Word: gillray
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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...
David Low at his most biting is gentlemanly compared to his cartooning forebears. Hogarth set the pace for English caricaturists in the 18th Century, and his followers, Rowlandson, Gillray, the Cruikshanks et al., set the pace for the French. In their work the age of the first three King Georges and the Regency appears unmatched in history for sheer beef-eating, blowzy, bullyragging license. Famous caricatures in the show included Isaac Cruikshank's credited Belly Piece Shop in which various court ladies of marked posterior inflation are being fitted to boot with anterior pads labeled one, two, four...
...Excellencies the British and French Ambassadors, and numbering among its active officers Anglophile André Maurois. Frenchmen, who are still fond enough of Daumier and Grandville (TIME, Nov. 8) to use their drawings in modern advertisements, got plenty of fun out of their English predecessors and contemporaries, Hogarth, Rowlandson, Gillray, Cruikshank et al., represented by 391 sketches, engravings and lithographs. But this was only a foretaste of the grandeurs to come...
...second etching portrays a more personal scene in 1798. At a birthday party in honor of Fox, the Duke of Norfolk proposed such vehement toasts in favor of Parliamentary reform that he was dismissed by the Crown. This, too, Gillray has touched with insight and humor...
Later, in 1803, word came across the Strait of Dover that Napoleon was preparing to invade England; and the French Assembly was reported to have declared that England could not cope single-handed with the armies of the Tricolor. In one of his most elaborate and brilliant drawings, Gillray shows the thick-set Napoleon urging his fleet on; the chief interest, however, lies in the different reactions seen in the faces of the onlookers in England--Sheridan making a dramatic speech, and Fox hiding behind...