The Eighteenth Century in English CaricatureBrinton, Selwyn
History
The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature
Brinton, Selwyn
Caricatures and cartoons -- Great Britain
We must turn now to our artist's later prints of English
eighteenth-century social life, which are as full of humorous
observation, even though they have not the special interest of these
notes on old France. For, like Collet and Sandby, his predecessors in
English caricature, Bunbury gave but little attention to political
caricature. Sandby belongs almost (b. 1725) to the later years of
Hogarth's ascendency; and, though not a professional caricaturist, being
perhaps annoyed at that artist's depreciation of other painters, many of
his caricatures are directed against Hogarth himself. But Sandby's best
claim to our interest lies outside our present subject; for his
landscape work in steel engraving, in aquatint and oil-colour, had led
him up to the discovery of the beauty and interest of water-colour
painting, in which art he may claim to be a pioneer. He outlived John
Collet, who had been born in the same year (1725) as himself, and is
said to have been a pupil of Hogarth, though Lambert, a
landscape-painter, is mentioned as giving him his first instructions.
Certainly there is something which recalls Hogarth in his drawings,
which deal, as I have said, with social satire rather than politics. "A
Disaster" treats of a lady who has lost both hat and wig together by the
same gust of wind; her footman behind has caught one of these in each
hand, and the rustics, who have preserved nature's covering, laugh at
her plight. Collet's picture of "Father Paul in his Cups, or The Private
Devotions of a Convent," was one of a series by our artist intended to
illustrate Sheridan's comedy of "The Duenna," produced in 1775. This was
close upon the period of Lord Gordon's riots (1780), and the "No Popery"
feeling which then prevailed finds illustration in this work of
Collet's. Like Sandby, he worked also in water-colour, and two of his
sketches in this medium are mentioned by Bryan as in the Victoria and
Albert Museum.
We have now returned with Bunbury from his "grand tour" abroad, and have
to study him at his best in his sketches of English social life in town
and country. He was probably himself a good horseman, and at any rate
understood, as thoroughly as even Caran d'Ache himself, the humorous
side of the equestrian art. A whole series of his smaller prints deal
with the rider and his steed. "How to pass a carriage," "How to lose
your way," "How to travel on two legs in a frost," are among the best of
these. Another clever print shows the rider of a pulling animal with a
mouth of cast-iron just clearing an old woman's barrow; while among the
larger prints we have "Richmond Hill," "Hyde Park," "Coxheath Ho," and
"Warley Ho," and his inimitable print of a "Riding House," published by
Bretherton in 1780.
Bunbury's caricatures of military subjects naturally connect themselves
with the period when he was actively connected with the Suffolk County
Militia, more especially when, in 1778, he was in camp at Coxheath at
the time of the war in America.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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