the issue of caricature || conventions of georgian caricature

Conventions of Georgian CaricatureAuthor(s): Robert L. PattenSource: Art Journal, Vol. 43, No. 4, The Issue of Caricature (Winter, 1983), pp. 331-338Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/776730 .

Accessed: 20/12/2014 08:54

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sat, 20 Dec 2014 08:54:48 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa

http://www.jstor.org/stable/776730?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Conventions of Georgian Caricature

By Robert L. Patten

Although the influence of Hogarth on

English fiction and on European art has received much scholarly attention,1 little notice has been taken of Hogarth's successors in the art of graphic satire. Nonetheless, the Georgian caricaturists who flourished from the 1780s through the 1820s exercised a profound influence on English culture. They forged a popular art out of the disparate materials of an iconographic, ideological, political, scientific, and social heritage and transmitted to nineteenth-century artists and audiences ways of looking at and talking about the world that fundamentally reoriented and reinvig- orated the fine arts and literature. Since so little is known about caricature as a cultural institution and as an aesthetic program, I shall concentrate on those aspects; but this whole essay is a prolegomenon to a fuller study that would trace the effects of Georgi- an graphic satire on nineteenth-century art.

From Hogarth forward, moralizing satirical prints depicting contemporary scenes were a staple of London (and some provin- cial) book and print dealers. At first these prints were largely concerned with man- ners, morals, fashions, and portraiture, but political and philosophical developments in the late eighteenth century encouraged the production of plates supporting various factions within the government; by the 1790s political satires were at least as numerous and popular as personal ones.

The French Revolution and the long Napoleonic wars that followed accelerated the growth of English prints for many rea- sons. Access to European engravings dried up, and the importation of Netherlandish genre subjects, so popular in the eighteenth century for their portrayal of bourgeois life, ceased. Artists and patrons turned to indigenous productions for images of their culture, and, as they did so, that which was British-more accurately, English, since

Fig. IFrancis Jukes and R. Pollard after Thomas Rowlandson, Vaux-Hall, 1785, etching and aquatint, 19 x 297/16". Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

the Celtic fringe was generally a subject of ridicule-was increasingly distinguished from that which was generic. Specific locations replaced generalized ones; particular persons replaced types; unique scenes rendered in contemporary dress supplanted allegorical scenes and costumes (Fig. 1). To that extent, the growth of caricature is another manifestation of the Romantic movement, that exploration of individuality and difference which con- futed Augustan assumptions about univer- sal norms.

The wars placed an unprecedented burden on propaganda. Unlike feudal campaigns, whose burden fell chiefly on the aristocracy and its servants, the Napoleonic campaigns exacted tribute from every citi- zen. No one understood better than Bona-

parte that modern war requires a modern bureaucracy that can quickly and efficiently summon all the resources of a country. Britain's effort required three things: a relatively stable government to prosecute both the military and diplomatic initiatives, a constant stream of conscripts to man the ships and carry the rifles, and an equally constant stream of taxes to finance not only the British enterprise but also most of the allies. It was therefore essential that the government gain and keep the support of the people, in spite of the appalling sacri- fices they were asked to make, year in and year out, for almost twenty years.

Maintaining that support in England was not easy. Ministries were often weak, because party allegiances were blurred by the conflicting ambitions of a relatively small

Winter 1983 331



--:l_:-;i iiiiiiisii

- ii:: _iii~iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii""

" 'iiilii

fo:

41? :-

Sm u::_-:: ::-~::::: r YE :: -::: :,&:-:

number of aristocratic families; because collective cabinet responsibility was un- known; and because the King's fitful health spurred the Opposition to form around the Prince of Wales, in the hope that a Regency would put them in office.

More subtle but pervasively potent was the claim that Napoleon, as heir to the Revolution, made to represent national liberty, progress, and the freedom of the individual from monarchical tyranny and privilege. As the Tsar wrote in 1804: "The most powerful weapon hitherto used by the French, and still threatening the other European States, is the general opinion which France has managed to promulgate, that her cause is the cause of national liberty and prosperity."2 After Burke's death in 1797, there was in England no powerful orator to articulate conservative political philosophy. The Opposition continued to hammer away at the theme that England had provoked the wars, and that it, like the ancien regime and the despots of the Ger- man States and Russia, fought against the irresistible spirit of the age.

In general, popular prints favored those out of power. Satire is a weapon of the dispossessed, and caricature does not lend itself readily to encomiums. Dependent on public patronage, these lampoons seldom celebrated yet another of Pitt's taxes, whereas they were quick to ridicule fiascos such as the Walcheren expedition and to indulge in an orgy of scorn over venality in high places. James Gillray stands as something of an exception, since for much of his most productive decades (1790-1810) he received suggestions for plates from George Canning and a pension from the government.3 He was virtually alone in not attacking Pitt's second ministry.4 But even Gillray was in no sense a hired propa- gandist, for he was capable of etching dev- astating satires of the government, and he

was in any case dependent on the customers who patronized the shop of his employer, Mrs. Hannah Humphrey, many of whom favored the Opposition (Fig. 2).

If not often supportive of the Ministry, caricaturists did nevertheless support the war, although from time to time Opposition arguments for peace enlisted the aid of a considerable number of etchings. Artists were therefore faced with a threefold mission: to ridicule the follies of those govern- ing, to shape and foster antipathy towards the French, and to articulate and image English national virtue. In devising an iconography of Englishness, caricaturists contributed significantly, not only to the war effort but also, more lastingly, to a nation's sense of its identity, and a people's sense of their participation in affairs of state.

ooking at caricature was truly a national pastime. Although George III

took only a fitful interest in these plates, his eldest son, despite the fact that he was the target of the most scathing attacks, maintained standing orders for prints at several shops, ordering 121 from Mrs. Humphrey alone in 1806--07. According to George Cruikshank's nephew Percy, proofs of new caricatures were often de- livered, by rather indirect means, to the Prince's palace, Carlton House, the night before official publication:

The plate being finished, a proof, in the shape of a roll of paper, was taken by a trusty agent, to Carlton House at night. There a pair of sen- tries marched, in front of the Royal residence, and when their walk was back to back, the agent, stepping up, unperceived, dropped the roll of

paper over the open screen in front of the House. This, in course of time, being found by [a] Royal porter, was opened, and after being enjoyed in the kitchen, was laid on the Royal breakfast table, and a very indigesti- ble roll it must have proved.6

When the Prince found a print too offensive or dangerous, he sometimes bought up the impression or the copper, as he did of Gillray's L'Assemblie Nationale (1804).7 Percy gives a colorful, if somewhat im- probable, version of how these Royal trans- actions were executed:

Mr. Calken, of the firm of Calken and Budd, booksellers, Pall Mall, and who had originally been a musi- cian at the Opera House in the Hay- market, by some means had the "back stairs" road to favour, and was the agent confided with the delicate task of frightening the publisher of these offensive pictures. Failing in that, a compromise was effected, Calken purchasing the copper plate, sometimes as much as seventy guineas being paid for one, when particularly unpleasant, and which was of so much importance that the agent has sometimes taken a post chaise to Brighton, while the publisher was enjoying his ease there, who found this copper mine exceed- ingly profitable.8 The more usual route for the circulation

of caricature prints was through the shops of dealers (Fig. 3). Those located in the West End catered to all the nobs. Hannah Humphrey's shop, at 27 St. James's Street

Fig. 2 James Gillray, Substitutes for Bread, 1795, colored engraving, sheet: 111/8 x 133/4", plate: 9%5/ x 13%5/" (trimmed within platemark). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

332 Art Journal



near the old Palace, enjoyed the patronage not only of the Prince but also of states- men and wits, dandies and officers of the Guards, learned divines and fashionable loungers, and the habitues of the nearby clubs.

Samuel William Fores could claim an equally distinguished clientele. A Scots- man who had set up business in Piccadilly at the age of twenty-two, in 1797 he re- moved to the junction of Piccadilly and Sackville Streets, the corner location af- fording him more windows for displaying his wares. There he established himself as "Caricaturist to the First Consul"; his quick wit and strong sense of humor, along with the gentle grace of his second wife, Jane, attracted such customers as the old Marquis of Queensbury, Sir Francis Bur- dett, Lord Byron (for a time installed in the Albany just around the corner), Wellesley, General Dumouriez, Pitt, Fox, and the French aristocrats who fled the Terror. Louis Phillippe, when the Duc d'Orleans, took rooms on the first floor over Fores's shop, and used to while away the long hours of exile gazing at the grotesque pictures of revolutionary soldiers."

The third principal West End dealer was a German carriage builder, Rudolph Acker- mann, who in 1795 opened a shop in the Strand purveying books and prints, as a business his family could carry on when he died. Designer of state coaches for the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1790) and the Lord Mayor of Dublin (1791) and of Nel- son's funeral car (1806), Ackermann also founded a drawing school, later shut down so that he could incorporate the space into his "Repository of Art." To this elegant gallery he would invite the leading writers, artists, foreign visitors, and socialites for his Wednesday evening salons, said to be an introduction to the best social life in London. 1 During the French Revolution

..:i --, : iiiiiiii i- i -:-_--i .i i -: -: i:i ?- - : .~, ~ lliiiiiiiii

...i~l7 "-:~i~:: _

diai*:il-~:iiiii~ili~_ii-ii-~iii ii :ii':i-:_l-- ..:

i:-iiiiiii. .........-~i:

Ah . ........ ....--- -:--- ;- I : -:; ---:: - : -~~

74---~~P 81rk

ZED -iiii-i :iii:i: , _ -7i-

9 ii:i

-i--, 'rn

-?f1'r77777? 7,77,

-m-MMT-,MF "1-107a71-M,7-,,M*

Fig. 3 James Gillray, Very Slippy-Weather, 1808, engraving 9/4 x 71/16". Princeton University Library.

he employed a number of aristocratic emi- gres; when these titled journeymen returned to France following the Bourbon Restora- tion, they sent Ackermann diamonds and other costly mementos.I

In the City, clustered around St. Paul's and along Cheapside, was another group of print dealers catering to merchants and bankers but also reaching down to tap the pockets of clerks, shopkeepers, and the petit bourgeois. Chief among these was Thomas Tegg, for many years installed, with his "Apollo Library," at 111 Cheap- side, the old Mansion House built by Christopher Wren. Tegg commenced business by selling cheap reprints and abridg- ments; he then expanded into caricatures, often underselling the competition by fur- nishing large editions of prints imperfectly colored, and eventually made so much money that he founded the Tegg scholarship at the City of London School and opened the first bookshop in Australia.12

Tegg was a particularly aggressive busi- nessman and usually outlasted his competition. He also catered to a more radical taste in political satires and a bawdier taste in personal ones than did his counterparts in the West End.

In all these places copies of the latest prints were offered for sale, plain or colored, sometimes in sets. Subscribers could also rent circulating portfolios for the evening or weekend; many a country-house party was enlivened by the perusal of the latest political or personal satire. The Hon. Grantley Berkeley remembered

well the unfailing resource for the entertainment of guests in large country houses, of the book of caricatures. Those unfortunates who cannot be got to talk, or are nervously reserved, are usually set by the hostess to find entertainment, and become social over a portfolio of ludicrous scenes

Winter 1983 333



in which celebrated personages have acted with more or less success. Shy girls and silent young men generally get on pretty well by means of such a medium--in truth, grave and rever- end seignors and ancient tabbies have been found to grow quite amiable, as well as cheerful, as the more equivo- cal prints were turned over.

It was the custom before my day, and in my youth, to get all the novel- ties of this kind from London as regularly as the fashionable novel or the last new ballad; and notwith- standing that they were coarsely drawn and still more coarsely col- oured, it is impossible to exaggerate the amusement they afforded-- especially if at the expense of any particular friend. 13

There were other means of obtaining access to caricatures, too. By paying a small admission fee, the public could view the exhibitions permanently displayed in the larger shops; a German visitor in 1802 reported that a daily visit to the caricature shops was routine for a man of fashion.14 And the bow-fronted, many-paned windows of the period supplied a free exterior gallery; crowds became at times so pressing that railings had to be installed to protect the glass. It was not uncommon for throngs to block passage along the street in front of print shops, especially when some major victory or scandal was being celebrated by the caricaturists. Mobs incited in part by prints disrupted John Kemble's new Covent Garden Opera House for months in 1809, repeatedly disturbed the election of M.P.'s for Westminster, and prevented the arrest of Sir Francis Burdett on a Warrant from the Speaker of the House for three days in 1810. On major public occasions, such as the fetes commemorating Trafalgar, the

X. N

]

i ~i

J I 'ot n hi or ikprot( "11 'R asrb Lv+.' , p M4,h rn onA t4t, WOO~,? -Pp t ~l '1 f- CI'-/A s';:d,','-_: /a:z: ,4': li-:::b dd; P

Fig. 4 James Gillray, Pizarro Contemplating ... His New Peruvian Mine, 1799, etching, 143/8 x 10?/2". Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

. .. .. . ..i..r

4 7 - 7W -U - : : :::-:---- ' -44_ir:iia iiiiiiii~i:i.'iB:i,~- j-:I :-iii~-i~--iiii~iii ;(iiiii-iiii~ ~AN--_i-i

Fig. 5 George Cruikshank, The Return to Office, 1811, etching, 6% x 153/16". Princeton University Library.

334 Art Journal



centenary of the House of Hanover, and Waterloo, large transparencies executed by caricaturists would be illuminated by gas and exhibited by the principal dealers. And the images of the caricaturists were reproduced everywhere: on broadsides and song sheets, lottery puffs and tickets, in children's alphabets, toys, and puzzles, as posters for exhibitions and theatrical per- formances, in wood engravings for cheap books, pamphlets, jest books, and tracts, in panoramas, on cloth, pottery, and por- celain, on fans, valentines, watch dials, tobacco-wrappers, snuff boxes, pipe bowls, and walking sticks.I

The artists who furnished these widely dispersed images worked at the center of an elaborate, although informal, network of relationships-commercial, political, and social. They were not well paid, they never amassed the fortunes accruing to their publishers, and they lived a hand-to- mouth existence. Gillray lodged for over twenty years in rooms above Mrs. Hum- phrey's shop, where she and her maid Betty provided food, drink, and supplies so that he could turn out an astonishing number of superbly conceived and executed etchings. Mrs. Cruikshank had to take in lodgers to supplement the income her husband and sons earned. But even though for most caricaturists their living conditions were meager, they met the leading figures of the day-in the shops, during soirees, in the studio, and in such places frequented by all classes as the taverns, theaters, and pleasure gardens. Like journalists, they had a limited entree based on power, not birth or wealth.

At this period caricature was essentially collaborative. George Moutard Woodward designed many plates that Rowlandson and Isaac Cruikshank etched. Canning would make suggestions for subjects through the Rev. John Sneyd for Gillray to draw. Pub- lishers might develop a particular line-- Fores of Napoleonic satires, William Hol- land of West Indian subjects-and com- mission plates to fill in the run. Amateurs would submit drawings to be perfected and printed; writers would drop by studio or shop with articles and satirical verses re- quiring illustration. Artists borrowed con- stantly from one another; they did parodies, imitations, and sequels; and publishers, notably McCleary in Dublin and Side- botham in London, engaged in wholesale piracy. For the most part, reputable artists and dealers tried to make clear where responsibility for a particular plate belonged. "Invenit" or "invt" appended to a signa- ture usually meant that the etcher had also designed the subject; Gillray added "del." (delineavit) or "des." (designavit) when the plate was etched from a verbal or drawn suggestion by someone else.16 Perhaps these distinctions were made to forestall prosecution; on plates that skirted close to libel, sometimes an artist would inscribe a pseudonym. But caricaturists seldom op-

posed these intrusions by others and did not consider their autonomy threatened; deluged with ideas from all quarters, they picked those that seemed most promising, shaped them up, etched them, and hurried on to the next plate.

Graphic satirists worked at a frantic pace, generating, at times of heightened national tension such as the invasion threat of 1802- 03, at the rate of almost one plate per day, if we can judge by the numbers of those that survive. Consequently, they depended on secondhand information. Obviously it was impossible to visit the scenes of battle, so pictures of Europe tend to be either very generalized (a walled, castellated city might represent any number of Spanish towns) or depicted in terms of well-known features: Paris is portes and palaces and spires and restaurants with French menus. Likenesses of foreign dignitaries derived from prints: the first of Napoleon reached England in the summer of 1796 from Italy and showed a very young man with clean-cut profile, long dark hair, and piercing eyes.17 He was quickly transmogrified into a vil- lainous-looking little demon.

he whole caricature enterprise was intensely personal and individual.

Whatever philosophical or strategic con- cerns might underlie the conduct of politics and war, the political prints personalized. Sometimes the artists were well informed, through private means or through omnivo- rous reading of the public journals, especially the Morning Chronicle, the Exam- iner, and Cobbett's Political Register. Sometimes prejudice attached to a Minister from the beginning and unfairly distorted his whole career: Melville was the object of ridicule for his supposed favoritism to his fellow Scots, and Castlereagh consist- ently got a bad press. Once caricatured, public figures found it difficult to shake off the image: the actor, playwright, and Member of Parliament Richard Brinsley Sheridan rarely appears as other than a drink-blotched greedy fool (Fig. 4). That personalization extended to the rival shops, essentially identified with the political prejudices of their owners, clientele, and artists. Lesser satirists may not always have been able to shape a distinctive style, and some preferred flexibility or anonymity; but each of the great trio of Rowlandson, Gillray, and George Cruikshank was known for his personal style, subject matter, and iconography.

Moreover, this personalization of politics was often achieved through scurrilous calumny. No holds were barred (Fig. 5). Angels fart, Kings sit on close-stools, Royal Dukes are accused of murder, lech- ery, and adultery, Ministers stand convicted by the public of bribery, theft, and treason, and opponents make pacts with the devil. Husbands are cuckolds, ladies are whores, alleged lovers are invested with phenome-

nal "parts," generals are cowards, merchants defraud the public with adulterated goods, physicians are quacks, lawyers-up to and including the Lord Chancellor-are venal place seekers, clergy are humbugging sinecurists. In the caricaturists' theater, each man and woman has a price: the exchange of power, money, or sex becomes the quintessential transaction that explains all that goes wrong with the state.

he aesthetic program developed for communicating this cultural institu-

tion resulted in part from the fact that many of the caricaturists were untrained. They depended on their unschooled talents, quick inventiveness, and tricks of the trade that minimized, even exploited, their artistic weaknesses. What Isaac Cruikshank, largely self-taught, passed on to his sons Robert and George about the vocabulary and strategies of caricature probably exem- plifies the ways their fellow artists learned their vocation. Three aspects of drawing that give difficulty to most amateurs also plagued the caricaturists, so they learned to fudge problems of perspective, portraiture, and anatomy.

For example, two means of achieving perspective--controlling contrast gradients and diminishing the size of figures as they recede from the picture plane-were often inappropriate to the medium of caricature. In graphic satire figures are not disposed to give scale (as in John Martin or Turner) or a human context to landscape (as in Gains- borough or Constable). They are there to be recognized, by features and clothing, in their own right; thus, details of even the most remote figures must be readily dis- cernible. Moreover, caricaturists like Gill- ray developed a vocabulary of scale that did not have anything whatever to do with perspective but, rather, was iconographic: figures like Napoleon were graphically belittled by reducing them to the size of Lilliputians.

Organizing a composition around a van- ishing point located at the approximate center of the plate is not difficult, but if the recession is deep, it has for caricaturists one extreme disadvantage: either it forces the background figures at the center to be very small-in which case they can get lost or be obscured by objects closer to the picture plane-or it leaves a meaningless hole right at the center of the design. Isaac Cruikshank solved that dilemma by avoid- ing outdoor scenes. Many of his pictures take place within what we might call a shallow box set, with a rear wall a few "feet" from the front plane and floor boards receding in perspective along the bottom of the print to ground the design and give that illusion of space unobtainable by other means. Within this shallow space, he disposes his figures across the plate in a firiezelike structure. He does not, therefore, have to draw groups lying behind one

Winter 1983 335



WhoII~' 'a(#

v'r' r

wmp' r v~4

fA~ ~ ~ ~lh wArk V AAr 4v&

/ M;, mdi ~ ~~v

Fig. 6 James Gillray, Doublares of Character, 1798, colored engraving, sheet: 10/4 x 143/16". Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Inot

!/ .... .

...... . .

~::~:: 1 :: 2 1

s

..... ....

)iiiiiii~~.~ - :'~

ttc:- rn-ve ei e.~ /

Fig. 7 George Cruikshank, Inconveniences of a Crowded Drawing Room, 1818, colored etching, 83/4 X 121s/16". Princeton University Library.

another. Furthermore, he often rakes the floor, as designers rake a stage, so that figures at the rear stand on a higher plane than those in the foreground; this illusion can be achieved by picking a vantage point somewhat above normal eye level.

Another problem for which Isaac passed on solutions that by-passed academic drawing concerned portraiture. Political satire depends on the audience's being able to recognize the persons being satirized. Before photography and mass-circulation journals, few, even in London, would have known the features of Liverpool or Sid-

mouth or Wellington except through portrait engravings and caricatures. Various iconographic devices were employed to assist in identification, ranging from written tags like laundry labels through graphic- verbal puns (Charles James Fox was in early prints depicted with a fox's head or brush; Henry Brougham often carried a broom) to characteristic uniforms, familiar through parades and colored prints, which unmistakably identified the allied com- manders and their troops.

Still, if possible, the heads had to be identifiable. Caricaturists could seldom

afford to depict their figures except in full or three-quarters face, or in profile. Thus, however a caricaturist disposed his persons across the plate, they all had to be facing within ninety degrees of head-on. That constraint reinforced the theatricality of the design and compelled artists to invent an enormous variety of ways of sustaining a dramatic narrative engagement among the figures while keeping their faces to the viewer. One solution was the same as a director's: to place the principal focus of attention at the front of the picture plane/ stage and to range the figures around it in radiating lines or arcs.

Caricaturists also relied extensively on profiles; thus they often showed two figures coming from opposite sides of the drawing to meet in the middle. The profile is one of the most easily recognized forms of like- ness; it was the subject of much physiognomical analysis; and it was a particular favorite of the populace, who delighted in images obtained by machines such as the physiognotrace, which connected a rod passed down the center of the face to a pencil that reproduced the contours on paper. Artists who cut silhouettes out of paper were also patronized by the public; many cottages and tenements had as their only decoration portrait silhouettes of children or relatives.18

For bust or full-figure silhouettes and their graphic counterparts, bumps and hol- lows are a gift to the artist: Pitt's beanpole torso, the Prince Regent's paunch, Sir Wil- liam Curtis's gherkin-pickle nose, Wel- lington's hooked bridge, and the swelling globes of Lady Hertford's breasts. These features developed a life of their own as they shuttlecocked from one caricature to another, gaining in definition and expres- sive distortion according to the style and purpose of the individual print. In these respects, caricaturists were trying not to

336 Art Journal



iiii!•iiarv

•iiiiiiii!% ~ i iiiii iii~ i iiiiiii iiii ~ iiiii~ • ..........................................

iiiiiA

•ii~ial,711 !ii~i1

/ W-0/0i"Zo PW!

(A VON, Mill"iiiii

iii~iiiiiiiiiiii!•iiiiiiiiii~/I

Fig. 8 George Cruikshank, Massacre at St. Peter's, 1819, colored etching, 811/16". Princeton University Library.

draw from or like life but to replicate a vocabulary of physical signs that had been established by a process of graphic analysis, selection, reduction, and exchange among artist, subject, and audience.

Learning that vocabulary was facilitated by two factors: the procedure of classifica- tion and taxonomy of physiological psychology. Graphic satirists learned to break down the head, and indeed the entire body, into component parts, which were then classified according to the precepts of LeBrun, Lavater, and others. Rowlandson continually plays with the contrast between fat, squat, old male and voluptuous, well- proportioned, young female;19 but the classifications became much more elaborate than that, were made for comic as well as serious purposes, and got extended into related areas, such as kinds of hats or shoes. An artist acquainted with these options could quickly identify the type of feature in each case that the subject presented, or more precisely that would characterize the subject, and could then compose a portrait accordingly. Moreover, the somatic features were allied to vocabularies of physiological psychology (including Lavater's physiognomy and Gall and Spurzheim's phrenology), to psychological, physiolog-

ical, and theatrical theories of expression and gesture, and to characterological, theatrical, and occupational types that extend backward into Renaissance humors and beyond, to the iconic physiology of the medieval period.20 Contours suggested character, and character shaped contours (Fig. 6). The connections were elaborately worked out, and the resulting vocabulary was shared by artists, actors, novelists, playwrights, and poets.

A third area of difficulty for any amateur artist is anatomy. Students at the Royal Academy would spend years copying from antique nude sculptures and life models. The object was to achieve correctness-of proportion, of body structure, weight, and balance, and of attitude. The last was achieved also by reference to a host of books, from Ripa to Reynolds, prescribing the stances, gestures, tilt of head, curve of back, position of arms, and even the flare of nostril or dilation of eye appropriate to convey the heroic emotions: fear, courage, veneration, melancholy, defiance, agony, resolution, nobility, resignation. There was a continual exchange between the theater and the atelier, as academicians and actors traded information about ways of communicating psychic states through physical

means. But the range of states with which they were concerned and the effects which they wished to achieve were limited to the grand, the intense, the deliberate. The caricaturists' repertoire was necessarily more expansive. It included the casual, private, momentary: the vitiated slouch of a debauchee, the effusive energy of rois- terers, the indignity of flight. Whereas the classical manner sought a kind of fixity of image, an ideal immobilized, caricaturists put mankind in motion, often of a kind that could not be maintained with decorum, if maintained at all (Fig. 7).

The line that expresses this movement tends, in the best plates, to have its own energy, to delineate the nervous impulse rather than the resolute purpose. Tension, awkwardness, effort replace control; short, choppy, angular strokes, or serpentine lines that swell and taper in sensuous, fluid arabesques are substituted for tight, vol- umetric outlines and fine shading. Elbows and knees, fingers and toes protrude, as- sertively bony and cartilaginous.

A knowledge of anatomy is no less important for the comic artist than for a history painter, but caricaturists found ways around their lack of formal training. For one thing, clothing was such an important mark of Winter 1983 337



identification that to some degree it could substitute for a correct rendering of the underlying body as a readable image of a particular person in a particular state. John Gibson Lockhart noted that Henry Bunbury could not draw, but "provided he was allowed the benefit of loose breeches, and capacious coats, and grizzly wigs, and tobacco-smoke, he could get on well enough."21 And this clothing could be disposed to express primary elements of bodies in motion: the carriage of the head, the stoop of spine and shoulders, the angle of a stride, the thrust of an arm. But hands are a big problem, because they can't be concealed by clothing, and their linearity can create a fussy, disproportionate effect with respect to the image as a whole. If they couldn't be partly concealed by giving them something to hold-a bag, a purse, a cane, a letter, or a sword-then the next best thing was to put them in pockets out of sight. That was the advice Isaac Cruikshank gave to his sons, and his son Robert re- peated it when he taught drawing at a girls' school.22

The aim of most caricaturists was to tell a story, however abbreviated the narrative content. Given direction by the examples of Hogarth, English graphic satire moved away from medieval and Renaissance emblems towards the moralized tale, away from the abstract, the hieratic, and the constant towards human life in time, informed and judged, perhaps, by images of a more permanent ideal.23 Caricatures recorded the passing events of the day: Ministries forming and dissolving, battles won or lost, the changing parade of fashion. To do this, caricaturists resorted more and more to the invention of dramatic scenes. Instead of grotesquely exaggerating the features or headdress of one person, or of displaying several small groups of people engaged in unrelated activities, they de- vised imaginary situations---often based on extremely accurate information about what went on behind the scenes--in which a group of participants all played characteristic roles.

Ideas, policies, philosophies, and values were thus translated into dramatic narra- tives. Theories of government, taxation, military and diplomatic strategy, and ethics were treated, not in the measured cadences of reasoned discourse, but in the exagger- ated lines--graphic and verbal--of theater. Not the ideas themselves but the character of their spokesmen and their effect upon the people were depicted. And as citizens began to perceive their representatives in the caricatures, they began to think of themselves as characters, as participants, in the national drama (Fig. 8). That self- perception encouraged Britons, in particular, to intervene in public events. Carica- ture helped people to see their lives in relation to national and abstract issues and to conceive of their own existence not as

meaningless, obscure, or archetypal, but as narrative, consequential, and individual. The differences between the generic characters of Fielding-a Tom Jones or a Squire Allworthy-and the representative eccen- trics of Dickens are in part due to the intervention of this flourishing popular graphic art that taught two generations to read their lives in terms of the paradigms and vocabulary of graphic satire.24 Ac- cording to Sydney Smith, "the soul of Hogarth ... migrated into the body of Mr. Dickens."25

Thus, in thousands of prints churned out daily over decades, Georgian caricaturists imaged their world. Drawing on traditional emblems, popular literature and theater, familiar contemporary scenes, persons, and costumes, fashionable argot and puns, the prejudices of their patrons and audience, and the achievements of their fellow artists, they made a vocabulary and a way of reading the world. Caricature is an omnium- gatherum of topoi; it protests against the restraints of custom and genre; and it melds its miscellaneous materials into comic or satiric scenes. That strategy for interpreting the world-that vocabulary and those fic- tions--descended both in general and in very specific ways to the audiences and artists of the mid-nineteenth century.

Notes I am grateful to the Literature and Society group at Brown University for the opportunity to try out an expanded version of this paper in March 1982.

1 The starting point for a consideration of Hogarth's influence on English fiction is Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, 2 vols., New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1971; for Hogarth's influence on European art, Frederick Antal, Hogarth and His Place in European Art, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962.

2 To Novosiltzoff, 11 September 1804, quoted from J.H. Rose, Napoleonic Studies, in Catalogue ofPolitical and Personal Satires, ed. Mary Dorothy George, vol. 8, London, British Museum Publications, Ltd., 1947, p. xi; hereafter cited as BM, followed by volume and page or catalogue number as appropriate.

3 Draper Hill, Mr. Gillray the Caricaturist, London, Phaidon Press, 1965.

4 BM, 8:xxiii. 5 Royal Archives, Manuscript 27094 et seq.,

cited by John Wardroper, The Caricatures of George Cruikshank, London, Gordon Fraser, 1977, p. 14 n. 30.

6 Percy R. Cruikshank, "George Cruikshank, with some Account of his Brother, Robert Cruikshank," unpublished autograph mem- oir, c. 1879, Princeton University Library, p. 40; orthography regularized, grammar improved, and accidentals modified here and below.

7 BM 10253.

8 Cruikshank, "George Cruikshank," p. 41.

9 A.M.Broadley, Napoleon in Caricature, 1795-1821, 2 vols., London, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1911, vol. 1, pp. 57-59.

10 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 62-65. 11 Cruikshank, "George Cruikshank," pp.

62-63.

12 Broadley, vol. 1, pp. 67-69, andBM, 8:xli.

13 Hon. George C. Grantley F. Berkeley, My Life and Recollections, 4 vols., London, Hurst and Blackett, 1865-67, vol. 4, p. 133.

14 BM, 8:xli.

15 Broadley, Napoleon, vol. 1, pp. 2-3 and passim.

16 BM, 8:xxxvii. 17 Broadley, Napoleon, vol. 1, p. 87.

18 For examples, see James Ayres, English Naive Painting, 1750-1900, London, Thames and Hudson, 1980.

19 Ronald Paulson, Rowlandson: A New Inter- pretation, London, Studio Vista, 1972, esp. ch. 2, "The Comedy of Contrasting Shapes."

20 For the influence of Lavater, see Graeme Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1982; and for the inventive amalgamation of physiognomy with theatrical and artistic conventions, see Judith Wechsler, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in Nineteenth Century Paris, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982.

21 John Gibson Lockhart, "Lectures on the Fine Arts, No. 1. On George Cruikshank," Blackwood's Magazine, 14 (July 1823), p. 23.

22 Cruikshank, "George Cruikshank," p. 54.

23 Ronald Paulson, "The Tradition of Comic Illustration from Hogarth to Cruikshank," George Cruikshank: A Revaluation, ed. Robert L. Patten, Princeton, Princeton Uni- versity Library, 1974, pp. 35-60.

24 Although it overstates the case for Lavater as the sole source of physiognomical psychology, Tytler's book (see n. 20) illustrates the effect of physiognomy on nineteenth- century description of character.

25 John B. Podeschi, Dickens andDickensiana: A Catalogue of the Richard Gimbel Collec- tion, New Haven, Yale University Library, 1980, H1562, ALS. of 5 September 1837 to Paulet Mildmay.

Robert L. Patten, Professor of English at Rice University, edits SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. He has written extensively on Victorian fiction and is now completing a biography of George Cruikshank.

338 Art Journal



the issue of caricature || conventions of georgian caricature

Documents