The killer satire of James Gillray

‘I hope the day will never come when I shall neither be the subject of calumny or ridicule, for then I shall be neglected and forgotten’, is how Samuel Johnson greeted the news that James Gillray had caricatured him as Dr Pomposo. In Georgian London, a caricature was a fast-track to celebrity. And, as described by one contemporary observer, the print shop window was ‘the temple of fame in grotesque’.

Gillray was chiefly responsible for this. When he emerged on to the print publishing scene in the 1780s, the British art of ‘caricatura’ – an Italian import – was in its infancy. It grew up fast. Gillray, who had misspent part of his youth as a strolling player, invented a wittily scripted visual theatre of the absurd, uniting brilliant draughtsmanship with a fluency in mirror writing that rivalled Leonardo’s. It was a killer combination.

For modern audiences, the problem with Gillray is that without a grasp of the politics of the period, his best shots are liable to fly over their heads. For the current Gillray exhibition at Gainsborough’s House – the first in 20 years – his biographer Tim Clayton has sensibly focused on the most famous of his cast of characters. Nobody – apart from Nelson – is spared. Lèse-majesté was his stock-in-trade: in ‘Taking Physick; or The News of Shooting the King of Sweden!’(1792) George III and Queen Charlotte are shown sitting on a double commode as William Pitt announces some bowel-loosening news.

For an audience that, pre-modern mass media, had little idea what public figures looked like, Gillray rendered his favourite targets instantly recognisable by judicious exaggeration: the corpulent Prince George straining the buttons of his waistcoat and breeches in ‘A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion’ (1792); the ascetic Edmund Burke stripped down to specs, nose and bony hands in ‘Smelling out a Rat; or The Atheistical-Revolutionist disturbed in his Midnight “Calculations”’ (1790); the lanky Pitt contrasted with the rotund Albinia Hobart in ‘A Sphere Projecting against a Plane’ (1792), illustrating Euclid’s principle that a plane, ‘when applied ever so closely to a sphere, can only touch its Superfices, without being able to enter it’ (see below).