It’s the job of a satirist to identify their subjects by their works – “By their fruits shall ye know them” is our sustaining text from Saint Matthew – justifying the monstrous portrayal of our political masters because of their serial screw-ups. But how then should we judge satirists? Often their works are taken at face value, assumed to be advocating what they are, in fact, satirising. Judgment is, therefore, frequently harsh. In 1703 Daniel Defoe was sentenced to be pilloried after his satirical pamphlet The Shortest Way With the Dissenters ironically advocated their wholesale slaughter as a satire on extreme Anglicanism.
After the 18th century, through which satire had run like an open sewer, something similar befell the satirical engraver James Gillray. As Tim Clayton admits at the start of his new study of the caricaturist, little is known or knowable about the man himself, so for more than two centuries Gillray has been judged solely by his works. These are typified by a print I discovered recently showing the Marquess of Rockingham simultaneously defecating into a bucket labelled “Publick Reservoir” and puking into a tricorn hat to provide relief for the poor. It’s almost a type specimen of an 18th-century satirical print: scatalogical, disrespectful, rude and brutally funny. The clincher, though, on top of the exquisite skill in design and execution, is that double evacuation. It goes the extra mile into the truly savage, which is how I instantly knew that it was a real Gillray.
But the savagery of a real Gillray doesn’t necessarily mean Gillray himself was a savage. Nonetheless, on the basis of his work, he was dismissed by the Victorians as another insane misanthrope, and then, more recently, as a cynical, hypocritical apostate who betrayed his revolutionary principles by accepting a government pension.
How Clayton builds up an alternative portrait of his subject, given the paucity of direct information, is little short of miraculous. Comprehensively and meticulously recreating the world that shaped Gillray, he fits it round him so tightly that the subject takes palpable form.
It’s a world in which the workshops of Georgian London dominated the European trade in engravings, then the only available way of reproducing images for the mass market. Centred around reproductions of “high” art oil paintings, it blurred along its edges into pornography (one of Gillray’s early dealers had cornered the market in flagellation lit), satire, blackmail and libel. At its heart were women like Mary Darly, Elizabeth d’Archery and Hannah Humphrey, operating as publishers, entrepreneurs and engravers of satirical prints. Morever, throughout his career Gillray continued depicting serious subjects in parallel with his satirical work, for several years to the exclusion of it, only abandoning this after the collapse of the Peace of Amiens in 1803 locked British engravers out of the lucrative European market.
The Gillray Clayton thus reveals, in place of the hate-filled madman or unprincipled political patsy, is a businessman bobbing and weaving in difficult times, networking between politicians and punters, the houseguest of aristocrats and, at one point, a proto-war artist who, like Hogarth, straddled the divide between “low” and “high” art.
It’s a nuanced and convincing portrait, and the level of detail in this massive and masterly book is breathtaking. My favourite is Clayton’s revelation that the most effective way for printers to clean the ink off the copper plates without damaging them between impressions was to wipe them with a cloth soaked in urine, a fact magnificently true to Gillray’s immortal satirical vision.
It’s the job of a satirist to identify their subjects by their works – “By their fruits shall ye know them” is our sustaining text from Saint Matthew – justifying the monstrous portrayal of our political masters because of their serial screw-ups. But how then should we judge satirists? Often their works are taken at face value, assumed to be advocating what they are, in fact, satirising. Judgment is, therefore, frequently harsh. In 1703 Daniel Defoe was sentenced to be pilloried after his satirical pamphlet The Shortest Way With the Dissenters ironically advocated their wholesale slaughter as a satire on extreme Anglicanism.
After the 18th century, through which satire had run like an open sewer, something similar befell the satirical engraver James Gillray. As Tim Clayton admits at the start of his new study of the caricaturist, little is known or knowable about the man himself, so for more than two centuries Gillray has been judged solely by his works. These are typified by a print I discovered recently showing the Marquess of Rockingham simultaneously defecating into a bucket labelled “Publick Reservoir” and puking into a tricorn hat to provide relief for the poor. It’s almost a type specimen of an 18th-century satirical print: scatalogical, disrespectful, rude and brutally funny. The clincher, though, on top of the exquisite skill in design and execution, is that double evacuation. It goes the extra mile into the truly savage, which is how I instantly knew that it was a real Gillray.
But the savagery of a real Gillray doesn’t necessarily mean Gillray himself was a savage. Nonetheless, on the basis of his work, he was dismissed by the Victorians as another insane misanthrope, and then, more recently, as a cynical, hypocritical apostate who betrayed his revolutionary principles by accepting a government pension.
How Clayton builds up an alternative portrait of his subject, given the paucity of direct information, is little short of miraculous. Comprehensively and meticulously recreating the world that shaped Gillray, he fits it round him so tightly that the subject takes palpable form.
It’s a world in which the workshops of Georgian London dominated the European trade in engravings, then the only available way of reproducing images for the mass market. Centred around reproductions of “high” art oil paintings, it blurred along its edges into pornography (one of Gillray’s early dealers had cornered the market in flagellation lit), satire, blackmail and libel. At its heart were women like Mary Darly, Elizabeth d’Archery and Hannah Humphrey, operating as publishers, entrepreneurs and engravers of satirical prints. Morever, throughout his career Gillray continued depicting serious subjects in parallel with his satirical work, for several years to the exclusion of it, only abandoning this after the collapse of the Peace of Amiens in 1803 locked British engravers out of the lucrative European market.
The Gillray Clayton thus reveals, in place of the hate-filled madman or unprincipled political patsy, is a businessman bobbing and weaving in difficult times, networking between politicians and punters, the houseguest of aristocrats and, at one point, a proto-war artist who, like Hogarth, straddled the divide between “low” and “high” art.
It’s a nuanced and convincing portrait, and the level of detail in this massive and masterly book is breathtaking. My favourite is Clayton’s revelation that the most effective way for printers to clean the ink off the copper plates without damaging them between impressions was to wipe them with a cloth soaked in urine, a fact magnificently true to Gillray’s immortal satirical vision.