By Augustus John, c.1920

D. G. Hogarth (1862-1927) came to the Ashmolean Museum as Keeper in January 1909, and Lawrence consulted him soon afterwards about the proposed walking tour in Syria. Thereafter, Lawrence had little contact with Hogarth until the Autumn of 1910 when he asked if it might be possible to go on an archaeological excavation overseas. Hogarth was about to reopen the British Museum’s excavations at Carchemish in northern Syria for a trial season, and helped Lawrence to obtain a research award from Magdalen College, Oxford, so that he could join the expedition.

In the event, Hogarth spent only a few weeks at Carchemish during the 1911 season, and when it was decided to resume the dig in 1912 his place was taken by Leonard Woolley. A friendship nevertheless developed between Hogarth and Lawrence during these Carchemish years, largely because Lawrence volunteered to buy antiquities in Syria for the Ashmolean.

When war broke out in 1914 Hogarth helped Lawrence to obtain a post in the Geographical Section of the War Office in London. Hogarth joined the Geographical Section of Naval Intelligence in 1915, and helped to prepare a series of reference works on the Middle East. In this connection he visited Cairo several times during 1915 and 1916 (acting as first Head of the Arab Bureau for a few weeks). During the later stages of the war he took charge of a branch of the Arab Bureau at Allenby’s headquarters in Palestine.

After the war Hogarth and Lawrence were both involved in official deliberations about the political settlement of the Middle East. Then, at the end of 1919, it was Hogarth who, with Lionel Curtis, persuaded Lawrence to rewrite Seven Pillars of Wisdom after the manuscript had been lost. Their friendship became much closer during these immediate post-war years, and Hogarth viewed Lawrence’s enlistment with deep concern. He was one of the small group of friends who helped launch the subscription edition of Seven Pillars in 1923; by this time Lawrence looked on Hogarth almost as a father. After Hogarth’s death in 1927 Lawrence wrote that, since the war, ‘whenever I was in a dangerous position I used to make up my mind after coming away from his advice. He was very wise for others, and very understanding, and comfortable, for he knew all the world’s vices and tricks and shifts and evasions and pretexts, and was kindly towards them all. If I might so put it, he had no knowledge of evil: because everything to him was fit to be looked at, or to touch.’¹

Neither Hogarth nor his wife liked this portrait, drawn by Augustus John for Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and Lawrence had some difficulty presenting it to the Ashmolean. It was finally accepted in 1935.

1. T. E. Lawrence to C. F. Shaw, 10.11.1927.

Charcoal, 50.2 x 35.5

Signed lower right: John

Provenance: Given by T. E. Lawrence, 1935

Literature: SP 1926, ill.; SP 1935, ill. fp. 504;

Ashmolean Museum Report of the Visitors, 1935, p. 24.