About JAMES GILLRAY
James Gillray was a British caricaturist and printmaker active from 1779 to 1811. He became famous in his own lifetime for his unmerciful satires on politicians, high society, the Royal family and Napoleon during the scandal-rich Regency period, earning him the contemporary description of ‘a caterpillar on the green leaf of reputation’. Today, he is arguably the most influential caricaturist the world has known.
How did my involvement with him begin? As a young man living in London in the 60’s, I was riding the Underground going home to my bed-sit from work at Unilever when I noticed an advertisement for an exhibition of caricatures by a James Gillray at The Arts Council in St. James’s Square. I didn’t remember the name, but I recognised the illustration they used for the ad. It was The Plumb-pudding in danger, which I had copied by hand from a history textbook at Denstone College some 8 years before, being impressed by its graphic design. Already a cartoon nut, I visited the exhibition the very next day and was captivated by everything I saw. There and then I determined to turn London upside down, shake it, and see just how many Gillrays would fall out.
I had immediate success. It seems incredible now, but I was buying prints for just a few pounds. So started a lifetime of collecting and research into Gillray and his contemporaries like Rowlandson and Cruikshank, spending many hours in The Print Room at the British Museum on Saturdays and chasing down caricatures, not only in London, but all over the world. And my interest continues to this day, sustained by Gillray’s imagination, his understanding of human frailty and his wicked wit, added to his outstanding skill with the engraving tool and superb sense of composition.
1756 - 1815
from a self-portrait
But while he is credited with being the father of the political cartoon, he also dabbled in the world outside the high and mighty, satirizing everyday social situations from ideas often provided by friends. As I delved into his work, I became familiar with those prints also, some of which had no known background descriptions in either contemporary books or the British Museum’s archives. I thought it would be fun to remedy that situation which was the inspiration for the stories in this book.
The first of them, ‘Slippery Sam’, is a glimpse into the world in which Gillray lived, and how the business of a caricaturist was conducted in the late 18th and early 19th century. The issues of plagiarism and unwelcome competition are also explored in another of the stories The Military Caricaturist.
