Daily Times

It always throws you, to have one sense interpreted by another, like those art programmes on the radio which are about visual things but are described only in words.

Hogarth & the Art of Noise might seem to be just such a crossover. It is a one-room exhibition based on the museum’s prize work, The March of the Guards to Finchley. Hogarth was a great friend to the Foundling Hospital, that admirable orphanage.

There are benches before the picture where you listen to a soundscape to tell its story by the musician Martyn Ware — marches, ballads, exclamations and exchanges with the mistress of the bawdy house. It’s preceded by an examination of Hogarth’s treatment of sound in a selection of his pictures and prints — one thing they convey is how rowdy and vital London once was — and an exploration of the themes in the March of Guards, not necessarily to do with noise

This is a polemical work, about the marshalling of troops to defend London from the Jacobite forces who were marching south in 1746 on behalf of Charles Edward Stuart. Hogarth was a Hanoverian, and this picture depicts, on the left, good Protestants with their devoted womenfolk and manly boxers and on the right, troublesome, drunken, whoring Catholics. Like so much of his work it’s rich in detail; it’s also full of allusions to sound, from the pipes and drums of the troops to the raucous cries of any London crowd.

There are benches before the picture where you listen to a soundscape to tell its story by the musician Martyn Ware – marches, ballads, exclamations and exchanges with the mistress of the bawdy house. It’s preceded by an examination of Hogarth’s treatment of sound in a selection of his pictures and prints – one thing they convey is how rowdy and vital London once was – and an exploration of the themes in the March of Guards… not necessarily to do with noise. So there’s a section given to prize-fighting, to venereal disease and prostitution, to drink and the Guards.

It’s all good material, which lets you look better and more closely at the picture, while the soundscape is as busy as the scene.

The exhibition is accompanied by A New Song, a display of contemporary prints and paintings by Nicola Bealing, based on narrative London ballads. The prints are terrific: lively, bawdy and coarse. So yes, Hogarthian.