless otherwise stated. The illustrations are from Rev. John Trusler's Works of Hogarth (London: E. T. Brain, n.d.). In 1766, Trusler was employed by Hogarth's wife, Jane, to write explanations of the prints.

6. R. W. Symonds, Thomas Tompion: His Life and Works (London: Spring Books, 1969), p. 232.

7. See Bernard Falk, Thomas Rowlandson: His Life and Art (New York: The Beechhurst Press, 1952), passim; and James Gillray, Works (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1851), passim. Gillray frequently alludes to opulence and loot, but he uses gold coins (in great profusion), and not watches.

8. Francis D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, ed. Arthur Elton (London: Paladin, 1972), p. 46; and Herbert L. Sussman, Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 9, 41.

9. Karl-Adolf Knappe, Dürer: The Complete Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts (New York: Harry N. Abrams, n.d.), p. xliv and plates. See Erwin Panofsky's “Father Time,” Studies in Iconology (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 71, 73, 80, 82, as well as the bibliographical references in this important article; and Soji Iwasaki's The Sword and the Word: Shakespeare's Tragic Sense of Time (Tokyo: Shinozaki Press, 1973), plates 21, 23, 24, 34, 46, 48, 51, 60, 61. Clocks and sundials were used less frequently. See Panofsky's plates 51 and 55 (Time appears here to be standing on the foliot of a clock rather than on a sundial as Panofsky seems to suggest on p. 80); and Iwasaki, plate 12.

10. Paulson, Life, I, 48, 513. See also pp. 50, 176, 514.

11. Ibid., II, 244; I, 494; and I, 433, 554.

12. Ibid., I, 251, 291.

13. Ibid., I, 492.

14. Heidegger's head was probably intended to move mechanically from side to side. Paulson suggests that Nonsense and Impertinence would be set in motion more frequently than Wit (Works, I, 133). See also references in Edward J. Wood, Curiosities of Clocks and Watches (1866; rpt. Wakefield: EP Publishing Ltd., 1973), pp. 127-28.

15. Panofsky, Iconology, p. 83n.

16. Paulson, Life, I, 234.

17. Ibid., II, 175.

18. Iwasaki, Sword, plates 5, 12, 28 (also pp. 21-32), and Panofsky, Iconology, plates 42, 46, 47, 56, 57, 60. Hogarth seems to have taken one step beyond Iwasaki's “Saturn-Time and Death” (pp. 32-44), and given some of Saturn's qualities to a fusion of Satan with Time.

19. Klingender, Art, plates 52 ff., and pp. 106, 109-10, 117, 128-29. See also Boswell's London Journal, December 15, 1762.

20. Alfred Chapuis, De Horologiis in Arte (Lausanne: Scriptar, 1954). Illustrations 55-64 (Holbein), 79-85 (Jan Breughel).