Curators organising exhibitions of satirical prints and caricatures are clearly challenged, by the nature of the medium, to present them within an innovative framework. They were intended to be humorous, ephemeral and topical, and appeal to a wide audience through reproduction. As Hannah More lamented: ‘An age which values itself on parody, burlesque, irony, and caricature, produces little that is sublime, either in genius or in virtue; but they amuse, and we live in an age which must be amused…’ (Strictures, I, 16). Whether we agree or not, the snapshot of time offered by caricature reveals far more about society’s foibles and obsessions than elegant oil paintings. The subject matter of particular satirical responses to current affairs, or an exhibition outlining the careers of individual practitioners, are the most likely current models for gallery displays of satirical prints. This small Fitzwilliam display offers instead a broad analysis of the techniques and themes chosen by caricaturists from the eighteenth to the present century. It is shown alongside the Shiba Room exhibition Ronald Searle: ‘Obsessed with Drawing’, which examines the career and output of this familiar and much loved contributor to our cultural landscape.

A 2014 gift of Searle’s work to the museum inspired this accompanying exhibition, with its stimulus being his fascinating handwritten page charting the history of caricature. This resembles an undergraduate’s revision notes, closely written across a sheet of squared paper, using biro, inks and felt tips. It charts the origins of the form in the seventeenth century, particularly in the first portrait caricatures of Annibale Carracci. Two points on the red timeline highlight the significance of the first recorded mention of the word ‘caricatura’ in England by Sir Thomas Browne in 1682, and of the liberty of the press in 1688. Hogarth inevitably looms in the largest letters along the top, since he ‘made English art national’, although he would not have been pleased to be categorised as a caricaturist. His mission had a far more moral purpose in his eyes. He and his successors Rowlandson, Gillray, and Cruikshank are accompanied on the chart by the notes: ‘Caricature [is] a vigorous political weapon; lusty and brilliant satire; calling attention to follies; Caricature becomes a genuine popular art’. Searle’s list of minor eighteenth-century artists with their dates extends beyond the more predictable cast of artists, and the work of some of them is represented around the room. Searle extended his list through the nineteenth century to include the names of international practitioners, and ended his survey with Gerald Scarfe and Private Eye magazine. Searle died only recently in 2011, so this chart reads as a comprehensive and inclusive survey of an art which is still dynamic and as relevant as it ever was. The exhibition examines the possibilities it suggests and successfully draws together examples of art within themed sections, although it could not encompass the full breadth covered in Searle’s lists.

The title Cradled in Caricature is taken from George Cruikshank’s description of his own artistic training as the son of Isaac Cruikshank, who is perhaps better known to eighteenth-century scholars. Searle was acutely aware of his own debt to his forebears, and was conscious of Cruikshank’s 1838 work when preparing illustrations for the new Longmans 1960s editions of Dickens’ novels. The long timescale of caricature’s development is skilfully condensed in the display. The chosen prints include well-known but also surprising examples, and the themes maintain a clear and necessary structure in what could otherwise bewilder visitors. Our instinct to seek the familiar can be a challenge to curators wishing to offer something more unusual, but we are redirected to a closer examination of the images and a deeper appreciation of the genre, its characteristics and compositional effects. An illuminating leaflet provides extensive descriptions of each print, background historical context and analysis. It is clear for the general visitor, but also includes interesting scholarly detail and provenance.

The first three sections could all be linked by their exploitation of exaggeration for comic effect. The first is ‘Exaggeration of faces and bodies’. The introductory sentence of Francis Grose’s Rules for drawing Caricaturas of 1788 heads this section in the exhibition leaflet, and highlights the dangers faced by the caricaturist. He may be feared rather than esteemed for his art. However, Grose went on to explain the public benefits of the art, which ‘may be most efficaciously employed in the cause of virtue and decorum’, interrogating offenders ‘not amenable to any other tribunal’. It had a serious political purpose. He recommended starting with a study of the head and using contrasting body types for comic effect. Examples from Gillray and Hogarth are placed alongside the 1913 pen and wash by Max Beerbohm, Caricature of Lord Morley and Lord Courtney and Henry Mayo Bateman’s 1922 pen and ink The maid who was but human. Bateman’s drawing demonstrates class snobbery and the crossing of taboo boundaries when a maid laughs at a joke made by a guest at an elegant dinner party. It is more subtle than the grosser contrasts depicted in the eighteenth century, but the viewer is invited to compare the images at a fundamental level of technique. Beerbohm caricatures still populate the walls of staircases and smoking rooms in London gentlemen’s clubs, reminders of those once familiar politicians and lords whose votes determined the laws and wars of the country in the early twentieth century. The exaggerated noses and chins are evident in all the examples, though the Bateman and Beerbohm examples emerge as more constrained, their commentary more muted and gently amusing compared to the eighteenth century’s vitriol. Issues of press freedom and political sensitivities force their way into one’s examination of techniques. This section introduces Richard Newton (1777-1798), a talented artist who died young but whom Searle respected and whose work is represented in further examples. He was part of the radical circle of the publisher William Holland for several years, and a visit to Holland while in Newgate is thought to have led to his early death from disease contracted there.

The ‘Costume Satire’ section could have dominated the exhibition. Satires of outrageous French hairstyle fashion and ‘macaroni’ stereotypes abound in eighteenth-century culture studies publications. Instead we have the unusual etching after Samuel Hieronymous Grimm (1733-94), The French lady in London or the head dress for the year 1771, in which a woman’s gigantic hair style competes with a painting of a Tenerife mountain on the wall, and knocks over a man holding a copy of a ‘lecture upon heads’. The leaflet suggests it may not have much ‘moral indignation’ but simply lampoons vanity. We might also read elements of misogyny, nationalistic spite and assumptions of superiority into the image, although its paired print The English Lady at Paris (not on display) equally mocks the English figure. Grimm’s 1770s designs, along with those by Philip Dawe (1750-91), are interesting satires focussing on gender, age and the body and their associated underlying social anxieties. This section highlights two satirical prints of the 1820s to counter the generally accepted view that these years produced less acerbic satire. They are Private practice or a solo at home by Henry Pyall (1795-1833) from 1827, and A desert imitation of modern fashion! by William Heath (1796-1840), c.1827. Pyall’s dandy musician risks having his hair burned by his candle as he stands awkwardly in his tight clothes, while Heath’s fashionable portrait consists of fruit imitating the puffed sleeves and decorated hats of the day. The scope of the exhibition allows us to view less predictable work of the 1820s which Searle placed on a downward trajectory on his timeline, redeemed only by the founding of Punch magazine in 1841 with its new wave of illustrators and satirists. Indeed, Pyall and Heath are not featured as important artists in Searle’s list. The exhibition does not simply illustrate Searle’s view but supplements and interrogates it with a rich variety of examples.

The grotesque and absurd are celebrated in the following section. The grotesque is demonstrated in Rowlandson’s A French dentist shewing a specimen of artificial teeth and false palates (1811), and the absurd in Gillray’s The Cow-Pock-or-the-Wonderful effects of the new innoculation (1802). Many possible examples could have joined them, but necessary restraint has been shown. George Cruikshank’s Striking effects produced by lines and dots – for the assistance of young Draughtsmen (1817) satirises the drawing manuals which proliferated for the amateur artist, and depicts stick men beating and tripping up others, sinking ships and causing mayhem. It seems to suggest that chaos results from so much misguided instruction and misdirected energy. Did he feel threatened by so many amateurs, or does the picture perhaps show how he would like to deal with them as they attempt to draw all those ships and country pursuits? By then, the term ‘amateur’ was beginning its decline into one of derision, a pastime rather than gentlemanly occupation. The final picture in this section is by Glen Baxter, I’m afraid it’s another Rembrandt (2014), a contemporary artist whose ink and crayon drawings imitate and subvert the caricature form, drawing on surreal and absurdist imagery to surprise and challenge. The scale and techniques of his satirical cartoons mean they can be effectively juxtaposed with early caricatures, and reward close examination. Searle did not update his chart to include Baxter but was surely aware of him. Baxter was born in 1944 and trained at Leeds College of Art. His work is popular and often included in exhibitions of caricature and satirical prints, but he is perhaps best known for his graphic novels.

The leaflet points out in the section on ‘Blasphemy’ that it could be difficult to decide whether an artist was being subversive or actually foregrounding its dangers, so it was difficult to make a case against artists on such grounds. The case against Gillray’s etching The presentation -or- the wise men’s offering (1796) was based on the blasphemy of the title but was dropped, and was probably levelled against Gillray in the first place to persuade him to change his political allegiance. This section is significantly small, reflecting the low priority given to the charge. Since it had lost the impact it might have had on the public imagination during the previous two centuries, could it have been left out of the exhibition? The next three sections highlight types of humour. Gillray and Hogarth dominate the ‘Vitriolic/ dark humour’ section, and Newton features again in ‘Bawdy Humour’, with ‘Scatology’ displaying prints which greatly entertained the eighteenth-century viewer. All three sections do not stray from that period, evidence of the species of humour which epitomised all that the Victorians despised, the vulgarity and obscenity which we might argue most characterised the energy of Georgian satire. Vic Gatrell successfully analysed this ten years ago in City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-century London (Atlantic Books, 2006). William and Hannah Humphrey and William Holland are the publishers who dominate these sections. It is interesting that the exhibition’s focus means that specific political satires do not overwhelm the display. The broad timescale could not accommodate the variety of political fortunes and blunders which furnished satirists with their subjects and which necessitate detailed explanations and context for the current viewer.

The final group celebrates the intricate connection between word and image in ‘Word play’. The interplay and deliberate incongruities between them are perhaps what most connects visual satire of our own time with that of the eighteenth century. Shortcuts to meaning through current cultural iconography are the preferred approach. The leaflet reminds us that the variety of references used, from Shakespeare, Milton and other canonical writers, assumed an informed and educated viewer and challenged him to unravel the layers of meaning in image and text. The late eighteenth century excelled in the visualising of classical texts, in the paintings at the Royal Academy exhibitions and the prints of Boydell’s commercial projects. Word play through puns and curious emblems was used by Gillray to provide codes which avoided interpretation as direct attack but were transparent enough for his purposes. His Sir Richard Worse-than-Sly; exposing his wifes bottom; O Fye! of 1782 was readily seen as ‘Sir Richard Worsley’ whose court case against his wife’s lover was a cause célèbre at the time. Fuseli’s paintings were particularly fertile sources for Gillray. Glen Baxter reappears here, with his I could see clearly he had nothing to say (2014), which foregrounds the speech bubble as a convention.

This exhibition could have been much larger, given the extent of the survey covered by Searle’s timeline which was its inspiration. Aside from a few later examples, the eighteenth century or the ‘golden age’ of visual satire is examined and a framework of its techniques presented. There is little discussion of the physical labour of production or patterns of consumption of the work, aside from occasional details about the mediums employed. The section titles are carefully chosen and the case for the inclusion of each image made convincingly. They are not taken directly from Searle’s notes but showcase the substance of his lifelong study, enthusiasm and development of the art. Richard Newton is represented almost as caricature’s equivalent of the proverbial loss of Thomas Girtin to the art of watercolour, both taken by an early death.

Though the subject matter is comic, the exhibition is carefully organised, balanced, and researched; a serious and thoughtful exposition and a tribute to the great cultural contributions of Ronald Searle.

Texts Cited:

Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (London: 1799)

Cradled in Caricature was at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge from 13th October 2015 to 31st January 2016.