Word: gillray
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Among the more conspicuous exhibits on the walls of the society's sedate Georgian library were the rowdy etchings of James Gillray; he and his bibulous contemporary Thomas Rowlandson had fathered English cartooning. Working above Mistress Humphrey's print shop in Piccadilly where his etchings sold for 18 pence, Gillray had scorched the court of George III with his acid portrayals of spendthrift profligates and pompous politicians. Rowlandson's needle-sharp stylus had deflated many a Regency swell and belle...
Like Writers Fielding and Swift of their day, Engravers Hogarth, Rowlandson and Gillray masked their acid realism with ribaldry, spared little that was worth debunking. Nymphs were turned into hoydens, generals into cannibalistic monsters, politicians into poisonous toadstools. The plump Duke of Norfolk was pictured lying on a table like an apple dumpling, Tom Paine was made to look as thin and mean as a sharp knife, the Royal Georges were shown with the complacently stupid expressions of goldfish, and Lord Nelson's beautiful mistress, Lady Hamilton, was portrayed as a coarse, fat, dowdy Dido (see cut), mourning among...
Newspapers then were few and bad; the public paid up to a shilling a print for what were, in effect, editorial cartoons. George III complained that he "could not understand" Caricaturist James Gillray's pictorial attacks on him. The King would have had to be stupider than history has made him to miss the venom of Gillray's cartoon showing "Farmer George" sleepily sloffing up a soft-boiled...