Yet more eighteenth-century sanitation

One of my favourite interiors anywhere in the world is that of the Painted Hall in Greenwich. It started life as the dining hall for the bigwigs of what was then the Royal Naval Hospital. Of course the stinking, vermin-infested amputees and decrepits who were its inmates did not dine in such sumptuous surroundings. The second picture gives a general view of Sir James Thornhill's italianate, baroque interior. The first picture shows a detail; King William and Queen Mary are set in a cartouche in an allegorical setting. They preside over all. They are guarded by angels, and worshipped with awe by all other creatures and folk. This was certainly a fit subject. While the officers feasted their eyes upon this image (whilst stuffing their faces), they were reminded of their moral duty, and gloried in the name of Britain. It also took their minds off the suffering of the inmates, who were not so very far away.
The third and fourth pictures are by one of my favourite artists, William Hogarth. Hogarth was Thornhill's son-in-law. The two of them never really got on, and I'm sure that Hogarth's bolshy manner and general pugnaciousness probably didn't help matters. Whereas Thornhill was content to toady to the great and the mighty, Hogarth was a different kettle of fish. He would wander round london and make thumbnail sketches of tarts, beggars, criminals, the grotesque, and anything else that took his interest.
The third picture (I don't know the title) shows a group of people dancing. Thornhill would never have condescended to paint such a scene. It would never have occurred to him to do so. Hogarth doesn't give us idealised, static figures a la Thornhill. Hogarth's people are full of movement, full of life and having a bloody good time. There is humour in the shape of the dumpy man on the left, who seems to have tagged onto a couple who were already dancing. Hogarth's people seem real, even ordinary, rather like ourselves in fact. It's all a bit of a shindig, a rococo knees-up.
Hogarth didn't shy from the ugly. The fourth picture is Gin Lane, where Hogarth deplores the effects of the cheap gin, which was now flooding into the country from Holland, upon the poorer classes. Poor people didn't have fine paintings with which to ease their troubled lives. All they had was cheap  alcohol, with which they anaesthetised themselves for much of the day. Men, women and children, they all took gin in vast quantities. The ragged woman in the centre is so pissed that she is oblivious to the fact that she has dropped her baby. She doesn't hear its screams. She is so gin-sodden that she appears old enough to be the baby's grandmother.
These pictures have a sanitising effect on me. They channel my mind into thinking constructively. I am able to use my intellect, which my one good faculty. Here I come into my own.