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Category Archives: James Gillray

Transfer printing on pottery – James Gillray’s Independence

11 Wednesday Jul 2018

Posted by theprintshopwindow in James Gillray, Transfer-print pottery, Uncategorized

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James Gillray’s caricature of Thomas Tyrwhitt Jones (1765 – 1811), entitled Independence (1799), was copied and used as a decorative design on English pottery during the early nineteenth-century. The potteries would employ an engraver to etch the desired image onto a copperplate. The plate was heated and inked in the normal way, before being overlaid with damp tissue paper and passed through a rolling press. The tissue paper was then peeled from the plate, wrapped around a piece of pottery and burnished to leave an impression on the body of the vessel. Finally, the pot was soaked in order to remove the paper and could then either be sold or passed to a painter who would add colour to the design.

Copperplates used for engraving pottery transfer sheets can be distinguished from normal printing plates because the image, particularly the text, did not have to be engraved back-to-front. This was because image was pressed onto the inked underside of the wet paper, which was then lifted, placed onto the vessel and rubbed from the reverse side, meaning that it remained the right way around. This presumably made the whole task a lot quicker, easier and cheaper to accomplish than with conventional copperplate etching.

This plate, which is coming up at auction in the next couple of weeks, was used to print the text which appeared on the obverse of jugs carrying the Independence design. I have included a image of a creamware jug carrying the design on the right and you can read more about this object HERE.

 

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James Gillray, John Bull Roasted, c.1807

23 Saturday Sep 2017

Posted by theprintshopwindow in James Gillray, Original works

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The image of the nation as a great ox being slowly roasted for consumption by members of the government is one which appears to have occupied James Gillray’s mind on a number of occasions during the mid-1800s. However despite the fact that he made no less than three preparatory drawings for a caricature on this subject, it seems as though he ultimately failed to translate the design into a finished print for some reason.

The drawing shown here was formerly the property of the American cartoonist and Gillray historian Draper Hill (1935 – 2009) and will be offered up for auction here in England in a couple of weeks time. The other two sketched versions of this caricature can be found in the Courtauld Institute and the New York Public Library. The latter version has the line John Bull Roasted hastily scrawled across it and this is assumed to have been Gillray’s working title for the design.

So why did Gillray produce three versions of the same image? Ordinarily this could perhaps be explained by variations between the different drawings which would suggest that he was trying out different ideas as he worked towards a composition that he was happy with. However, apart from the fact that the Courtauld’s version is a mirror image of the other two and is drawn almost entirely in chalk, there does not appear to be a great deal of difference between the three sketches of the design. Nor can this be an image which Gillray kept returning to over a number of years, as the caricature relates to the short-lived ‘Ministry of All the Talents’ and therefore all three drawings must have been completed during their time in office between February 1806 and March 1807. Perhaps the presence of Gillray’s signature on this version and the Courtauld’s copy indicate that they were sold or given away to collectors shortly after they were drawn, thus requiring him to re-draw the design when the idea of engraving it resurfaced some weeks or months later? Whatever the explanation it is clear that Gillray couldn’t quite make up his mind about this caricature and went through the process of repeatedly working it up before finally abandoning the project once the Ministry of All the Talents left office in March 1807.

The handwritten notes on the New York Public Library’s version of this drawing indicate that the image was conceived as a satire on the ‘New Plan of Finance’ announced in Parliament by Lord Henry Petty, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, on 29th January 1807. The plan essentially called for a massive unfunded increase in public debt which would be used to meet the immediate costs of continuing the war against France and her European allies. The public was promised that taxes would remain at their current level for the next three years, but opponents of the plan rightly warned that the proposed levels of borrowing would require swingeing tax rises to service the national debt once this period of grace had expired.

Gillray shows the Prime Minister Lord Grenville as a cook basting John Bull with loans. The flanks of the roasting beef are covered in indistinct labels, one of which reads ‘New Loans’, whilst the juices from the meat drop into the ‘Broad Bottomed Dripping Tray’ which has been placed beneath the carcass on the floor. Lord Henry Petty is depicted as a ‘spit dog’ running in a wheel which turns the spit to which John Bull’s carcass has been fastened. Sidmouth, Lord Privy Seal in the Talents administration, stands on the far right of the images washing dishes in a sink, possibly intended as a visual pun on the new sinking fund that his government was planning to introduce. The caricature may have been intended to serve as a sequel to John Bull and the sinking-fund-a Pretty scheme for reducing the Taxes & Paying-off the National Debt! , Gillray’s other caricature on the New Plan of Finance, which was published by Hannah Humphrey on 23rd February 1807. However the Ministry of All the Talents was dismissed from office a month later and the New Plan of Finance was immediately shelved by their successors, thus rendering further satires on the subject irrelevant.

The image was initially sketched in red chalk and then outlined in ink. The paper carries an 1805 watermark for the company of Ruse & Turners Upper Tovil Mill in Maidstone, Kent. It is estimated to fetch somewhere between £3,000 and £5,000.

The costs and profitability of satirical print production

09 Tuesday May 2017

Posted by theprintshopwindow in James Gillray, S.W. Fores, The trade in caricature prints

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View of an intaglio printer’s workshop during the early years of the nineteenth-century. The technology and process of printing from copper changed remarkably little during the 300 years before the introduction of lithography. Albrecht Durer (1471 – 1528) could have walked into a printer’s workroom in 1800 and understood most of what was happening around him.   

I’m currently reading Anthony Griffith’s wonderful new book on printmaking in Europe between 1550 and 1820. I can’t recommend it highly enough to historians and fellow print-enthusiasts; Griffith’s draws on source material gathered from across Europe to piece together an incredibly detailed and revealing account of the business of making and selling printed images in this era. And whilst much of his analysis focuses on the very top end of the market for prints, I’ve inevitably found myself wondering whether his work could be used to draw more specific conclusions about the nature of the satirical print trade in Britain during the eighteenth-century?

What follows is something of a thought experiment in which I attempt to use Griffith’s work on the cost of printmaking and the profit margins of publishers to see if I can come up with a rough estimate of how much it might have cost to publish a caricature print in London at the end of the eighteenth-century [1]. The print in question is James Gillray’s King Henry IVth the last scene, published by S.W. Fores in November 1788, and I’ve chosen it purely because Gillray’s original bill survives and we know that he was paid £2 2s for engraving the plate [2]. With this important first piece of the puzzle in place, we can start to draw on Griffith’s work to see what other costs Fores may have incurred in bringing the finished print to the marketplace.

So let’s start with the copperplate on which the design would have been engaved. Griffith’s looks at the cost and dimensions of a number of plates published in London throughout the eighteenth-century and concludes that a ratio of 1s 1d per 100cm2 of copper seems to have been maintained consistently between 1700 and 1820. The British Museum’s copy of King Henry…  measures 25 x 41cm, but it has been trimmed quite closely to the borders of the image and therefore these dimensions need to be enlarged slightly to take account of the plate’s original borders. If we add 5-6 cms onto the edges of the print then the total size of the plate is likely to have been something in the region of 31 x 46cm, or 12 x 18 inches. If Griffith’s cost ratio is correct, a plate of this size would have cost Fores approximately 15s to purchase.

Paper would have been the next item on Fores’ shopping list, as the publisher was typically expected to supply the printer with the quantity, size and quality of paper that he or she deemed necessary. The paucity of domestic paper production had meant that good quality printing paper had to be imported from France and Holland for much of the eighteenth-century, but by the 1780s Fores would have been able to secure good quality domestic paper from one of a number of wholesalers and manufacturers in and around London. One of these was the paper merchant James Whatman, whose watermarks appear on a number of prints published by Fores during the 1790s [3]. Whilst we don’t know exactly how much Whatman was charging Fores for his paper in 1788, a copy of one of the papermaker’s bills from 1775 indicates that a ream of his best paper would have cost £3 10s at that time. A ream of paper would have contained 480 – 500 sheets (let’s say 500 to keep things simple), with a typical sheet measuring 32 x 42cm. That means Fores could reasonably expect to print 500 copies of King Henry… from every ream of paper purchased, with minimal waste being left over at the end of the process.

Fores would then need to take the finished plate and his paper to a printer. It’s possible that he owned his own press and employed a printer in house, but this seems rather unlikely given the sporadic nature of his publishing output and the relatively small size of the premises from which he was operating at this point in his career. Indeed Griffith’s argues that comparatively few publishers kept printers on their staff and most would have contracted such work out to printing houses that had the requisite skills and equipment to do the job. Volume was the main determinant of cost when printing, although it seems reasonable to assume that a publisher would have had to pay more if the project involved something difficult or out of the ordinary, such as adding different colours to a plate or printing an unusually large design. Griffith’s calculates that printing costs were typically 25% higher than the cost of the paper being used, so Fores would have been charged somewhere in the region of £4 8s to make 500 impressions on a ream of paper costing £3 10s.

Once the bundles of finished prints were returned from the printers, Fores would then have to decide how many copies he wanted to have coloured before they were put on sale. Griffith’s claims that the greater part of a publisher’s stock was always made up of coloured prints, which I find somewhat surprising given that this potentially increased the size of any losses incurred from unsold prints. I can only assume that comparative demand for coloured and uncoloured prints was such that printsellers believed that this was a risk worth taking. Colouring was also relatively inexpensive to apply, typically costing 1d per print, whilst typically adding 6d – 1s to the retail price of the finished item. So for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Fores had the entire 500 sheet run of King Henry… coloured and therefore had to pay his colourists a combined total of about £1 17s for their work.

Now let’s put all of these costs together:

Item £ S
Plate 14
Engraving 2 2
Paper 3 10
Printing 4 8
Colouring 1 17
Total 12 11

How many copies of King Henry… would Fores have to sell in order to break-even? Here’s where things get slightly tricky, as no evidence of the retail price survives and the price of other caricatures Fores published around the same time varied considerably. In January 1788, Fores had sold another plate by Gillray for 1s, but this was a smaller boxing-related print which may not be comparable to a larger caricature. Similarly, we know that Fores charged 3s 6d for copies of Isaac Cruikshank’s The Rout which was published some two years after our print, but that was an unusually long caricature and may therefore have warranted a higher-than-average retail price. So let’s assume that copies of this print sold for 2s, which is broadly comparable to the price Fores charged for two caricatures on the Prince Regent that he had published in 1786 [4].

If Fores sold King Henry… at 2s per copy then he would have had to sell 124 coloured copies, or 25% of every 500 copies printed, to break-even. Assuming he managed to sell every copy printed, then he stood to make a total profit of £37 10s per 500 prints published.

So what, if anything, does all this tell us about the business of making satirical prints? For me it highlights two things: Firstly, it demonstrates that there was reasonable money to be made from publishing caricatures. Fores’ profit on every 500 prints sold would have been more than double his initial investment and was comparable to the average annual wage for an unskilled labourer. As such it is perhaps easy to see why successful publishers such as John Boydell and Thomas Tegg managed to amass considerable fortunes on the back of publishing and selling prints. Secondly, our little experiment also indicates the potential cost of getting things wrong. The publisher faced considerable up-front expenditure to bring a new caricature to market and bore all of the financial risk if things went wrong. Success in printselling must in part have been based on one’s ability to accurately forecast sales and set production levels accordingly. Print too many copies and your profit margin would evaporate in piles of unsold stock, too few and you failed to maximise on the profitability of a successful design. The long list of eighteenth-century printsellers whose business floundered after just a few years of trading indicates just how difficult it was to consistently get this balance right.


Notes

  1. A. Griffiths, The Print Before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking, 1550 – 1820, (London, 2016) pp. 62 – 77.
  2. A.M. Broadly, Napoleon in Caricature 1795 – 1821, Vol. 1, (London, 1911) p. 37.
  3. The Lewis Walpole Library has a number of caricatures published by Fores on paper carrying a Whatman watermark. See here and here for examples.
  4. See BM Ref. 1851,0901.376. The wording of an advertisement for A Rout which appeared in the Times 20th February 1790 would suggest that it was considered to be a somewhat unusual caricature due to the number of figures depicted. Unusually, the prices of the two prints published in 1786 were etched onto the plates, see BM Cat. 6924 and 6927.

“Mark him out he is known on the town”, George Humphrey’s mysterious note

29 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by theprintshopwindow in George Humphrey, James Gillray

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One of the more unusual items to be found in the British Library’s collection of James Gillray’s correspondence is a copy of a note which the printseller George Humphrey found lying on the pavement outside his shop on 19th April 1823.20160728_165145

It reads:

A noted long nosd [sic] Jew-looking wretch about 40 attends this picture shop window every afternoon for hours; mark him out he his [sic] known on the town

Humphrey then scribbled the following line underneath his transcription:

This paper was drop’t down the area in front of my house, 24 St James’s St, on the 19th of April 1823. G. Humphrey. 

Although the  exact meaning and purpose of the note is as baffling to us as it evidently was to Humphrey, it seems likely that it was written by one of the printseller’s neighbours (or someone else who evidently had the opportunity to observe the comings and goings outside his shop for lengthy periods of the day), who was motivated not just by an obvious sense of antisemitism, but also by a concern that the printshop was acting as a magnet for some unspecified crime.

In this respect at least, the author’s the fears may not have been completely without foundation. Whilst our view of Georgian printshop windows is a rather rosy one, unduly influenced by puff-piece caricatures of smiling crowds happily congregating to enjoy the latest prints, it is not one which would necessarily have been shared by contemporary observers who had experienced these crowds first hand. There are numerous records which indicate that the windows of even the most fashionable West End printshops served as the backdrop for a variety of crimes, ranging from petty thefts to homosexual soliciting, with the ‘low’ and potentially dangerous, nature of the crowds that gathered there proving to be a constant source of anxiety to conservatively-minded Londoners.

Just as interesting as the note itself is the piece of paper it was written on. In his haste to transcribe the odd notice he’d found laying on the ground outside his shop, Humphrey had evidently grabbed the first piece of paper that came to hand, which in this case happened to be a blank customer bill marked with his letterhead. 20160728_165230

 

For me, this document goes some way towards answering a long-standing question about the nature of the Humphrey family’s publishing business, namely: “Given the small number of new prints the Humphreys’ published after Gillray’s final descent into madness in 1810, how did their business survive for so long?” George Humphrey’s letterhead quite clearly indicates that Gillray continued to act as the basis of the family’s business for years after his death. This over-reliance on simply churning out reissues of his works may have also proved to be the business’s undoing, stifling the sort of innovations in format and printing methods that were taking place elsewhere in the market during the 1820s and leaving Humphrey almost completely reliant on the public’s continued appetite for Gillray. Thus when tastes began to change from the 1820s onwards, Humphrey had nothing else to fall back on and found himself being rapidly overtaken by printsellers who had invested in new publishing techniques and the talents of new artists.

“I admire very much your etchings…” – James Gillray’s fan mail

20 Saturday Aug 2016

Posted by theprintshopwindow in James Gillray

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James Gillray’s signature on a letter dated 1800. BL Add Mss 27337.

By the middle of the 1790s James Gillray was becoming something of a celebrity among the affectedly art-conscious ranks of the British upper classes. The surviving remnants of his personal papers indicate that his postbag bulged with letters from amateur caricaturists and aspiring wits who desperately sought to have him translate their ideas into print. The following letter, written by Francis Hawksworth Esq. of Hickleton Hall in South Yorkshire, is indicative of the type of correspondence Gillray must have received from such people on a fairly regular basis. In this case Hawksworth goes a step further in actually requesting that Gillray touch up a plate he had already partially engraved himself and then send him copies of the finished prints. Gillray’s reply hasn’t survived but it seems hard to imagine that he would have turned down the request, particularly as Hawksworth he had offered to pay him a fee equivalent to that he would normally expect for engraving a new plate of his own design from scratch.

Nov. 18th 1799

Dear Sir,

Enclosed I send you five Guineas, which will cover your acc[oun]t for etching Sir George Sackville’s Monument. I have begun to try etching myself, but I am so defeated in the attempt that I must apply to you for a little assistance. Will you send me down a couple of needles and some wax, the same that you etch with yourself, and tell me how you lay it on… I have a great favour to ask of you. I have sent up by the mail coach of tonight a copper plate that has a very bad etching on it – some parts about the buggy are too strong, some parts by the horse are so weak as not to be seen in the impression. I would have destroy’d the plate immediately had not the face and figure of the man been so extraordinarily like him that I am sure I can never get such a resemblance again. Now I want you to cover the plate with wax… and touch it up for me. I would be very happy to give you the same price for doing this as if you were to etch a new one. If the lines of the face are too strong, you must burnish them down, but not by any means alter the likeness. Pray get the plate cut off at the bottom just above the letters and make a couple of lines at the sides of the plate. I know I have imposed upon your hands a piece of drudgery, but I really shall by greatly obliged if you will make an attempt to make it look decent. The sooner you send it me down and the better with twelve impressions not coloured [sic]. Give my complements to Mrs Humphreys [sic].

Your obed. servt. F. Hawksworth. Hickleton Hall near Doncaster.

P.S. I admire very much your etchings of Lord Moira, Mr Skeffington and Penn, they are vastly good indeed.


Add Mss 27337 ff 53.

Bold text represents underlining in the original.

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