Untitled drawing by Isaac Cruikshank

Isaac Cruikshank was one of a number of noted late eighteenth-century caricaturists to supplement their income from engraving with sales of drawings and watercolours. However unlike his more celebrated contemporaries such as Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray, who attempted to pursue careers in the comparatively elevated artistic fields of landscape and portraiture respectively, Cruikshank’s original works remained rooted in the comic humour of his caricatures. The only real difference between his output as a watercolourist and that as an engraver seems to have been his complete abandonment of political satire, with his paintings dealing solely with the humour derived from scenes of sociability, domestic life and the bawdier elements of romance.

His original watercolours seem to have been produced for a number of different reasons. Some were proofs for caricatures, songsheets and broadsides, which would be engraved by Cruikshank or someone else and published. Others appear to have been standalone pieces in their own right which were probably sold to collectors, with the printsellers Laurie & Whittle apparently enjoying a particularly favoured position as suppliers of Cruikshank originals during the 1790s.

This pencil sketch by Isaac Cruikshank is coming up for auction in the US in a few days time. It sadly appears to be rather faded but the principle characters are clearly discernible. The scene is set immediately outside a country inn, where a rustic on horseback is being offered a mug of ale by a buxom and slightly over-exposed young barmaid. The man is clearly delighted by the view he’s enjoying from on top of his horse and scratches his head and grins inanely.

The drawing is signed ‘IC’ in the lower right-hand corner and further evidence of Cruikshank’s hand can be found by comparing the figure of the rustic to that which appears in The Way to Stretchit, a late caricature by Cruikshank which was published by Thomas Tegg in May 1811. The faces of the two figures are almost identical and have the same long fringe and broad-brimmed hat. This indicates at the possibility of the drawing being a rare late composition by Cruikshank, which may indicate why it was never finished (Cruikshank died in April 1811).

Isaac Cruikshank’s ‘Small Print’ (1803)

Whilst I find the subject of eighteenth-century caricature to be an endlessly fascinating one, I have to confess that I don’t always find the prints themselves to be that funny. Admittedly this may say more about me than it does about the caricatures, but it’s not exactly surprising that the humor of many satirical prints has lost some of its impact over the course of the intervening two centuries. Tastes change and you only have to watch a re-run of an old comedy show to realise that what seemed funny 20 or 30 years ago, let along 200 years ago, can often seem passé to a contemporary viewer.

That’s why it’s always nice to come across a print which still has a genuine capacity to make me laugh. This image of Isaac Cruikshank’s Small Print definitely falls into that category. It was sent to me by a reader who, quite appropriately, has it hanging on his bathroom wall; prompting a slightly bizarre exchange of emails in which we compared our respective choice of lavatorial decoration (mine being a copy of John Bull caught at his Last Luxury).

The print was engraved by Isaac Cruikshank and published by Thomas Williamson of No. 20 Strand in 1803. Williamson is known to have published around 50 satirical plates between 1803 and 1805, almost all of which were the work of Isaac Cruikshank. Enjoy.

New shoes for Isaac Cruikshank

This pen, ink and watercolour caricature by Isaac Cruikshank will be going on sale in the UK in a couple of weeks time.

Cruikshank, along with notable contemporaries such as James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and Richard Dighton, produced numerous watercolours during his lifetime. These paintings seem to have served two purposes: firstly, as a means of proofing designs for potential publications prior to the investment in copperplate and other materials required to translate them into print; and secondly, they served a small but lucrative market of wealthy collectors who were interested in buying original works by their favourite satirists.

Cruikshank’s originals usually offer a toned-down version of the themes that he frequently explored in his satirical prints – a love of London life, sociability, and a tendency to occasionally veer towards the saccharine and the sentimental, being apparent in many of his paintings.

The scene here is set somewhere on Grub Street, a locality made famous by its association with satirists and hack writers in the first half of the eighteenth-century, but which by Cruikshank’s time was also becoming a byword for the deprivation and the down-and-out in general. It shows a hearty cobbler, Nathan Saveall, touting for business in the street. He gestures over his shoulder to his ‘shop’ which is little more than a hole in the street with a jerrybuilt timber and glass shed thrown over the top of it. The man he is addressing looks nonplussed, his slightly battered appearance suggesting that he hasn’t the money to buy whatever Saveall is selling and the rolled-up manuscript sticking out of his pocket hinting at the possibility that he is an impoverished writer. In the background a small crowd has gathered around the window of a cookhouse. It includes a ragged ballad singer who bawls out one of the songs from the sheaf of broadsides in her hands while simultaneously tending to her three young children.

I must admit that if Cruikshank is making a joke here then its meaning is largely lost on me. I can only think that if humour was his intent then this image was conceived as a realistic counterpoint to the heavily idealised images of urban poverty presented in popular prints such as Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London series. It’s a nice picture nonetheless and something of a rarity to the collector.

The New South Sea Fishery or A Cheap Way to Catch Whales

Isaac Cruikshank, The New South Sea Fishery or A Cheap Way to Catch Wales, published by H. Humphrey, 4th January 1791.

This print by Isaac Cruikshank was one of the last political satires to have been published on the subject of the Nootka Sound Crisis. The crisis erupted in the spring of 1790, when news of Spanish authorities summarily expelling British traders from the area around Vancouver Island arrived in England. Britain and Spain had been tussling over possessions in the New World since the sixteenth-century and tension between the two nations escalated rapidly, with London demanding the immediate return of the confiscated trading posts and Madrid insisting that its officials had every right to enforce Spanish sovereignty in the region. Within a matter of weeks it appeared as though an incident that had begun with a scuffle in a distant outpost on the far side of the world, was about to precipitate a major European war.

However as both nations began to prepare for conflict it became apparent that Spain lacked the means to successfully face Britain alone. While the British had been able to immediately mobilise a fleet of 40 ships of the line for action, persistent shortages of money, men and supplies had left Spanish authorities struggling to adequately fit out a fleet of 30 warships. Spain had initially assumed that France could be relied upon to enter the conflict on her side, thus tipping the balance of naval power against Britain, but failed to reckon on the changes brought about by the revolution in Paris the previous summer. When the new revolutionary regime finally announced that it had no intention of upholding the terms of the old alliance between the French and Spanish monarchs, Spain was left with little choice but to make a humiliating u-turn in the face of British threats. In October 1790 she signed the Nootka Sound Convention, promising to restore the confiscated British outposts, acknowledge Britain’s right to fish off the Pacific Northwest and essentially relinquishing her own claims of sovereignty over the area.

The references to fishing rights which were inserted into the Convention may have confused some; this was after all a document designed to settle a dispute over fur trading posts on the Canadian coast, not access to deep sea fisheries. Nor had the issue played a big role in Anglo-Spanish relations prior to the outbreak of the crisis over Nootka Sound. So what had changed? The answer is that British foreign policy had been effectively hijacked by lobbyists representing the nation’s whaling industry. During the course of the crisis they had managed to convince ministers that the whaling grounds off the northwest coast of America represented a vast source of potential wealth for the nation which should be seized from the Spanish at the first opportunity. Their arguments worked: British diplomacy was re-arranged to reflect the demands of the whalers and the references to fishing rights were inserted into the draft of the documents which were to be presented to the Spanish.

While the British government had been able to rely on an outbreak of bellicose patriotic sentiment to carry them through the Nootka Sound Crisis without too many questions being asked, the catcalls of criticism from their political opponents began to grow louder as the threat of war receded. Members of the Whig opposition rushed to point out that mobilisation of the armed forces had cost the nation £4 million, a sum which dwarfed the value of the trading posts at the centre of the dispute and any revenues currently being derived from whaling in the Pacific. Whether the government had or had not managed to secure access to a lucrative fishing ground was irrelevant – fishing rights had not caused the rupture with Spain and the Spanish had never attempted to curtail the activities of British fisherman in the Pacific. At best, they concluded, the crisis had been a pointless waste of large sums of public money, and at worst it was a deliberate scheme which had been cooked up to further the interest of the whaling industry at the public’s expense.

This print reflects the view of those opposition critics. It was published in early January 1791, shortly after several heated Parliamentary exchanges on the subject of the Nootka Convention. It depicts William Pitt and his crony Henry Dundas as whalers, lurking beyond the ten league markers denoting the area of the American coast in which Britons now had a right to fish. Despite the fact they are the only fishing boat sailing in an otherwise empty sea, their activities are overseen by the presence of a British warship named ‘Convention’, its presence serving as a reminder of the huge costs associated with securing the profits of a few whaling firms. Pitt has baited his line with a bag of gold worth £3 million, while Dundas stands ready to supply further quantities of cash should additional lures be required. The speech bubble coming from Pitt’s mouth reads “I fear Harry this fishing will never answer”, while Dundas replies “Never mind Billy, the Gudgeons we have caught in England will pay for all”. The label ‘gudgeon’, which was the name of a small fish often used as bait, was commonly applied to a dupe or someone who could be relied upon to swallow anything. Its use here is clearly intended as a dig at politicians and members of the public who unthinkingly rushed to offer their support for a needless and expensive war against the Spanish.

The rhyme beneath the image reads:

The Hostile Nations view with glad Surprise / The Frugal plans of Ministers so Wise / But they they Censure of the World despise / Sure from their faithful Commons of supplies / Convinced that man must fame im(m)ortal gain / Who first dare fish with Millions in the Spanish Main

The print was produced by Isaac Cruikshank for Hannah Humphrey and published on 4th January 1791. Its design was probably influenced by a similar caricature entitled Billy and Harry fishing whales off Nootka Sound which had been published by William Holland on 23rd December 1790. The delay between the two publication dates can possibly be accounted for by the differing political outlook and markets of the two publishers. Holland was a committed radical and one of the few publishers to have been critical of the Tory government from the outset of the crisis. He would have wasted no time in producing a print which heaped further ignominy on Pitt’s head and could presumably have been confident of selling copies of the design to his likeminded clientele. Humphrey’s political prints were generally more moderate and conservative in their outlook. It seems plausible that she would have waited until criticism of Pitt’s handling off the Nootka affair became more mainstream before being confident of purchasing the plate from Cruikshank.

St George and the Dragon or the Glorious æra of 1798

Cruikshank & Sansom (?), St George and the Dragon or Glorious æra of 1798, Published by S.W. Fores, 5th December 1798. Note the “S.W.F” shop stamp at the bottom right-hand corner of the print.

Here’s another print from a marvellous set of caricatures that came into my possession a couple of weeks ago. It shows Pitt as St George, slaying the dragon of Whig opposition while surrounded by a panoply of unfortunate beasties representing the great powers of Europe.

As much as I enjoy this print, I’m not sure that it is entirely successful as a piece of political satire. The artist has attempted to cram too many references to various aspects of Britain’s domestic politics and foreign affairs into a single plate and consequently it fails to convey a single coherent message that extends beyond a rather vague sense of Tory triumphalism.  Nonetheless, the quality of the engraving work on display here and the beautiful delicacy of the colouring, mean that this is still an excellent example of the standard of English satirical printmaking in this period.

The design seemingly draws upon influences taken from both the world of high art and other pieces of contemporary English caricature. The central theme may have been derived from one of the popular engraved editions of seventeenth-century Flemish paintings of St George, such as Hans von Aachen’s St George Slaying the Dragon and Balthazar van Lemens’ St George and the Dragon. The latter painting having been reproduced as a highly successful mezzotint by the English engraver John Smith in 1685. The St George motif had already appeared in a number of English satirical prints and it’s possible that this design was based on one of these earlier caricatures. There is certainly a distinct similarity between the ‘dragon’ which appears in this design and the multi-headed monster that featured in a crudely etched political satire on the downfall of the Fox-North Coalition entitled George and the Dragon (1784). The artist also appears to have plundered a selection of recent prints by James Gillray to obtain accurate likenesses of the individuals portrayed. The images of Tierney (right), Sheridan and Pitt all being strikingly close to those which appeared in French Habits (1798), Doublûres of characters;- or – striking resemblances in phisiognomy (1798) and The Giant Factotum amusing himself (1797) respectively.

At first glance the print appears to be a blandly patriotic satire celebrating the revitalizing effect Nelson’s victory at the Nile had on the government’s standing at home and Britain’s position abroad. Pitt charges forward on John Bull, impaling his Whig opponents on the lance of the “United strength of the people”, while his mount tramples a pack of cockerels representing the Directory and an unfortunate Spanish hound. The constellation of European powers shifts above his head to shine their lights on England and reflect the fact that Austria, Russia and the Ottoman Empire were now all considering revanchist strikes against France. Look closely though and this celebratory tone becomes far more ambiguous. Pitt’s ruddy cheeks and closed eyes are indicative of extreme intoxication and it seems as though he has in fact been carried to victory on the back of the British bull. His flowing purple robes also carry a mixed symbolism which stands at once for both the triumphs, vanity and despotic tendencies of the emperors of ancient Rome. Even the bovine emblem of John Bull, who could be considered to be the real hero of the piece, seems enraged to the point of madness and is depicted in a posture which seems to suggest that it is about to toss the slumbering rider to the ground.

The identity of the print’s creator remains a matter of some conjecture. Edward Hawkins, the original curator of the British Museum’s collection of caricatures, recorded it as a work by Isaac Cruikshank but Dorothy George rejected this notion when she came to write her catalogue of the Museum’s collection a century later. It is certainly possible to discern a certain similarity between the likenesses of the individuals portrayed in this caricature and those that appear in other prints Cruikshank engraved for S.W. Fores around this time. However, the precise engraving that appears on the rest of the plate bears little comparison with the slightly scruffy style that typifies so much of Cruikshank’s output.

In 2008 an an amateur historian contacted the Museum to suggest that the lettering which had been added to this caricature and a number of other S.W. Fores prints in the collection, indicated that they were the work of the engraver Francis Sansom. Sansom is chiefly remembered today as the botanical illustrator responsible for producing the engraved plates that were published in the early editions of The Botanical Magazine but he was in fact a commercial engraver who worked on all manner of publications. He was retained by Fores for a period of roughly five years, from 1796 to 1801 during which time he was chiefly employed in engraving the designs of artists, such as G.W. Woodward and John Cawse, who lacked the technical skills required to translate their caricatures into print. The evidence of Cruikshank’s hand at work on this particular print therefore raises the intriguing possibility that it was the product of a collaboration between Sansom and Cruikshank. However, this begs us to ask why Fores felt the need to pair an experienced caricaturist like Cruikshank up with another engraver? One theory is that Fores insistence on Sansom’s involvement in the production of Cruikshank’s prints was symptomatic of a wider breakdown in the relationship which took place between Isaac Cruikshank and his publisher during 1798-99. It is certainly true that the number of plates Fores was commissioning from Cruikshank dropped off sharply after 1798 and that the printseller began offering more work to artists such as Woodward, Cawse and Charles Williams. It has been suggested that this transition may have been prompted by Fores growing frustration with Cruikshank’s slapdash approach to engraving and the number of mistakes that were being left uncorrected on his finished copperplates. In these circumstances it seems feasible that Fores may have insisted on pairing up Cruikshank with a more reliable craftsman like Sansom.

Of course, this is all pure speculation. The print may have been produced entirely by Sansom, or by Sansom and another artist whose identity has now been lost to history. Attributing unsigned prints to specific artists is an art rather than a science and should always be taken with a suitably large pinch of salt. Still, it is precisely this kind of unsolvable historical conundrum which makes Georgian caricatures such fascinating items to study.