Cartoonist on drink-fuelled trail of an 18th-century genius who looked at the filth around him, and laughed

“HOGARTH did a good line in syphilitic wretches,” exclaims Martin Rowson as he displays a blown-up version of his modern take on the 18th-century satirist and artist.
With its heaving log-jam of cars, unprepossessing flyover and bland office architecture, it seems unlikely that Hogarth Roundabout in west London would ever be the centre-piece of a talk about art.
The cartoonist is well aware of the irony of such a chaotic place being named after Hogarth, who spent his lifetime satirising 18th-century London.
Tonight (Thursday) his Hogarthian cartoon of the roundabout forms a key part of a talk at Bloomsbury’s Foundling Museum, where Hogarth was a governor of the Foundling Hospital for abandoned children.
The work, which hangs on the wall of the second-floor landing of the cartoonist’s south London home, is full of Hogarthian nuances and references.
A baby falls out of a car, reminiscent of the baby falling from her drunk mother’s arms in Hogarth’s Gin Lane, motorists shout and swear at one another while emaciated, drugged-out figures sit slumped at traffic lights and a man urinates against a bin. There is even a squashed cat.
The cartoonist explains: “I was commissioned to do it by the BBC, who were doing a programme on Hogarth but they changed producers halfway through and the new one decided not to use it.
“I tried to get it back but they told me they had the copyright so I had to buy back my own work.”
A regular contributor to the Guardian, Times and occasionally the New Journal whose work is often compared to Hogarth, his talk will concentrate on the enduring influence of Hogarth on political cartooning.
He is such a fan that, purely for research purposes, he embarked on a Hogarth pilgrimage, re-enacting a famous, alcohol-fuelled tour of Kent in 1732.
The cartoonist says: “Basically, Hogarth was in a West End pub with friends when they decided they wanted to go on a grand tour, but they couldn’t afford that. Instead, they got a Thames boatman to take them to Kent.”
For his tour 270 years later, the cartoonist, accompanied by fellow newspaper hacks, went to Rochester – “it was basically a two-day pub crawl” – and to the church where Hogarth defecated in the pulpit to express his anti-clericalism.
He admits: “I just had a piss but not in the pulpit. The others were lying on gravestones drunk.”
His talk is “all about the nature of satire and humour”. He adds: “There is something about the 18th century which makes it different from previous periods.
“To a large extent this was because of the Locke revolution, which brought in imposed religious toleration.
“But 18th-century London was full of squalor. There were all these people living together surrounded by filth, and Hogarth took this filth and laughed at it.”
His talk will be illustrated by Hogarth works, including Gin Lane. He says: “Hogarth was inspired to create this when he heard of a woman who killed and sold her baby to pay for gin.
“So here you have a carpenter selling his saw to the pawnbroker to buy gin, and a woman is showing such lack of care her baby is falling to its death. It’s very drunk, very brutal but very funny. The question is whether Hogarth is doing this deliberately or just cannot help himself.”
By contrast, the complementary piece, Beer Street, espouses the benefits of traditional beer. Everyone is happy, the pawn shop has fallen into disrepair. “Hogarth was definitely not supporting temperance,” he says.
Roundabout Hogarth is at the Foundling Museum in Brunswick Square tonight (Thursday) from 7-8pm. Admission is £6.50, concs £5.50.