[BITList] Fwd: The Satirical Prints of James Gillray

[John Feltham]

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

The Satirical Prints of James Gillray



James Gillray (1756-1815) was the pre-eminent caricaturist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and is considered by many to be the father of the political cartoon. His colorful political and social satires were wildly popular in his own time for their cruel and scurrilous content, which was often directed at George III, his family, and other leading political figures. Just as popular were his military caricatures of Napoleon and both French and British forces during the Napoleonic Wars.



James Gillray, sometimes spelled Gilray (13 August 1757 – 1 June 1815), was a British caricaturist and printmaker famous for his etched political and social satires, mainly published between 1792 and 1810.

He was born in Chelsea. His father, a native of Lanark, had served as a soldier, losing an arm at the Battle of Fontenoy, and was admitted, first as an inmate, and afterwards as an outdoor pensioner, at Chelsea Hospital. Gillray commenced life by learning letter-engraving, at which he soon became an adept. This employment, however, proving irksome, he wandered about for a time with a company of strolling players. After a very checkered experience he returned to London and was admitted a student in the Royal Academy, supporting himself by engraving, and probably issuing a considerable number of caricatures under fictitious names. His caricatures are almost all in etching, some also with aquatint, and a few using stipple technique. None can correctly be described as engravings, although this term is often loosely or ignorantly used of them. Hogarth’s works were the delight and study of his early years. Paddy on Horseback, which appeared in 1779, is the first caricature which is certainly his. Two caricatures on Rodney’s naval victory, issued in 1782, were among the first of the memorable series of his political sketches.



Gillray is still revered as one of the most influential political caricaturists of all time, and among the leading cartoonists on the political stage in the United Kingdom today, both Steve Bell and Martin Rowson acknowledge him as probably the most influential of all their predecessors in that particular arena.

The look of the Vogon race in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film were in part inspired by Gillray’s work.
There is a good account of Gillray in Wright’s History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art (1865).

[...]

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gillray



The prints of James Gillray come from a time when Britain was a very different place. It was a nation of tough, independent minded people, freedom loving and enjoying, with a love of free speech to the extent that the caricatures of James Gillray, that ‘attacked’ anyone he liked (or rather disliked), from the King down, were widely circulated and much admired. It was a time of reason, of true scientists exploring and improving life; when the true spirit of Britain was out in the open, working in the world for the good (mostly).

What is Britain like now?

It is a country where not only are the citizens disarmed, and where they cannot even send a shooting team to compete anywhere, but they cannot even use their own language for fear of reprisals from a group of unaccountable aparatchicks, leeches and social engineers. The new ‘hate speech’ laws have turned Britain into a place where even in private, you cannot say what you think without fear of losing your job.

Schoolboy ‘bullies’ are now hauled into court for speaking words. Whatever you might think about the way children should behave in a school, it is totally insane that the headmaster of a school should not be able to discipline and expel a bad pupil who breaks school rules, and that an actual court case was brought against the pupil in that last link.

Which brings us on to the Badman report saga, which is becoming more absurd by the day.

DCSF have refused to release the Submissions to the Elective Home Education Review, citing that its author is being ‘harassed and vilified” on the internets.

All of the Home Educators commenting on this independently and quite naturally come to the same conclusion; they have been hurt by this report, which equates their parenting to a form of abuse. It is THEY who have been vilified:

M Stafford left an annotation (19 July 2009)

So telling the general public in purposely twisted press releases that home education is a cover for abuse and servitude is not vilifying and harassing.

Graham Badman has produced a poor and dishonest report, misused statistics and compared apples and pears in order to produce a predecided result.

The DCSF needs to be open and transparent about this information, that is what would be in the public interest instead of trying to hide the duplicity involved in this report.

and

Emma Hornby left an annotation (20 July 2009)

I think Mr Badman should be looking long and hard at his conscience.

He is being heavily criticized for a piece of work which, it gradually emerges, is substandard in many respects. It went beyond the explicit terms of the brief, and the terms on which he consulted the public, and the recommendations follow neither from the brief nor from the data, so far as that can be verified. The use of stats is embarrassing. He has misrepresented the submission of the CofE and at least one selectively-quoted HEer, as well as, it emerges, working from notes of meetings with people who are not prepared to sign off those notes as an accurate record of the conversation.

There are two possible courses of action for Mr Badman here. One is to reject the criticisms, instead seeing himself as vilified and harassed (and this course becomes harder to sustain with every fresh revelation, to be honest), and the second is to say “mea culpa”, withdraw his report and either rewrite it more honestly and competently, or return the fee and let the DCSF commission someone else to complete the task.

I do not intend either to harass or vilify Mr Badman here. But his report and his conduct are both vulnerable to justified criticism, and the sooner he appreciates that, the sooner he will be able to begin restoring his reputation.

Those are just two of the many comments swirling around the internets. The fact of the matter is that this report, if it had been done with any kind of academic rigor, would be able to withstand any scrutiny. And another FOIA requester, Harold Davis, puts it very plainly, that there is no justification whatsoever for these submissions to be withheld:

[...]

You refer to vilification and harassment. Vilification means presenting as vile, and while it may often be uncondonable, it is not a criminal offence, and politicians and other public servants are vilified in numerous publications every day. As you are doubtless aware, many have been vilified in respect of expenses claims they have made. Indeed, when such information has been released, many in the population have very quickly formed or agreed with the view that the makers of such claims are “vile”. That is all part and parcel of the holding of public officials to account. Such a course of events does not in itself constitute the breaking of any law or the commission of any civil wrong. When vilification goes too far, surely the correct course of action is a civil suit for defamation or an application for a court order against the individuals responsible, not the use, without the prior launch of any such suit or the application for any such order (I presume you would have referred to these if they had happened), of s38 of the Freedom of Information Act.

If you would maintain that the risk of vilification is so great as to endanger Mr Badman’s health, this of course raises the question of what information you might hold that, if released, would give grist to the mill of the unidentified vilifiers. Section 38 is not meant to be invoked to protect individuals against the effects of the disclosure, for example, of actions by them which, if disclosed, would JUSTIFIABLY affect their reputations in a negative direction. This is so even if other individuals are already speculating in public that such information may exist, to the “distress” of the individual concerned. Of course there is a risk test, but the test, in my submission, is much stronger than the Department appears to believe. The assumption should be in favour of disclosure.

[...]

Home Ed Forums

Now this is an interesting situation. They do not want to release these documents, clearly because their release will fatally compromise this report, and destroy the reputations of everyone involved in its manufacture. It would not take a great leap of imagination to speculate that all the submissions have said the same thing that the CofE said; that there is no need for a change in the law, and that the status quo is more than adequate.

If they do go to court over this ‘vilification and harassment’, then during the discovery process the opposition will certainly demand everything submitted to this report to be released and entered into the public record, since they are material in determining whether or not what everyone is saying about the report is true or not, and whether the ‘vilification’ was justified or unjustified.

That is what is called being between a rock and a hard place.

This report, as we said before, should never have been written. Had it never been written and the conclusions of the 2007 consultations taken on board as the final word, Britain would still be the best place to Home Educate, and no one would have had to waste their time knocking down this utter rubbish. Now we have the very real prospect of families being disrupted as they either fight this insanity or flee the country to more rational freedom loving countries.

What sort of country can produce a report like this, where the submissions that fed it are made secret on the most weak and irrational of pretexts, the report being clearly biased, ill informed and wrong, which subsequently be accepted unchallenged and unquestioned to make new law? I would guess that reasonable people who know what Britain used to be like would not say that Britain is that sort of country. Secret contributions to false reports used to make bad law are the sort of thing you used to expect and get in the Soviet Union, not a ‘free society’ or ‘free country’ like Britain.

The Home Educating parents that are mounting a vigorous defence of themselves are demonstrating that they are head and shoulders above the crowd. These are the parents who are going to unleash a generation of Britons who are of the same quality and strength of character that we know the British used to have in the days of James Gillray. Even now, some of these Home Educated children are writing letters to complain that they do not want to be disturbed in any way, taking the authorities up on the claptrap that the voices of children are to be heard, only to be patted on the head and patronized.

Those tactics might work with a child, but they are clearly not working with the parents of these children.

Apart from the nauseating patting on the head, the people who are refusing to release the submissions are allowing themselves to be sucked into the black hole that this report has become. Clearly they are not being advised correctly, or are being given orders to suppress this information. If they have been advised to withhold this information, they need to say who it is that gave them this advice or these orders in order to separate and insulate themselves from these incorrect decisions; clearly the people who are the public interface for answering these requests are not applying the law correctly, and this could come back to damage them as this report is destroyed and discredited, as they will have acted improperly by invoking rules that should not have been invoked to try and stop the report being exposed. The first people that will be sacrificed as scape goats are these low level aparatchicks who are, in every instance, expendable. All the people who were responsible for this debacle have already secured new jobs for themselves or will never be discarded from their high level positions; they might get shuffled around, but they will not be brought down. It is the underlings, the messengers who are being ordered to act improperly who will get the chop.

If I were any of the people behind any of this I would now declare that this has been a monumental error in judgement. They failed to understand the true nature of Home Education, and this caused them to ask for a report with a pre-determined outcome that they should not have commissioned. They misjudged the parents who Home Educate who are clearly amongst the most intelligent, creative, capable, resourceful, dogged and passionate people in the UK (actually, they are REAL PEOPLE of the type that made Britain Great). These Home Educators have demonstrated that they are able to act in concert when necessary. This is highly effective in both Home Educating and in refuting and repulsing attacks, as has been amply demonstrated by the spectacular results reflected in the children of Home Educators, and the state’s pathetic response to being put under a high powered microscope controlled by Home Educators.

Many Home Educators are working on this problem from every conceivable angle. They are not going to rest until this report is totally exposed for what it is, and it is thrown out in its entirety. They have been forced to do this in order to protect their families from the outrageous, unjustifiable and absurd recommendations of this report.

It is patently absurd that the staff of a department and the people associated with it can discriminate against and call an entire group of people unfit parents and accuse them of being child abusers, who must allow their children to be separated from them for arbitrary, humiliating and deeply suspicious inspections during a home invasion; only to withdraw into their dirty little shells when those very same offended and injured parents defend themselves vigorously by requesting the facts and using all their skills to expose the villains.

But then again, this is just about what we expect from these people who are The Cancer That Is Killing Britain.

 
Related posts:

An Early Day Motion on the Badman Home Education review put before Parliament EDM 1794 HOME EDUCATION 01.07.2009 James, Utterson That this House recognises that an estimated 45,000 to 150,000 children are educated at home; believes that the mammalian mating structure is centered around the family, and that what a family is should not be......
Jeremy Yallop Destroys Simon Webb and Badman in the TES Jeremy Yallop is a home-educating parent who thinks attempts to intervene are based on faulty evidence, and says ‘No, learning is both more enjoyable and effective without coercion’ Some parents, we are told, believe that their children should be free to follow......
Pete Darby Nails it Pete Darby nails the farce of the Badman report, which was incomplete and which used statistics based on poor methodology. We now know this because the author of that scandalous piece of bird cage liner has gone back for the information that......
The truth about State Schools TONIGHT, CHRIST CHURCH – Lecture Room 1, 8PM JAMES STANFIELD – ‘Towards the Total Privatisation of Education: Lessons from History and the Developing World’ Researcher at the University of Newcastle’s E. G. West Centre, James Stanfield will speak about the incredible findings......
Graham Badman: Liar by omission Graham Badman’s scandalous, biased, immoral and utterly vile report on Home Education contains a submission from The Church of England. By selectively omitting parts of the entire submission, Graham Badman has engaged in what is called ‘a lie of omission’: Lying by......
From one fox to another fox In an almost surreal piece of theatre, an HE woman receives a reply from her MP, after writing to complain about the Badman review. In it, he encloses a reply he received from Mr. Balls himself. Now think about this. A constituent......
Parliament put on notice: DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT! Dropped into the BLOGDIAL inbox (twice!): [...] This is urgent, and requires active participation by all HEs. Please read and forward to all HEs and HE lists that you belong to. This act is not in competition with or an attack against......
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=2004

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   Great Caricatures    •    Articles & Galleries  •   Wednesday, May 19, 2010

   JAMES GILLRAY  1779 - 1788


      
PADDY on HORSE-BACK
March 4, 1779

   
RODNEY introducing DE GRASSE
June 7, 1782

      
				
 	
IRISH Gratitude
June 13, 1782

	 	
GLORIA MUNDI
July 22, 1782

	 
      
The JUBILEE
August 2, 1782

   
The V____ Committee Framing a Report
August 12, 1782 

      
				
 	
The W__st_r JUST-ASSES a Braying
August 26, 1782

	 	
The Lord of the Vineyard
April 3, 1783

	 
      
Wife & No Wife - or -
A trip to the Continent
March 27, 1786

   
The MORNING after MARRIAGE
__ or __ A Scene on the Continent
April 5, 1786

       
The Politcal-Banditti
Assailing the Saviour of India
May 11, 1786

   
Monstrous Craws
May 29, 1787

           
The Dutch Divisions
June 23, 1787

   
A March to the Bank
August 22, 1787

       
QUESTIONS & COMMANDS or,
The Mistaken ROAD to HE_R_F_RD
February 11, 1788



http://greatcaricatures.com/articles_galleries/gillray/galleries/html/01_gillray.html

======================

James Gillray: Biting Satire

He was the demon cartoonist who sank his fangs into the soft flesh of the 18th-century Establishment. John Walsh enters the curious world of the master caricaturist

Tuesday, 29 May 2001

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/james-gillray-biting-satire-686273.html

James Gillray died, incurably insane, on 1 June 1815. He had been mentally ill for four years but, being rarely violent, he was allowed to wander freely about the house of Mrs Hannah Humphrey, a printer and publisher, his long-term landlady and most enthusiastic exhibitor. In his confused state, Gillray sometimes received young artists, who came to sit at the feet of the age's greatest caricaturist. One was George Cruikshank, who was to inherit Gillray's spirit as well as his work table. "Poor Gillray," remembered Cruikshank. "[He] said, 'You are not Cruikshank but Addison; my name is not Gillray but Rubens'..."

It was a classic moment of folie de grandeur, but you could forgive Gillray for his high opinion of himself. The actual resemblances between his works and those of Rubens are few, once you've counted the passion they shared for the Baroque and for historic painting, and their fondness for voluptuous women. But if Gillray's words were his application to be considered among the great masters, they seem justified. Next week, Tate Britain opens the largest Gillray exhibition ever seen, bringing together 150 pieces from the British Museum, the V&A, the New York Library and the Library of Congress in Washington. The Tate will seek to establish him as not only the most technically gifted caricaturist of his time, but an artist of matchless visual imagination.

They may have a struggle on their hands. For the English middle classes, Gillrays are the works you find framed on the walls of Cotswold pubs, pictures you've seen a hundred times without actually looking at them, social satires etched with fury and disgust, all periwigs and chamber pots, spindly men in frock coats, lardy-bottomed slatterns and wrinkly dugg'd bawds, or else they're allegorical studies of long-forgotten political figures battling over money or countries, their interchanges enclosed in unreadable speech balloons that start off "Z--nds!" or "D--n me, Boney...". Gillray is the one you confuse with Rowlandson (the former all angles, the latter all corners), the one who came after Hogarth but is less moral, less nasty and less easy to understand.

Now we are being asked to look again, and what we see is different from the, as it were, caricature. For one thing, Gillray convincingly comes across as our contemporary. He was the man who invented the political cartoon as a fat visual metaphor, of which the first and best-known was The Plumb-Pudding in Trouble, a startling depiction of Napoleon and William Pitt dining à deux and carving up the globe between them, with Europe devoured by France and America sliced off by imperialist England. Every modern depiction of Russia as a raging bear, of Kosovo as a ticking bomb or America as a tank, every East European cartoonist from Moldova to Minsk who features the world as a football  they're all unwittingly taking their cue from the pudding. And his portrait caricatures are oddly timeless as well. The men and women seen passing in the London streets in his engravings reek with modern vice. Look at Sandwich-Carrots!, in which the disgusting voluptuary Lord Sandwich plays pocket billiards while fingering a barrow-girl in New Bond Street, and her barrow of produce becomes a platoon of straining phalluses. Look at Maecenas in Pursuit of the Fine Arts, in which the Marquis of Stafford (a collector of Titians, Raphaels and Poussins) grandly approaches the door of Christie's auction house. In both pictures, the texture of hands, gait and gesture capture a fat, patronising complacency that's similarly lampooned today by Ralph Steadman in the UK and Robert Crumb in the US.

Gillray's visual economy, the things he does, synecdochically, with bits of the body, also strike a modern note; you feel he would make a brilliant graphic designer or art director in commercials. His most famous close-up was Fashionable Contrasts  or The Duchess's Little Shoe Yielding to the Magnitude of the Duke's Foot, in which the prone position of George III's mighty court pumps, and the tiny supine slippers of Frederica, daughter of the King of Prussia, whom he'd just married in 1791, suggest a uniquely enervated sex life. (The English papers, keen to find something about the plain and charmless bride, had gone overboard about her dainty feet). This was the first-ever use of the suggestive image of feet pointing up and down; it's still global visual shorthand for missionary sex.

Just as striking, if more brutally rude, is Lubber's Hole, alias The Crack'd Jordan, a scorching comment on the affair between the Duke of Clarence (George III's son) and Dorothy Jordan, an actress whose surname was, unfortunately, the slang word for a chamber pot. Poor Dorothy becomes a pisspot on legs with a huge crack in one side, into which the duke burrows, uttering nautical cries of glee. As the author Claire Tomalin said in her biography, Mrs Jordan's Profession, "It must have haunted her: an image to make its victim reluctant to face friends, enemies, family... colleagues, servants or even strangers in the street; that could wake her at two in the morning in a cold sweat of humiliation".

Who was this lethal lampoonist, whose effects could be so simple and so devastating? He was born in Chelsea in 1756, the son of a strictly religious Scottish sexton and former soldier, a devotee of the unlovely Moravian community  a glum and death-fixated sect which disliked pleasure and signs of fun, and forbade children from playing games. Such a background must have given the young James ambivalent feelings about the hedonism on display in the court of St James's and the ducal palaces of London. James's four brothers and sisters died early, and he seems to have cultivated a chilly and buttoned-up solitude most of his life. He never married. He rarely spoke. He slouched along the street. He had no personality. This peerless debunker of human vanities seemed, to the few acquaintances with whom he drank, to be Mr Ordinary, Mr Cellophane, Mr Hardly-There-At-All. Henry Angelo, one of his few articulate friends, said Gillray seemed "scarcely to think at all and to care no more for the actors in the mighty drama nor for the events which he so wonderfully dramatised, than if he had no participation in the good or evil of the day".

He was a camera, in other words, with its shutter jammed open if only that image did not exclude so much industry. He was apprenticed to an engraver called Harry Ashby and, alongside the business cards and certificates, started to produce his own caricatures from 1775  crude subjects featuring prostitutes admiring themselves, and Scotsmen on the lavatory. His early social and political satires are simply too busy, too crammed with contemporary reference and half-explicable humour, to be easily enjoyed. To appreciate A Sale of English Beauties in the East Indies, which portrays an auction of British prostitutes in India, you need to know that London was buzzing at the time with scandalous rumours of louche behaviour among the British in Madras. To get the point of Lady Termagent Flaybum, it's vital to know that Lady Strathmore pathologically disliked her stepson. And so on. But some satires transcend their contemporary context  like the brilliant Ancient Music, in which the king and queen listen cluelessly to a chorus of caterwauling from dangling cats, oxen and other livestock, and two boys being flogged. The vivid faces, the casual throwing together of human and animal figures at several angles works like a parody of the Sacra Conversazione convention of the Renaissance.

Gillray tried to be a serious engraver in the 1780s, working to his own designs and others'. A work like The Nancy Packet  a shipwreck scene  shows how accomplished he could be, but his quirky individualism tips the engraving into absurdity.

And there are times when you can see Gillray himself tipping into the madness that would finally engulf him. His most powerful works are crammed with private demons, personal effects, inscrutable symbolic properties.Shakespeare Sacrificed or The Offering to Avarice, is typical a picture of a conflagration engraved in cold fury after Gillray was left out of John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, where modern artists were commissioned to draw new illustrations of Bardic subjects. There's a lot of barely controlled derangement about Lieut Governor Gall-Stone, inspired by Alecto, a blistering attack on the famously nasty author Philip Thicknesse, a blackmailer, lecher, sadist and slave master. This epic composition is full of rancour and bile, crammed with allusions, devils, clouds, sexual invitation and elemental excess  and the whole fantastic attack

was apparently prompted by the publication of Thicknesse's Memoirs (1788-90). One can only wonder why such an apparently detached figure as Gillray responded to them with such ad hominem fury.

If mighty works emerged in response to petty conflicts, larger events prompted even more remarkable responses from Gillray. The most potent political influence on his life was the French Revolution and its fallout. At the start, he was a passionate fan of the revolutionary ideal, but could not stomach the execution of Louis XVI in 1793. Clearly, he was haunted by the prospect of extreme political violence crossing the Channel. As atrocity stories became the talk of the metropolis, Gillray's imagination caught fire. Like a Ken Russell or Pasolini de ses jours, he pictured nuns being flogged in the streets and revolutionaries eating human flesh "after the fatigues of the day". A sense of engagé disgust informs his engravings of the time, especially The Zenith of French Glory  a view of the royal guillotining, in which a ragged-arsed revolutionary rests his foot on the bowed head of a hanged bishop  and The Blood of the Murdered Crying for Vengeance, where the severed head of the king sends torrents of crimson blood gushing into the sky, inscribed with floods of indignant rhetoric.

From considering the grisly spectacle of the Terror, Gillray turned to considering Napoleon. It's significant that the larger the threat of a French invasion becomes, the smaller and more ragamuffin becomes the figure of the Corsican warlord until he is a midget urchin, wild-eyed, dirty-faced, hungry for power, utterly inglorious.

Where can one locate the centre of Gillray, the core of his bilious, outraged, exceedingly moral imagination? You can look at his images of King George, his hairy-chinned queen and his feckless, indolent son, the Prince of Wales, and conclude that Gillray hated nobody as much as he hated the three of them. You can see his attempts to cut Napoleon down to size as the flip-side of blind panic. His hatred of the British art establishment fuels his best work, but so does his simple observational studies from the London streets. When I think of Gillray, after looking over the whole wicked, venal, witty, cruel, thousand-headed array of his work, the image I take away is not of periwigged statesmen at supper or clueless aristocrats lying abed, but his classic engraving, The Gout (1799). Simple, brutal, unhampered by social details, uncluttered by reaction-shots from Georgian exquisites, this is another perfect image from the feet-obsessed Gillray, an image of inexplicably ruthless pain. And you don't have to look too far to see in the splenetic, whiskery demon with the barbed tail an image of Gillray himself, sinking his fangs ferociously into the soft, hypocritical flesh of the English Enlightenment.










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