https://literaryreview.co.uk/prince-of-caricatura * For People Who Devour Books * Subscribe Today! * Sign In * Register * Help Literary Review Sunday 4th December, 2022 * Home * Current Issue * Archive * Bad Sex * Search * Subscribe * About * Shop Home >> Current Issue >> Freya Johnston << previous | next >> [DECJAN-COVER-198x266] Dec 2022 Categories more 18th Century, 19th Century, Art Read more by Freya Johnston Mother & Author Radical Yet Reasonable Squalor & Sublimity A Writer's Revenge We are Family Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Dogs Revolting Mind The Son He Never Had What The Doctor Ordered Two Inches of Ivory * * Tweet * * i Print This Freya Johnston Prince of Caricatura James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire By Tim Clayton Yale University Press 408pp PS50 order from our bookshop Children do not tend to feature prominently in the satirical works of the 'Prince of Caricatura', James Gillray. As someone professionally committed to excoriating the politicians and celebrities of his day, he was paid to train his eye on the grown-ups. One exception to this rule comes in A March to the Bank, a vast, elaborate print of 1787. It was published in the wake of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in London and reflects the city's outrage at the subsequent military crackdown on public disorder. Gillray blends straight portraiture with lurid exaggeration in his etching: an absurdly dandified, impossibly skinny officer goosesteps over a mob of Londoners, who lie crushed and abandoned in various states of disarray. At the centre of the picture, with the officer's foot daintily poised on her midriff, lies the grotesque, ungainly figure of a fishwife, still grasping a basket of eels, her hefty legs splayed wide open. A fragment of cloth barely covers her genitals. Next to her lies a baby boy, perhaps her son, who is naked from the waist down and spread-eagled on the edge of the pavement. An impassive-looking soldier has placed the tip of his boot squarely on the child's face. Gillray seems here to be alluding, as he often did, to his fellow artist William Hogarth, whose Gin Lane (1751) also displays in the foreground a dishevelled female figure with exposed breasts and a half-naked male baby crying and falling from her arms to the ground. In the case of Hogarth's infant, the fall seems more than likely to prove fatal; in Gillray's, it is hard to tell. At the very edge of the print, a wild-eyed man, perhaps the baby's father, is grabbing the infant's arm while trying with his other hand to push the soldier's boot away, but his distorted, antic expression makes it difficult to be sure that this is a gesture of protection. There may be another reason for the child's face to have been obscured by a soldier's boot, though this is speculation on my part: Gillray was perhaps unsure of his ability to depict the very young. One early print of a boy, after Ozias Humphry, was published in 1781, but Gillray subsequently spoiled the plate, scoring the whole image through with lines in such a way as effectively to erase it (although, very strangely and, in Tim Clayton's view, perhaps uniquely in this period, fans continued to buy copies of the image in its mutilated state). It is tempting, albeit again perhaps unwarranted, to relate the reluctance of Gillray to include children in his work to the fact that none of his siblings lived beyond the age of ten. He had no offspring of his own. Two versions of A March to the Bank are included in Clayton's wonderful new book. The first, uncensored one of 1787 was titillatingly advertised as 'a curious treat to the Gentlemen of the Army'. Gillray, the son of a soldier who had lost an arm while serving in the Queen's Dragoons, knew what was most likely to appeal to this constituency: pornography and attacks on the snivelling French. The second version is an edited image, apparently produced a couple of years later in response to objections that elements in the original were obscene. By way of reply to his prudish critics, Gillray grudgingly added a tiny bit of extra fabric to the upturned fishwife's crotch, though without restoring much of her dignity. As for the baby with the exposed penis, Gillray concealed the offensive organ only by having an eel from the fishwife's basket jump out to bite it. As Clayton remarks, in satisfying his critics the artist also managed to insult them. Born in 1756, Gillray is known to have been coarse as well as witty, cynical, eccentric and extremely sensitive to criticism. No whiff of impropriety survives as far as his own private life is concerned: long hours spent ridiculing the sexual and gastronomic excesses of the royal family and other figures eminent in public life may have put him off indulgences of his own. Or perhaps he quickly grew expert at concealing them: more than one person remarked on the fact that he gave very little away. Such reticence might have been a necessity in view of the often murky and licentious business in which he was involved. There is another very good reason for the paucity of surviving biographical material: as Clayton puts it with apt succinctness, Gillray 'did not do much that is recorded except work'. The person to whom he seems to have been most fondly attached in both his professional and his domestic lives was his employer and fellow engraver Hannah Humphrey, a remarkable woman whose career and family receive sustained attention for the first time in Clayton's thoroughly researched and lavishly illustrated study. When he died in 1815, Gillray left everything he owned to her. It may seem odd to refer to works of such a manic and outlandish character as elegant or beautiful, but the fact that Gillray's crude images of buggery, flatulence, excretion, groping, rough sex and flagellation are both gorgeous and beguiling is one of the many remarkable things about them. He did not initially intend to become a caricaturist, and even once he had embarked on that course his engravings and prints continued to marry serious, faithful aspects of human portraiture with aberrant and freakish ingredients. His works are at once intricate, preposterous, gross and technically dazzling. They are also extraordinary in the ways in which they combine images with texts. From the start of his career, Gillray was verbal as well as visual in his instincts: some of his finest work depicts or refers to the writings of novelists and poets. The first prints to which he put his name, in 1780, were scenes taken from Henry Fielding's comic masterpiece Tom Jones (1749). In later works, Gillray deployed speech bubbles in innovative and visually striking ways, sometimes continuing to allude to and remake bits of popular literary texts in the process, but just as frequently capturing the slangy, smutty or comically revealing speech patterns of polite society at home and off guard. In Taking Physick; - or - The News of Shooting the King of Sweden! (1792), we discover George III and his queen perched on their twin wooden privies shitting in panic as William Pitt blurts out to them in language scarcely fit for a royal audience, 'Another Monarch done over!' (In the top left-hand corner of the picture, in a typically arresting detail, the terrified lion on the royal coat of arms is pelting out a miniature stream of turds to match the king's.) Clayton guides us through every aspect - technical, practical, commercial and collaborative - of platemaking and printmaking in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and explains the markets at home and abroad to whose demanding tastes Gillray had to cater. He lived to witness and respond at lightning speed to the loss of the American colonies, the French Revolution, the trial of Warren Hastings and countless scandals involving politicians and the royal family. His visceral, fantastical prints were collected by their aristocratic targets as well as relished by critics of the rich and powerful; their distribution and influence extended far beyond this country and they now serve (among other things) as a historical record of the tumultuous Regency years. Gillray's work does not reveal a personal commitment to one political stance or party - unsurprisingly, since he was often drawing and engraving to order rather than representing his own views - though you do sense a bitter, cumulative disgust with the whole dirty business (in his last years, he gave up drawing and went mad). His art is, however, steadfast in its patriotism and in rejecting the French Revolution and everything it stood for. That did not stop pro-revolutionary French artists from admiring and seeking to copy his techniques. Gillray's accomplishments are all the more astonishing in that, before his day, no such category of artist as the political or satirical caricature-maker was recognised. There was simply no precedent for his glorious career, without which it is hard to imagine, in our own times, the winning and piercingly graphic inventions of Chris Riddell, Martin Rowson and Gerald Scarfe. 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