Looking at Picture, Smoking It and Turning It Into Nocturne By An Old Master!

 James Hall, TLS, May 2025:

"...A trickle of late-medieval night scenes – the finest being Taddeo Gaddi’s greyscale fresco of the annunciation to the shepherds in a blaze of divine light (c.1330) – became a flood in the seventeenth century, when Adam Elsheimer and Georges de La Tour specialized in starkly lit night scenes, and Caravaggio and Rembrandt spot-lit faces in what passes for perpetual night. Illuminated by moon, torch, bonfire, hearth, candle or lamp, night enabled artists to create drama, mystery, fear and awe; sentience became more secretive, imbued with visionary or nightmarish intensity. The trick was not to make the dark stretches feel turgid or slapdash, with luminous heads becoming Orpheus-like floaters on bituminous seas. This was almost inevitable, however, as successive layers of varnish and tobacco smoke could transform any picture into a nocturne: Hogarth’s print of Father Time has him blowing pipe smoke over a painting to make it look old. The passage of time darkened the “Mona Lisa”, thereby enabling Walter Pater to dub her a vampire and “diver in deep seas” who “keeps their fallen day about her”...."

Time Smoking a Picture, 1761 by William Hogarth deals with art connoisseurs and their mislead enthusiasm for old master paintings of any quality or lack thereof, because of the popular notion that 'time' both improved and mellowed art. William Hogarth's portrayal of time and his activities is less than flattering. He sits upon a statue he has utterly destroyed. A severed hand points directly to time's ever darkening varnish. 'Time' meanwhile is viewing a painting which he blackens and obscures with the voluminous smoke from his pipe. He has also carelessly ripped a great hole in the canvas with his scythe.

Time Smoking a Picture is an original engraving printed upon early nineteenth century wove paper and with large, full margins as published by William Heath in 1822. This is a fine, original example of the satirical art both designed and engraved by the British artist, William Hogarth.