Date: 07-05-2000
Owning Institution: Tate Collection
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”    
Subject: 18th Century      

Next Tuesday, 9 May, is Europe Day, designed to promote awareness of “the values of European Union”. It is also Schumann Day, marking the fiftieth anniversary of an influential speech given by the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schumann, now widely credited with laying the foundations for the formation of a united Europe. Hence this week’s cautionary choice of picture, William Hogarth’s Calais Gate, or O! The Roast Beef of Old England. Venomously xenophobic, profoundly insular, it is a lasting monument to the values and attitudes of a quintessential, unpersuadable English Euro-sceptic.

Hogarth’s viciously anti-French satire has its origins, paradoxically, in an outbreak of peace between Britain and its European neighbours. In 1748 the British, the French and the Dutch signed an armistice designed to put an end to the War of the Austrian Succession. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle meant that the continent was once more open to English travellers. so Hogarth, together with a group of other painters, sculptors and engravers set off on a jaunt to Paris. But the trip did not turn out well. Hogarth, according to one of his fellow-travellers, spent his entire time in a foul mood, picking fights and finding fault:

“While Hogarth was in France, wherever he went, he was sure to be dissatisfied with what he saw. If an elegant circumstance either in furniture, or the ornaments of a room, was pointed as deserving approbation, his narrow and constant reply was, ‘What then? But it is French!’ … In the streets he was often clamorously rude.” Unsurprisingly, after just a short time in Paris Hogarth decided to turn straight around and go back to Calais. It was there that the events on which he was to base his picture took place.

By Hogarth’s own account, he was “sauntering about” minding his own business when he came to the ancient gateway of the town. Noticing, with characteristic patriotic pride, that this structure “was built by the English, when the place was in our possession,” he stopped to make a sketch of it. But no sooner had he begun his drawing than he was arrested on the charge of spying and frogmarched to the residence of the Governor of Calais for interrogation. The Governor realised that Hogarth was harmless enough and released him with a stern warning, ordeing him to leave France immediately. His men saw the artist on to the next boat to England, and stayed with him until they were three miles from shore.

At this point, according to the artist’s contemporary George Vertue, an assiduous collector of gossip, Hogarth’s guards “spun him round like a top, on the deck; and told him that he was at liberty to proceed on his voyage without further attendance or molestation.” Hogarth, who was short and stout,with a tendency to self-importance, cannot have enjoyed the indignity of being treated like a spinning top. Vertue tells us that “even the slightest allusion to the ludicrous particulars of this affair” would enrage Hogarth in later life.

O! The Roast Beef of England, which he is said to have begun almost the moment he got back to London, was to bethe painter’s revenge on those who had humiliated him. The action takes place just in front of the Porte du Havre, where Hogarth has assembled an impressive array of stereotypes. Two servants in clogs are struggling with a great bucket full of grey soupe maigre. Next to them, a cross-eyed scrawny petit-monsieur helps himself to a bowl of this unappetising fare, while to his right an even more skeletal French soldier is spilling his own soup, which falls in a thin drizzle to the ground. They have all been distracted from their customary meagre mid-day meal by the gigantic side of beef, so generously veined with fat, which is the painting’s focal point. The cook’s boy struggles under the unaccustomed weight of such a feast, as he makes his way to Grandsire’s Hotel, favoured haunt of English visitors to Calais.

French poverty and want is thus set against meaty British prosperity and wellbeing. The only Frenchman in the painting not suffering from emaciation is the greasy priest who seems almost infatuated by the joint of beef, one hand on his heart, the other caressing its greasy surface. This figure is Hogarth’s way of indicting the Catholic priesthood, traders in superstition all, growing fat on the misery of others. This is a theme developed in the sunlit distance, inside the town itself, where priests in white robes are processing to administer the sacrament to the poor and the sick. What they really need, Hogarth implies, is not some wafer-thin piece of Catholic mumbo-jumbo, but a good thick slice or two of meat. But what can you expect in a country like this? In the left foreground, he has included three nuns in raptures, who think they have discerned the face of Christ in the features of a fish. To their right, a Scottish Jacobin cowers in the shade with only an onion to eat – his punishment for backing the wrong side in the rebellion of 1745.

The artist himself, face seen in profile, can be seen lurking with his sketchbook just to the left of the gate. The hand of the arresting officer is already on his shoulder, but this time it is Hogarth who has the last laugh. He has turned the scene of his arrest into some corner of a foreign field that will, forever, be Little England.

What, one wonders, would Hogarth have made of the European Union? And how on earth would he have responded to the various bans that have been imposed on British beef? Perhaps with the same, defiant old song that he and his fellow-members of the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks sang, every Saturday, after their ritual dinner of steak and potatoes, beetroot and toasted cheese, all washed down with lashings of port and warm whisky:

“When mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman’s Food
It enobled our Hearts, and enriched our Blood;
Our soldiers were brave, and our Courtiers were good.
Oh the Roast beef of Old England
And old England’s Roast Beef!

Then, Britons, from all nice Dainties refrain
Which effeminate Italy, France and Spain;
And might Roast Beef shall command on the Main.
Oh the Roast beef of Old England"