A drawing of a full-length female figure used by Hogarth as the basis of the principal figure in the painting of The Pool of Bethesda, St Bartholomew's Hospital, London.

In 1720 the young Hogarth attended a drawing academy in St Martin’s Lane run by John Vanderbank and Louis Chéron; fifteen years later he himself set up an academy in the same street, with the emphasis on drawing from the nude model. His abiding aim was to cultivate a home-grown Grand Style that would allow domestic painters to compete with the imports from Europe that dominated the early eighteenth-century English art trade. Hogarth’s first major effort in this vein was a huge painting of the Pool of Bethesda, depicting Christ healing a paralytic, executed free of charge for St Bartholomew’s Hospital (of which Hogarth was a governor) and unveiled in April 1736. Together with the Good Samaritan, unveiled the following year, the painting still hangs above the staircase leading to the Great Hall of James Gibbs’s north block.

As inscribed by Samuel Ireland (fl.1764-1835), the drawing corresponds generally with the nude woman seated at centre right of the Pool of Bethesda. Hogarth wished to depict illnesses that were being treated at St Bartholomew’s - rickets, gout, atrophy and so on - and it is probable that the woman, reaching backwards to her extravagantly dressed lover, was intended to be read as suffering from venereal disease. John Nicholls discussing a print after the painting, recorded that ‘In this Plate, I was assured by an old acquaintance of Mr Hogarth, is a faithful Portrait of Nell Robinson, a celebrated courtezan, with whom, in early life, they had both been very intimately acquainted.’ But this supposed use of a prostitute as a model would not have been prompted by the disease suffered by his painted figure - it is likely that Hogarth utilised a pre-existing drawing rather than posing a model expressly for the painting, and the female models for life drawings would in any case usually have been prostitutes.

Inscribed lower centre by Samuel Ireland, effaced pencil From Hogarth’s Sketch Book, and pen The original Sketch from the life for the principal female figure in the picture of the Pool of Bethesda at St. Bartholomews Hospital - by Wm: Hogarth - this figure was drawn in St. Martin’s lane - & given to me by Chs. Catton Esqr. Nov: 21. 1794. S.I.

Text adapted from Holbein to Hockney: Drawings from the Royal Collection