Gillray’s Cries of London

Gillray produced a number of finished watercolour genre scenes during the 1790s. Many of these paintings were evidently intended for sale as individual works of art and were presumably traded among a small following of loyal and wealthy collectors. Others were simply retained by the artist in his sketch books, which were eventually broken up and sold off when the Humphrey family finally put their business into administration in  1835.

The subject matter of this piece reflects the contemporary fascination with idealized representations of the lives of the working poor. As a commercial artist and engraver, Gillray would have been acutely aware of the many reproductions which had been made of works by artists such as George Moreland and Francis Wheatley and was presumably keen to cash in on their popularity. Indeed, a number of similar painting by Gillray were listed in catalogue for the exhibition of Gillray’s works that appeared at London’s Tate Gallery in 2001. It is therefore possible that this image was part of a larger series of paintings of street traders and may have been influenced by Wheatley’s Cries of London series.

One interesting point to note about the execution of this piece is Gillray’s selective use of paint mixed with gum arabic. This has been applied carefully to add shading and a sense of texture to the basket and its contents, as well as parts of the figure’s clothing.

 

Print Shop Window: An Exhibition of Visual Satire

James Gillray, Posting in Scotland, 25th May 1805 – He should have stuck to the A90.

Apparently the folks at the University of Aberdeen’s Sir Duncan Rice Library have launched a new and imaginatively titled exhibition called, Print Shop Window: An Exhibition of Visual Satire. It runs from 27th September 2013 until 26th January 2014 and features examples of works by Gillray, Hogarth and George Cruikshank, as well as contemporary political caricaturists such as Gerald Scarfe and Steve Bell.

According to the University Library’s website: “The exhibition explores the Georgian political landscape, social issues, fashion and stereotypes. It highlights artists who pushed the boundaries of taste and etiquette for comic and satirical purposes, and offered a powerful medium through which to test ideas of the freedom of speech.”

A teaser photo which appeared on the Special Collection Centre’s Facebook page suggests that the exhibition is based around a fantastic mock-up of Hannah Humphrey’s famous bow-fronted shop window and includes a couple of other oddities like that stunningly awesome life-sized cutout of Cruikshank’s The Dandy of Sixty. Does anyone know where can I get one of those?

Naturally, we’d encourage anyone lucky enough to live up that way to get along to the exhibition post-haste and let us know what they thought of the experience.  

Further details can be found on the Library’s website.

 

A sketch by George Townshend

George Townsend, Justice attempting to beat boy strikes wife pen, n.d.

This unassuming little sketch is an original work by the seminal mid-eighteenth-caricaturist George Townshend (1724 – 1807). The aristocratic Townshend was to hold several governmental posts in his lifetime, as well as serving a senior officer in the British army and regularly attending on the king at court. However, he is perhaps more readily remembered today as one of the most successful amateur caricaturists to emerge during the boom in speculative satirical print publishing that occurred during the middle decades of the eighteenth-century. With the British public’s appetite for news and political commentary being buoyed ever-upwards by the Seven Years War and the bitter internecine rivalry between the factions aligned under the Dukes of Newcastle and Devonshire, London’s print shops became increasingly reliant on the efforts of amateur caricaturists to keep up with the demand for new satire.

Townshend was an establishment figure par excellence; the son of a viscount, he had purchased his way into one of the most fashionable regiments of the British army and was appointed to serve as aid-de-camp to the Duke of Cumberland during the Flanders campaign of the War of Austrian Succession. On stepping down from active service in 1749, he was able to use his contacts and family connections to begin a career on the margins of British politics and increasingly took to publishing caricatured portraits and political satires as a means of venting his spleen at those who crossed him. His prints became popular in London society, thanks in part to their innovative application of Italian caricatura to the conventional tropes of domestic political satire, but they provoked a rising tide of criticism among those who felt the publication of such material was beyond the pale. It was all well and good for gentlemen to laugh at such sketches in their studies or the privacy of their club, but to have them published and publicly displayed in a manner that invited the lower orders to gawp and laugh at the failings of their betters was an act of treachery to ones own class. A correspondent calling himself ‘George Bout-de-Ville’ captured this mood perfectly in a letter to the Public Advertiser in June 1756:

Every window of every print shop is in a manner glazed, and the shop itself papered with libels. One arch-libeller in particular has rendered himself more than a hundred times liable to prosecution for Scandalum Magnatum. There is scarce a distinguished person in the Kingdom, who he has not exhibited in Caricature. He has dealt his grotesque cards from House to House, and circulated his defamatory pictures from Town’s end to Town’s end…. However faintly he is crayoned out in this Letter, I dare say that most people will know and abominate him.

The British Museum holds a number of hand-drawn versions of caricatures that were later published by Townshend and it is possible that this is also a preparatory version of a print which has now been lost. The image itself is undated but the paper and the dress of the principle figures suggest a date of 1765 – 1770 is not unlikely. It shows a cat or dog attacking the leg of a waiter who in turn drops the contents of a teapot into the lap of a startled and understandably enraged old gent. The title of the piece, which has been added in pencil, is somewhat odd as it seemingly bears no relation to the original image and may therefore have been a reference to something which appeared elsewhere in the original sketchbook, or simply a later edition by an unknown hand.