The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature Part 4

An artist of extraordinary genius, we have it on record that two successive Presidents of the Academy in his day, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir Benjamin West, in expressing their admiration of his drawings, added their opinion that, had he chosen a higher branch of art, he might have stood in the forefront of English contemporary painting. Instead of this he preferred to devote his genius and his best years to caricature, and in doing so, has bequeathed to us a rich and most precious heritage.

He was happy in his friends.h.i.+ps. James Gillray was well known to him; George Morland, that brilliant artist with whom he had so much in common, Henry Angelo, whom he loved to depict among his pupils of the foil ("Angelo's Fencing Room" and "Signora Cigali Fencing at Angelo's"), Bannister, and Ackermann the art publisher were among his intimates. He was less happy in the conduct of his life. Extravagance and carelessness were combined with a pa.s.sion for gambling which made him a frequent figure in the fas.h.i.+onable playhouses of London; and these habits placed the fortune, which should have been his by industry and inheritance, beyond his reach. The legacy of 7000 bequeathed him by his French aunt, who had treated him so generously in his student days, was speedily dissipated in this way. Indeed, but for the frequent advice and a.s.sistance of his friend and publisher, Rudolph Ackermann, he might have found himself in serious difficulties; and the story runs that on one occasion he sat for thirty-six hours at the cards, and that on another, after losing all he had, he sat down coolly to his work and (raising that facile pencil of his) said, "Here is my resource." Thus it was that, after many years of fertile labour, he died a poor man in lodgings at the Adelphi, on the 22nd of April, 1827. His faithful friends of earlier days, Henry Angelo, Bannister, and Rudolph Ackermann, followed to his grave the last great caricaturist of the bygone century.

=_By Thomas Rowlandson_ OLD JOSEPH NOLLEKENS AND HIS VENUS=

In these pages we have traced together the record of that century in English Caricature; and if we have been compelled to note but hastily the lesser men, have, in so doing, at least gained breathing s.p.a.ce to study four great and typical figures. We saw how William Hogarth, when he handles the graver as humourist and delineator of character, stands forth immortally great; how, when he sought to place himself at the head of the nascent English School, he fell beneath his own level. We saw in Henry William Bunbury the cultured artist, soldier, and man of society, the welcome guest in many a great country-house, who could bring his host's pretty daughters into some charming sketch, or take his part in the improvised theatricals; but whose prints have real humour, charm, and the sweet, wholesome breath of English country life. Then we watched Gillray tower aloft in political satire, and Rowlandson's pencil touch every side of life.

If we noticed at the same time a certain coa.r.s.eness of fibre come to the surface in much of their work, finding expression often both in subject, and still more in treatment and in type, we must remember that this quality belongs not to the men alone, but to the age. The more sensitive modern may feel himself at first repelled rather than attracted, and many a print of Rowlandson or Gillray find a place in his _Index Expurgatorius_; but the brutality of these men is the brutality of Nature in some of her moods, and their work, like Nature, fertile, fresh, and vigorous, attracts us (as all strong work will and must) the more we study it by its masterly drawing, its free, open humour, and often its high imaginative grasp.

Behind these men, these Masters of English Caricature, appears, never entirely absent from our thought, the history of the century, with its magnificent record of English achievement. Behind them, too, a corrective and a stimulant to their best effort, is that wonderful revelation of English eighteenth-century pictorial art. For just as when, in years to come, men think on that stirring epoch, the two words _England_ and _Liberty_ will leap unbidden to their thought; so, too, in the record of the greatest epoch of our country's art, a place must be found for the English Caricaturists of the Eighteenth Century.

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.

London & Edinburgh

Footnotes:

[1] A fine collection of lithographs of Honore Daumier (1808-1879) has this year been exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

[2] "The Works of William Hogarth, elucidated by Descriptions." By T.

Clerk. London, 1810.

[3] "William Hogarth," by Austin Dobson; with a valuable technical introduction by Sir W. Armstrong. London, 1902.

[4] "Bartolozzi and his Pupils in England" (Langham Series). By Selwyn Brinton. London, 1903.

[5] "History of Caricature and of Grotesque in Art." By Thomas Wright, M.A., F.S.A. London, 1863.

[6] His "Englishman at Paris" even predates this by four years (1767).

The British Museum etchings, to which I allude later, are early work, one even dating from his schooldays at Westminster!

[7] _Op. cit._ p. 63.

[8] I give a plate of this beautiful Eliza Farren (painted by Lawrence, engraved by Bartolozzi) in my work on Bartolozzi in this Series (facing p. 63). Gillray has an amusing print of the diminutive Lord Derby, standing on his coronet to admire himself in the gla.s.s.

[9] They are all enjoying their new diet under similar conditions. In Italy (perhaps the cleverest hit of all) the old Pope, seated, is having the bread shot into his open mouth from a French soldier's blunderbuss, while an a.s.sistant at the same moment neatly removes from his head the triple crown.

[10] Mme. Vigee le Brun, in her delightful memoirs, gives some justification to Gillray's severe treatment. Visiting Lady Hamilton soon after Sir William's death she found "this Andromache" draped in black, and extremely fat.

[11] In "Two-penny Whist" appear the worthy Mrs. Humphrey and her maid Betty; in "Push-pin" the Duke of Queensbury and the d.u.c.h.ess of Gordon.

[12] _The Magazine of Art_, 1901.

[13] Rudolph Ackermann occupies almost the same position to Rowlandson that Mistress Humphrey did to Gillray, as his early and faithful friend and princ.i.p.al publisher.

[14] _Bartolozzi and His Pupils in England_, p. 46.

[15] _Rowlandson, the Caricaturist._ By Joseph Grego. 1880.