From Journal 21 (2012)

Discussions with visitors to Hogarth’s House before it closed for refurbishment in 2009 revealed that they wanted to know more about it as a home. As a result research was undertaken during the refurbishment to make possible a new presentation of its history. By identifying most of its past owners and occupiers, we now understand more about its changing fortunes during almost three centuries

The builder of the House
The House was built in the corner of a walled orchard. In 1670 the manor court had given Richard Downes permission to enclose a plot from Chiswick Common Field; the wall and the surviving mulberry tree made date from this time. Richard left this plot to his wife Susannah. When she made her will in 1711, she left the orchard to her son James and gave his brother, Edmond, £20 in lieu of a share in it.  The Downes family were bakers. They supplied St Nicholas Church with communion bread and Chiswick House also owed them a large debt, which Susanna’s will stipulated must be paid before her heirs received their bequests.

Susannah’s choice of witnesses to her will suggests that she had a building project in mind for her son. The first was Abraham Evans, who lived beside what is now the George & Devonshire pub. Abraham’s sister had married Thomas Meard, a local carpenter whose brother John was developing a large area of Soho at this time. The second witness was Thomas Board, also a carpenter, who was regularly paid for repairs to the Parish Church. He worked on Chiswick House and Burlington House for Lord Burlington and had earlier been paid for garden carpentry at Sir Stephen Fox’s new house in Chiswick in the 1680s. The third witness was William Browne, who came from a local brick-making family. Carpenters and joiners were the house-builders of that time and knew other craftsmen from past projects. For example, Thomas Kirton witnessed Evans’ will and his forge, only about 100 yards to the east could have supplied handles and hinges for the new house.

James Downes mortgaged a brick-built house with an adjoining garden or orchard to William Taylor in 1718, selling the house to Georg Andreas Ruperti in 1721. As Ruperti was already listed as the rate-payer in 1717, the house must have been completed, but perhaps he only rented it at that date.

The Rupertis
Ruperti (1670-1731) came from the Harz Mountains in Lower Saxony. His family lived in the Savoy, where he was Pastor to the German Lutheran Church from 1706. Queen Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, set up a Lutheran Court Chapel at St James’s Palace, where Ruperti became Assistant Pastor in 1711 and one of two Ministers in 1728, on £200 a year.

In 1709 he helped care for German refugees arriving in London following a famine in the Rhineland. They set out believing wrongly that Queen Anne would help them establish new lives across the Atlantic. Ruperti and Pastor John Tribekko were given government funds to house over 13,000 of them, first in barns and warehouses and later in camps at Camberwell and Blackheath, and to list them all. Some eventually went to Ireland, America and Scotland, but only when a large group returned to their homeland did the mass migration stop.

Ruperti’s will left his two daughters by his first wife her household linen and her marriage settlement of 1,000 dollars. He had paid money into the Brunswick Widows’ Cash Fund to support his second wife, Anne Elizabeth, who would also receive her marriage settlement of 1,000 marks. Worried that there would be little left for the small children of his second marriage, he asked friends to seek a royal pension for them, to find a position for his young son and to sell his books.

By coincidence, on the same page of The Daily Journal, March 20 1732, advertisements appeared for the book auction and for Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress. Over eight evenings 1,090 lots were sold at the Bedford Coffee House, Covent Garden, one of Hogarth’s haunts. Amongst classical texts and religious commentaries were books on angling and gardening, perhaps for his relaxation in Chiswick. The scale of Ruperti’s spending on books could explain his anxieties about money.

His widow paid parish rates on the house until 1745, when her name was marked with a P for pauper. The property was probably then neglected, as its value fell from £10 to £7. The London Evening Post of 15 April 1749 listed charity apprenticeships arranged for children of poor clergymen in 1748 – among them was her daughter Elizabeth, placed with Mary Lauch, mantua-maker in the Savoy, a prized position making high quality women’s garments. At 21 her son George inherited the house and soon sold it to William Hogarth.

The Hogarths arrive
The Hogarths knew the area before they took the house in September 1749. William’s friends included Thomas Morell, one of Handel’s librettists, at Turnham Green and John Ranby, the model for Hogarth’s Rake, whose second home was probably that later known as The Cedars in Burlington Lane. Jane’s uncle, David Lewis, a harpist, lived in Twickenham and his son, John, a flautist, had married the sister-in-law of a Clitherow from Boston Manor and lived in Brentford Butts.

With William and Jane came Jane’s widowed mother, Lady Judith Thornhill (d 1757) and cousin, Mary Lewis (1719-1808), the harpist’s daughter, who acted as Jane’s companion and William’s shop-woman. Hogarth’s sister, Anne (1701-1771) and a wealthy spinster, Julian Bere (d 1790), also lived with them. All were buried in the family tomb at St Nicholas Church, except Miss Bere, who asked to be buried near her father at Hammersmith. There her property included The Dove, then a coffee-house. This large household need extra space so the Hogarths added one room on each floor and the value rose to £10 in 1750.

Richard Loveday (1731-1812), surgeon and freemason, was a witness to Hogarth’s will in 1764. He then lived in Chiswick Town but later moved to Hammersmith. Jane Hogarth was godmother to Amelia Jane, one of his daughters. Jane bequeathed the house to Mary Lewis for life and then to Mr Loveday but after his death his adult children sold it.

Another clergyman’s family
Henry Francis Cary (1772-1844), the new Curate at St Nicholas’ Church, bought it that summer, and wrote to a friend for advice on rowing on the Thames! Born in Gibraltar, a soldier’s son, Cary hoped to join the army himself, but his grandfather and great-grandfather were clergymen in Ireland and he was persuaded to go into the Church.

Cary married Jane Ormsby in 1796 and they had five sons and two daughters. He had a mental breakdown in 1807 when their 6-year-old daughter, Harriet, died of typhus. Ten years later another daughter, Jane, died at 17 from tuberculosis. Cary had taught her Italian, French, and Spanish and she helped with his work. A son born the same year raised Cary’s spirits; the little boy became obsessed with the theatre, reciting all the performers and shows listed in the London newspapers. Cary had resigned his post in Chiswick and rented out Hogarth’s House, intending to take Jane to a warmer climate for her health. He now took the post of Curate at the Savoy Chapel in the Strand, near Ruperti’s old Lutheran chapel.

Cary had worked on a translation of Dante’s works for many years. This sold poorly until he met the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, while walking with his sons on the beach at Littlehampton, and found a champion. Coleridge’s praise for Cary’s translation, and a favourable review from Italian poet Ugo Foscolo in 1818, led to sales of 1,000 copies in three months. Cary wrote for the London Magazine in the early 1820s to earn money for his sons’ education. He became part of a writers’ circle including Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, Gabriele Rossetti, John Clare and Thomas Hood.

In 1826 he became the British Museum’s Assistant Keeper of Printed Books, with an apartment there. Hogarth’s House again became a second home. Cary’s wife died in 1832 and, seeing the fragility of his mental state, the British Museum gave him leave to travel to Italy with one of his sons.

Cary was not promoted in 1837 because the Museum thought extra responsibility would put too much pressure upon him. He abruptly resigned, writing a furious letter to the press. He spent his last years living near his son’s Bloomsbury art school, where John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (son of his father’s friend) were trained, and was buried in Westminster Abbey in 1844.

The Wicksteads and their tenants
In 1833 Cary had sold the house to George Wickstead (or Wicksteed), whose brother John (1803-1847) inherited it in 1836. He emigrated to Australia in 1840, leaving the house in Samuel Thoady’s care. John ran the Union Hotel and general store in Fremantle before settling in Singapore, where he died in 1847. Through his daughter, Ellen Mary, the house remained in the family until 1890.

Street directories, rate books and census returns list several respectable but short-term tenants. John Hunter, a man of independent means, lived there with his family in 1840-41. Major Russell was tenant for the next two years. The rate books then list Thoady as tenant, but he too was in Australia by 1850. Patrick Young Hill, parliamentary agent, was there in 1851 followed by Edmund Wyllie in 1855. W M Rossetti (1829-1919), son of one of Cary’s poet friends, wrote in 1858 to the artist John Brett suggesting he look at a‘pleasant old-fashioned house, once Hogarth’s at Chiswick – to be let very low, £25 a year or thereabouts’. But he did not take it – Mr Dufrene was in residence in 1859. No other residents are known until Mrs Curling in 1867, perhaps the Mary Ann Curling with a Berlin wool repository in King Street, Hammersmith a decade earlier.

A retired melodramatic actor, Newton Treen ‘Brayvo’ Hicks (1811-1873), moved in with his second wife. Hicks was acting major roles as a teenager in the 1820s in East Anglian theatres. In Colchester he rescued two children from a blazing house, bringing them down a ladder which was itself on fire – this may be the origin of his nickname. He worked in theatres in south and east London with his first wife. Often injured performing stunts, on one occasion he was thrown from a horse.

It was a precarious life: he appeared in court for debt in 1839 as one of 3 owners of the theatre on Richmond Green. He took on the Britannia Saloon, a Hoxton pub, in 1846 but was in debtors’ prison by 1848.

His obituary described his as ‘the very beau ideal of a tragedian, robust in appearance, graceful in action, stentorian in declamation, skilled in the mysteries of self-defence and almost as agile as a tiger. . . deservedly respected by all who knew him’. He died after a long period of illness in 1873.

The following year a newspaper bemoaned the neglect of Hogarth’s old home, prompting a letter from a nearby resident stating that the tenant, Mr Clack, cared for it and showed visitors round.

By 1881 Mrs Clack was widowed, living there with her mother and daughter. She kept pigs and ran a shop in the dining room. George Coles, with his wife and small children, shared the house where he worked the garden as a nursery.

A new owner

At The Cedars in Burlington Lane lived Henry Dawson, landscape painter, with his sons Alfred and Charles, also artists. Their Typographic Etching Co at the Hogarth Works in Short Road specialised in plates for high quality reproduction of art works. Emery Walker became their apprentice and eventually their manager. In late 1890 Alfred bought Hogarth’s House from John Wickstead’s grand-daughter. He restored it and let it to John Allgrove with part of the garden of The Cedars. Allgrove ran the Hogarth’s House Nursery there until Dawson sold the house in 1900.

The following March The Daily Telegraph carried the news that the house and garden were likely become a building site and the Hogarth’s House Preservation Committee was launched. Most members were literary and artistic men, many from Bedford Park. They failed to raise necessary funds but Lieut-Col Shipway of Grove House, Chiswick, stepped in, bought the House in late 1901, restored it and opened it to visitors in 1904.

Directories list John Thomas Airey as the first custodian in 1904-5, followed by Frank J Bateman in 1905-6. No other custodians are listed until 1933, when Albert Stafford Diddams arrived. A specialist nurse in the care of the mentally ill, he met his wife when they worked at the Tuke family’s private asylum in Chiswick House. They had two daughters and a son, two of whom still lived in Chiswick in 2011. Though very young when they moved away, they remembered their father growing vegetables and tulips, and their mother cooking mulberries and plums from the old orchard trees. The family were sheltering in the cellar with neighbours in 1940 when a landmine blast left the house uninhabitable. It was boarded up and the museum contents taken to Chiswick Library but some of the Diddams’ possessions, including their gas fires, had already been stolen.

No-one lived at the house during the 1940s. After it re-opened in 1951 its resident custodians were local authority employees who were not listed independently of the house.

Sources of information used: Parish rate books and accounts, St Nicholas’ Church archives; rate books, directories, census, memoir of Rev Cary, Hounslow Local Studies Library, Chiswick; wills in The National Archives; S Steinmetz, 300 years of St Mary’s Lutheran Church in London,1994; catalogue of Ruperti book sale, British Library; Rossetti letter, Hogarth’s House; Diddams family interview; East London Theatre Project website (www.elta-project.org); historic newspapers references to Hicks, researched by Simon Francis. And thanks to Local Studies Library staff

Val Bott is a local historian and works freelance as a museum consultan; she chairs the William Hogarth Trust and co-ordinated the refurbishment of Hogarth’s House during 2009 to 2011