A great hero of mine is the 18th-century caricaturist James Gillray. His work was so biting that the exiled Napoleon was reported to have complained that his anti-French engravings did more than all the armies of Europe to topple him.
In an age before TV and magazine photo features, Gillray gave celebrities, politicians, and royalty the faces by which they came to be known to the public, who stood with their noses pressed up against London’s print-shop windows as they ogled the latest etchings.
There’s a bit of a misconception that cartoonists fix very quickly upon how best to portray a public figure. But there’s a lot of experimentation, and testing of ideas in the public forum, before a winning formula is hit upon. Just as Steve Bell (formerly of The Guardian) played around with many portrayals of John Major before he struck gold with the Y-fronts outside the trousers, or with various characterisations of George W. Bush before drawing him as a chimp, Gillray was constantly searching for visual shorthands that resonated with his patrons.
This included exaggerating the swarthy Whig politician Charles James Fox’s five o’clock shadow, and inflating the bulbous boozer’s nose of playwright and statesman Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
When King George III is portrayed in James Gillray’s caricatures, he is nearly always shown in profile. The king was often seen by crowds at public functions, and was by no means reclusive, until his notorious bouts of insanity kept him indisposed and closeted away in later life.
But given that most people would have known him best from his profile on coins, I wonder if Gillray was using this as a simple but effective trick of recognition in his engravings. Many of those buying caricatures sat high enough up the social scale to have encountered the king in the flesh at social and official engagements, but the first point of contact caricatures would have had with an audience was the mob who viewed them in the print shops’ window displays. Their mental picture of their monarch was undoubtedly shaped by the image on the pennies in their greatcoat pockets. In my view, Gillray cottoned on to this and used it to his advantage.
By combining such tricks of the trade with astonishing draughtsmanship, and a frankly sick sense of humour, Gillray became the finest political caricaturist of all time, and he was described by one contemporary as ‘a caterpillar on the green leaf of reputation.’ I can think of no greater accolade.