'Hogarth's Britons': (Derby Museum and Art Gallery until June 4 2023)

William Hogarth, The March of the Guards to Finchley, c.1759, Foundling Museum, London

The mouthful of a title, Hogarth's Britons: Succession, Patriotism and the Jacobite Rebellion, suggests an admirable level of ambition from the curators at Derby. I'm not sure they achieve their aims, but this is nevertheless a thoroughly enjoyable romp of a show. The exhibition never really decides whether it is a gallery survey of Hogarth's art or a museum exploration of the Jacobite rebellions. One the one hand we have cardboard cutouts of soldiers, a Jacobite garter and other memorabilia; one the other we have random examples of Hogarth's work, like his Election series prints and Marriage a la Mode loaned from the National Gallery.  The Jacobite Rebellions are certainly worth an exhibition. There is local interest, certainly, with Derby having the dubious honour of being the southern-most town the Scottish troops reached in 1745. More importantly, the period is generally not well covered, and, unless you are a fan of the time-travelling drama Outlander, much of the information presented here is probably new and definitely interesting. The question is whether the art on display really fits the narrative.   

William Hogarth is a slippery character at the best of times. Last year the Tate failed to make the case that he was at heart a European in a huge exhibition which, if you took away the captions, was really a retrospective of his whole career. In Derby, we are presented with exactly the opposite argument: Hogarth as the patriot. Well, yes and no. Hogarth was gleefully anti-French but his caricaturist's eye gleefully attacked a lot of things, including the English establishment. Derby's other great coup, a loan of The March of the Guards to Finchley (1750) from the Foundling Museum, shows the English army going to give battle to the Jacobites in 1745, but the troops are represented in a fairly disreputable light. Although the background shows them as a disciplined, martialled force, the foreground focus is on drunkenness, debauchery and disease: certainly George II found nothing to recommend it. In the end Hogarth sent it to the King of Prussia.

Allan Ramsay, Charles Edward Stuart, c.1745, National Galleries of Scotland

Paradoxically, whilst the curators are keen to present Hogarth as a patriot, they are more reluctant to see Allan Ramsay as a Jacobite sympathiser, despite his newly discovered portrait of Charles Edward Stuart and his famous image of Flora Macdonald. Ultimately perhaps neither artist was highly politicised: both sought royal patronage (of any kind) and were arguably more concerned with furthering their own careers than with pursuing nationalist agendas. In the same way, the exhibition is perhaps best viewed not through a historical lens, but as a collection of fine mid-eighteenth century art. Ramsay is a portraitist of understated skill and delicacy, who too often gets ignored in the Gainsborough-Reynolds duopoly. Hogarth is fresh no matter how many times you see his work and Marriage a la Mode is beautifully displayed here, at a perfect height and lighting to take in all the tiny subtleties.

Derby Museum and Art Gallery is worth a visit any time for their wonderful collection of Joseph Wrights and it has the warm, embracing feel of a place which is valued and has had money spent on it. There's a new entrance, built in the 1960s but recently refurbished, a lovely cafe and Objects of Hope, Love and Fear, a sympathetically but lightly curated display of world objects. Sadly, taking a wrong turn on the ways to the toilets, I discovered the old entrance, chilly, empty and neglected and a locked display of Victorian-labelled objects, which had clearly suffered water damage. Some use surely could be found for these areas.