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Updated: May 14, 2025
If the adversaries of Hastings naturally seized upon the opportunity of a classical effect by presenting Burke and Hastings in the character of Cicero and Verres, the friends of Verres replied by the pencil of Gillray, representing Hastings as the savior of India defending himself heroically against assassins with the faces of Burke and of Fox.
Gillray had treated a French subject with success in his amusing "Landing of Sir John Bull and his Family at Boulogne-sur-Mer," which recalls Bunbury to our thought both in its humour and treatment. This latter artist had thoroughly appreciated James Gillray's genius, and said of his great contemporary that "he was a living folio, every page of which abounded with wit."
Syntax, with his thin legs, black coat and breeches, and hooked nose, claims a prominent place. These subjects lead us already into the early nineteenth century, and, as doing so, fall outside our present limit; but Rowlandson himself belongs in his art, as much as Bunbury or Gillray, to the earlier age.
We read one or two of the names, and they were quaint and strange: "Anne Rypheria Hurloch;" "Anna Benigna La Trobe;" and one was especially interesting, James Gillray, forty years sexton to this simple cemetery, and father of Gillray, the H. B. of the past century. One thing pleased us mightily, the extreme old age to which the dwellers in this house seemed to have attained.
And thus I have attempted here not so much the history of the men, the catalogue of their achieved work interesting or valuable though such a history or catalogue might be as to show the spirit of the age itself reflected most faithfully, even when it seems most caricatured or burlesqued, by their brush or graver or pencil; to watch the grotesque visage and ignoble form of Vice traced by Hogarth's genius from the homes of London's luxury to her dens of hidden crime; to study the more refined, if somewhat weaker, social satire of Henry William Bunbury; to admire those magnificent political cartoons of James Gillray colossal and overwhelming, even in their brutality or obscenity; and finally, to lose ourselves in the luxuriant and living growth of Thomas Rowlandson's pencil, recreating for us the features of an age that was, like himself, vigorous, buoyant, and expansive, that true Age of Caricature, which is also known as the Eighteenth Century.
There was Tom Jones in four volumes and the Spectator in eight, Gil Blas and the works of Swift, all with the long "s," and backs like polished oak; in the lower shelves were Hogarth and Gillray in rare folios; at every level and on either hand were books worth taking out. But this was almost all that Rachel did; she took them out and put them in again, for that was her unsettled mood.
... "the gate With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms. Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide." James Gillray made his entry into English political caricature almost at the same date as Sayer namely in 1782 with his caricatures on the subject of Rodney's naval victory.
Petersburg know well that Gillray did not exaggerate Paul's ugliness, for he could not. And Paul's face was but a mirror of his character. Tyranny was wrought into his every fibre. He insisted on an Oriental homage. As his carriage whirled by, it was held the duty of all others in carriages to stop, descend into the mud, and bow themselves.
The eighteenth century, which was to witness the magnificent and, in its own way, unequalled achievement of English art in the paintings of Reynolds, Romney, Gainsborough, Hoppner; in the engravings of Bartolozzi, Dalton, John Raphael Smith, and William Henry Ryland; in the caricatures, which we have just noted, of Bunbury, Rowlandson, and Gillray, was to open, not inappropriately, with the appearance and speedy recognition of a very individual and very characteristic genius with the pictured comedies of William Hogarth.
Then we watched Gillray tower aloft in political satire, and Rowlandson's pencil touch every side of life. If we noticed at the same time a certain coarseness of fibre come to the surface in much of their work, finding expression often both in subject, and still more in treatment and in type, we must remember that this quality belongs not to the men alone, but to the age.
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