William Hogarth 1697–1764
NG 1162 
The Shrimp Girl

Judy Egerton, 2000

Extracted from:
Judy Egerton, The British Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2000).

c. 1740–5

Oil on canvas, 63.5 × 52.5 cm (25 × 20¾ in.)

Provenance

Remained in Hogarth’s studio, and with his widow until her death in 1789; Mrs Hogarth’s sale by Mr Greenwood at the Golden Head, Leicester Square, 24 April 1790 (51, as ‘The shrimp girl, a sketch’), bt Mathew Mitchell, and in his sale after his death, Christie’s 8 March 1819 (31, ‘An Oyster Woman, a Sketch’), bt Seguier £15 4s. 6d.; George Watson Taylor, Erlestoke Park, Wiltshire, where sold by George Robins, 14th day, 24 July 1832 (47, 42 guineas); Sir William Miles, Leigh Court, near Bristol (by 1854), by descent to Sir Philip Miles, sold Christie’s 28 June 1884 (31, 250 guineas), bt Agnew’s for the National Gallery (Wheeler Fund).

Exhibited

London, South Kensington Museum, 1862 (40); RA Winter 1875 (31); Paris, Louvre, 1938 (68); Art Institute of Chicago and Toronto, Art Gallery, Masterpieces of English Painting, 1946–7 (4); Manchester, City Art Gallery, William Hogarth, 1954 (39); Tate Gallery 1971–2 (129); Munich, Haus der Kunst, Zwei Jahrhunderte englische Malerei: Britische Kunste und Europa 1680 bis 1880, 1988 (x); Leningrad and Moscow 1988 (no cat.); Tate Gallery, Hogarth the Painter, 1997 (8).

At the Tate Gallery 1960–1; 1963–4.

Literature

Nichols and Steevens 1817, III, p. 270; R.B. Beckett, Hogarth, London 1949, p. 72; Davies 1959, p. 68; Frederick Antal, Hogarth and his Place in European Art, London 1962, pp. 116–17; Robert Raines, Marcellus Laroon, London 1967, p. 14; Paulson 1971, I, p. 203; II, p. 246; Jack Lindsay, Hogarth: His Art and his World, London 1977, pp. 134–5; Webster 1978, pp. 119, 122.

Engraved

in stipple, and in reverse, by Bartolozzi, (1) first state, before title, Engravd from an Original Sketch in Oil in the possession of Mrs Hogarth, published Dec.24, 1781, by R. Livesay; (2) lettered ‘Shrimps!’, published 25 March 1782 by Jane Hogarth and R[ichar]d Livesay, Leicester Fields: repr. John Ireland and John Nichols, Hogarth’s Works, 3rd series, London n.d., following p. 268.

Technical Notes

Cleaned and relined in 1966. In very good condition, though thinly painted, with ground visible in many places. The paint has become slightly lighter in a strip about 5 cm wide at both sides, roughly corresponding to the width of the stretcher bars.

The picture is painted on a white ground (several layers as in the Marriage A‐la‐Mode series), composed of lead white mixed with chalk. The ground is now rather grey through discoloration. This priming layer is left unpainted in parts of the composition, for example in the light‐coloured patch beneath the girl’s ‘sou’wester’, to the left side of her face.

The sou’wester, presumably made of oilskin, is intended to be a dark bluish grey since the paint contains traces of Prussian blue (mixed with black pigment, white and a little yellow ochre).

Discussion

The earliest record of the picture appears to be in 1781, when John Nichols listed ‘a most spirited sketch in oil of a young fishwoman’ among works which remained in Mrs Hogarth’s possession nearly two decades after Hogarth’s death.¹ The title ‘Shrimps!’ lettered on Bartolozzi’s engraving of the subject, published in 1782, must have been intended to suggest the girl’s street cry; but it is Bartolozzi’s title rather than Hogarth’s. The title The Shrimp Girl first appears in Christie’s 1790 sale catalogue of works remaining in Hogarth’s studio after Mrs Hogarth’s death; and apart from Mathew Mitchell’s sale in 1819 in which the picture was called ‘An Oyster Woman’, it has been used ever since.

Hogarth probably knew Marcellus Lauron’s Cryes of the City of London, Drawne after the Life, published in various editions between 1688 and 1733.² Raines (1967) suggests that The Shrimp Girl has something of the feeling of Lauron’s Six pence a pound fair Cherryes; the subject has even stronger affinities with Buy my Dish of Great Eeles (fig. 1).³ But it is unlikely that Hogarth needed inspiration from Lauron (or any other artist⁴) to paint a ‘fishwoman’ whom he could have observed at first hand as she cried her wares in the London streets.

For at least a century before and a century after Hogarth painted The Shrimp Girl, most of the itinerant sellers of shellfish in London were women, usually the daughters or wives of fishmongers in the markets. Donald Lupton describes them in 1632⁵ as ‘crying, wandering and travelling creatures [who] carry their shops on their heads, and their store is ordinarily Billingsgate… They set up every morning their trade afresh. They are easily set up and furnished, get something and spend it jovially and merrily. Five shillings, a basket and a good cry, is a large stock for one of them…’ By the 1850s, Henry Mayhew observed that most fishmongers worked from stalls or pitches in the streets; but ‘the females in the shrimp line’ still went through the streets, especially in wet weather, ‘when people prefer buying at their doors’; their cry, he noted, was ‘A penny half‐pint, fine fresh s’rimps’.⁶ Hogarth sketches in a half‐pint measure in the basket balanced on his ‘Shrimp Girl’s’ head; a few darker shells suggest that she sells mussels (? and cockles) as well as shrimps. She wears what Mayhew was later to describe as the shrimp‐seller’s customary garb – ‘a hybrid sort of cloak, half a man’s and half a woman’s garment’⁷ – somewhat greasy, and perhaps made of oilskin. But nothing can dim her vitality. Showing the picture to visitors after Hogarth’s death, with a wealth of contempt for some critics’ attempts [page 183][page 184]to demote him to a mere caricaturist, Mrs Hogarth reputedly liked to remark: ‘They say he could not paint flesh and blood. There’s flesh and blood for you: – them!’⁸

There can be no doubt that this sketch is from life; and although Hogarth may never have known the girl’s name, Paulson is surely right in calling this ‘a portrait’.⁹ Compared with the ‘fancy pictures’ of pretty street vendors which became popular some fifty years later, such as John Hoppner’s Girl with Sallad, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1782 (fig. 3, for which the sitter was in fact the artist’s wife Phoebe),¹⁰ or with the still more prettified girls crying Two bunches a penny primroses or Sweet China Oranges in Francis Wheatley’s Itinerant Trades of London (engraved 1793–5, and frequently copied),¹¹ Hogarth’s image is direct and wholly unpatronising. This painter recognises that the ‘Shrimp Girl’ is an individual in her own right, and does not presume to tidy her up. It is difficult to agree with Antal that this is ‘not a work on its own account’ but was ‘intended for a figure in one of Hogarth’s finished compositions’,¹² and equally difficult to agree with Webster that Hogarth ‘must have intended to work it up to a much smoother finish’.¹³

Beckett (1949) considered The Shrimp Girl to be ‘not datable, but fairly late’;¹⁴ since no pointers to a precise date have emerged, ‘circa 1740–5’, as suggested by Webster (1978), remains the likeliest approximation to its date. No comparable single‐figure oil sketches by Hogarth are known. Oil sketches of groups such as The Dance, of about 1745 (one of three surviving sketches for an unfinished series to have been called ‘The Happy Marriage’),¹⁵ show a similar brilliance of rapid handling, but The Shrimp Girl appears to be unique in being painted from life, spontaneously, and for its own sake.

The Shrimp Girl remained in Hogarth’s studio during the remaining twenty years or so of his life. He did not add a single brushstroke to her image. He was no doubt well aware that his Shrimp Girl triumphantly illustrated his own dictum that ‘if a thing is good, the action and the passion may be more truly and distinctly conveyed by a coarse bold stroke than the most delicate finishing’.

In the early 1850s Dr Waagen, Director of the Berlin Gallery, went to see Sir William Miles’s collection at Leigh Court, near Bristol. He went chiefly to see the revered Altieri Claudes in the Saloon; he was delighted to come across The Shrimp Girl, ‘animatedly conceived and sketched with the utmost freedom’, hanging less obtrusively in the Little Dining‐Room.¹⁶

Notes