Substack is proving to be a rewarding experience, and a great outlet for sharing all of the great stories, succulent morsels of art history, and practical experience that caricature has given me over the decades.
It has also made me think a lot about how caricaturists of the past monetized this trade. My 18th-century predecessors, in particular, were an enterprising bunch.
For example, the print-shop husband-and-wife team of Matthew and Mary Darly published a ‘How To’ book about caricature, and even offered a caricature correspondence course to their patrons. More importantly, Mary Darly was Britain's first professional female caricaturist.
The demand for enjoying caricature as a domestic experience led to other developments. In the manner of the late, lamented Blockbuster Video, the enterprising London printer S.W. Fores rented out portfolios of caricatures to patrons for an evening, so clients could take home a batch of the latest ‘cuts’, as engravings were known, and enjoy them with their nearest and dearest. The price was half a crown, with a £1 deposit. In 1789 Fores opened an exhibition that was billed as ‘the largest in Europe’, and four years later he had a six-foot replica of a guillotine on display there. Fores sold caricatures wholesale too, or ready for clients’ use on screens and in scrapbooks, and he also offered a bespoke caricature service.
There were opportunities for less-than-honest financial dealing too. Caricaturists sometimes had a neat side-line in blackmail, especially as royalty’s sense of humour so often suffered egregious failures when it was the butt of the joke. All that you as a caricaturist needed to do was make one of the Prince of Wales’s minions aware that you were planning to issue yet another salacious engraving showing His Highness in an embarrassing scenario with his new lover, and you’d be offered a bribe to suppress the work altogether. Sometimes, you can spot the word ‘Suppressed’ etched at the bottom of a caricature, indicating that this is precisely what has happened.
On one occasion, James Gillray found himself with a couple of royal lawyers on his back after caricaturing the Prince and his latest squeeze, Mrs. Fitzherbert. Gillray showed them being thrown violently from their phaeton, with Fitzherbert’s bare buttocks exposed to public scrutiny as her skirts tumble over her head, and the face of the prince on the point of burying itself in the lady’s aforementioned ample backside.
Caricatures of the monarchy were perennially popular, and in modern parlance, Gillray’s royal satires helped the print shops ‘shift units’. He also had to deal with the ceaseless pressure of reacting quickly to topical events, and he churned out a couple of powerful engravings every week. It was said that he scratched away so intensely and quickly at his copperplates that the curls of waste metal flying off them used to make his fingers bleed. The stress of maintaining an extraordinarily high output surely contributed to both his sanity and his eyesight giving way at the end of his life.
If you’d like to start churning out great caricatures almost as frenetically as Mr. Gillray and his contemporaries, sign up to my paid posts, which offer a masterclass in getting to grips with the art-form. A small, monthly contribution helps sustain my account and all I hope to offer you. Thank you!
seems like a documentry is due on this subject...
Fascinating! You’d hope political caricaturists nowadays have more freedom than back then.