The work of one of Britain's finest satirists shows how the rich and famous were skewered over 200 years ago
By B.B. | OXFORD
A MASSIVE shaggy goat with curly horns embraces a beautifully attired princess with a plumed head-dress; merry men dance in the background and a father figure hovers in the sky. It might be an illustration for a fairytale—but in fact it is a mordant cartoon showing the notoriously wayward Prince of Wales being reconciled with his wife, Princess Caroline, though one suspects not for long.
The engraving is one of about 60 caricatures by James Gillray (1756-1815) now on show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford to mark the 200th anniversary of the artist’s death. The theme is love, friendship and alliances, but Gillray’s engraving needle is relentlessly sharp, whether he is lampooning politicians, royalty or private passions. That acuity made him highly influential. He earned the gratitude (and financial support) of the Tory government for making a number of prominent opposition Whig politicians look ridiculous, but showed no particular loyalty to his patrons, once depicting William Pitt, the prime minister of the day, as a fungus growing from a dunghill. Napoleon, a frequent target of his pictorial attacks, is said to have remarked in exile in St Helena that the British caricaturist did more than all the armies of Europe to bring him down.
The exhibition is drawn entirely from a superb collection of Gillrays at New College, Oxford, which owns examples of about 800 of the artist’s output of some 1,100 prints. The majority of the engravings in the show have not been exhibited before, and because they have been kept away from the light, their colours, added by hand, are still bright and fresh two centuries on. To mark the occasion, New College has also commissioned a new cartoon in the Gillray tradition from the Guardian’s Martin Rowson, who can be just as spiky.
Gillray was the son of a Scottish soldier, the only one of five children who survived to adulthood. He went to school for a while, then was apprenticed to a letter-engraver, but soon left. In his early 20s he studied at the Royal Academy and tried to become a portrait-painter, but could not make a living and turned to making engravings sold in print shops. By his mid-20s he had found his metier as a political caricaturist.
In the later part of his career he sold his prints exclusively through the print shop of Mrs Hannah Humphreys (who may or may not have been his mistress), and for a long time he lived above the shop in St James’s Street, near where The Economist building now stands. Contemporary accounts suggest that he was an unassuming character, thin, dry and bespectacled, without artistic airs and graces. When his eyesight began to fail he became depressed and tried to commit suicide by throwing himself out of an upstairs window, but failed. He took to drink and his mind became increasingly disturbed. When he was visited by George Cruikshank, a fellow caricaturist, towards the end of his life, he told his visitor that his name was not Gillray but Rubens. That may not have been as far-fetched as it sounds: Rubens had been a lifelong hero of Gillray’s.
But before those sticky final years, Gillray enjoyed considerable fame and some fortune. A contemporary German magazine declared him one of Europe’s greatest artists, and his satirical prints sold well to an affluent London clientele. One of his engravings shows a crowd looking at the prints in the window of Mrs Humphreys’s shop, with the much-lampooned Prince of Wales as a customer inside.
A few decades on, though, the Victorians could no longer cope with his frequent depictions of copulation, excretion and other bodily functions. A catalogue of his work from 1851 left out 45 particularly rude images, which had to be specially requested by those with stronger stomachs. A history of caricature published in 1904 suggested that his pictures came from an unclean and unbalanced mind and symbolised “the moral foulness of the age”. But over the past few decades the artist has been enjoying a considerable renaissance, helped along by a big retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London in 2001. The Ashmolean exhibition taps into that.
However acerbic, Gillray’s images are beautifully drawn and composed and full of a remarkable range of cultural references, from classical antiquity to mathematics and great artists of the past. The captions and the often extensive speech bubbles are full of wicked wit and invention. It was Gillray who first portrayed the Bank of England as the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, crying murder and rape as Pitt fishes for the gold in her pocket.
So is this art or a very superior form of journalism? Todd Porterfield, a professor at the University of Montreal who curated the exhibition, thinks it is a bit of both. Gillray was supremely gifted, but also stood out for the immediacy of his images at a time of a nascent mass culture. Caricaturists then ran risks, says Mr Porterfield, but they knew the limits. Gillray once narrowly avoided a charge of blasphemy over a caricature containing a Biblical reference. But at least he was in little danger of being shot dead for his satire, Charlie Hebdo style.
“Love Bites: Caricatures by James Gillray” is at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford until June 21st
