The Art of Humour: English Satirical Prints
Target Audience
AS Art Students who are interested in exploring how satirical prints from the 18th and 19th
centuries used humour, imagery and text to make socio-political comment, and influence public
opinion.
Key Concepts
Humour, caricature, satire, society, politics, politicians, culture, national identity, class, religion,
sexuality, power, monarchy, hierarchy, celebrity, controversy, engraving, etching, print shops.
The Activity
Take two satirical prints produced between 1780 and 1830, with similar themes. Compare how each print has
uniquely utilised humour, distortion, imagery and text to make specific social and/or political comments.
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James Gillray, detail from Very Slippy Weather, published 10 February 1808
Background Knowledge
A popular artistic medium in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Georgian satirical prints or
caricatures (as they were often called) were published daily through London print sellers for
middle and upper class buyers. Similar to tabloid newspapers today, they were produced
quickly in response to the latest news or gossip of the moment and (in the absence of a free
press) took on a critical role as reactive commentary - reflecting the private attitudes, fears and
behaviour of their predominantly male producers and buyers. Consequently, satirical prints
were mostly preoccupied with war, political unrest, social hierarchies, sex and fashion.
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However, satirical prints were not like the throwaway cartoons of today’s newspapers. They
were art objects in their own right – albeit ‘low’ art. Prints were sold in single sheets, or
sometimes as a collection portfolio. They were produced by artists using engraving or etching
techniques on a metal plate, which were then printed on paper with black ink and then hand
coloured - by the artist (for the first few editions) and then by studio hands who were sometimes
children. Key satirical artists were James Gillray, Isaac Cruikshank, George Cruikshank,
Thomas Rowlandson, Henry Bunbury and Richard Newton.
During their most popular age in the reign of George III and later George IV, satirical prints were
one of the few main sources of information about royal, political and social life in London. In fact
a politician would gauge his popularity and influence on public opinion, based on his prevalence
in satirical imagery – If you were not the butt of the joke, you were not important!
Hence certain figures (mostly politicians and their courtesans) repeat themselves in satirical
imagery, including: George III, Queen Charlotte, their son George IV, William Pitt (the
conservative leader of the Tory party) and Charles James Fox (the ‘rebellious’ leader of the
Whig party). John Bull was the name given to the physical personification of England in prints,
who was represented usually a robust, portly man or a simple country bumpkin. The ‘sansculottes’ was the name given to the working-class French, during the revolution, who were
represented in prints as gaunt and malnourished, with tattered clothing and “no trousers” [See:
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/gillray/characters.htm]. The Irish, the Scottish, African
people and Jewish people were all reduced to visual stereotypes within satirical humour.
The quantity and speed with which these prints were produced, offered a much wider reach of
circulation for these images. Also, new prints were often displayed in the windows of print shops
on the diverse streets of London. It’s fair to suggest that the availability of satirical imagery
shifted the terms by which art was being consumed.
Using this brief background and the resources provided below, you can begin to build a view of
how satirical prints were produced, and the kinds of subjects that they were preoccupied with.
But how did these prints tell their jokes? What kind of imagery and language did they
draw on? Was there more than one joke or story within a particular image? Who or what
was the ‘butt’ of each particular joke? These are some of the questions that this activity is
concerned with.
Resources
There are a number of very rich and helpful online resources that will help you to approach this
activity. The following list is a starting-point and will inevitably lead to more discoveries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_III_of_the_United_Kingdom - Wikipedia entry on George III
and his reign, including significant political shifts and development of the Hanoverian period.
http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/gallery/viveladifference - Vive la différence! The English and
French stereotype in satirical prints, 1720-1815, an online resource from the Fitzwilliam
Museum, Cambridge, UK.
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/gillray - James Gillray: The Art of Caricature, an online
exhibition from Tate Britain
http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/art/print/exhibits/gillray/ - James Gillray, an online
exhibition and print resource from the New York Public Library
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http://libweb5.princeton.edu/Visual_Materials/cruikshank/comparison.html - The George
Cruikshank online resource from Princeton University, USA.
http://www.britainexpress.com/History/Georgian_index.htm - Georgian England, an index of
articles exploring the culture and politics of this period in England’s History.
Finally, use the British Museum online ‘Search the Collection’ facility, to find out more about the
prints you have chosen to explore. The Museum holds one of the largest collections of satirical
prints in the world: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database.aspx
Outcomes
This activity can be used either for individual or group study. This is really an opportunity to
explore some of the tools used by satirical artists, in order to produce humorous images.
This will inevitably prompt in-depth discussion around the role of images in influencing public
opinion. You may want to make comparisons with contemporary newspaper cartoonists. Do
you think we draw on humour as a source of information, in the same way as our Georgian
counterparts? Georgian satires were often the result of ‘collaboration’, in the sense that the
ideas for jokes often came from anonymous patrons who commissioned their own slant on a
particular debate. How then does this dynamic change/shift our perception of the artist? Does
the artist become merely a visual interpreter in this process? The discussion around visual satire
will also raise questions about the ‘limits of humour’; particularly when offensive stereotypes or
caricatures of people are included in a joke.
Your final analysis could be in the form of a short essay, a presentation, a montage or even a
photo-story or film. You can decide what approach will best convey your ideas.
Helpful hints
The objective of this activity is really to explore the components that make up satirical imagery
from the Georgian period, and to decide how they inform a ‘reading’ or interpretation of the joke.
It will be useful to think about the following questions:
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What is the relationship between image and text within the print?
Are there ‘motifs’ that are immediately recognisable as having a particular meaning?
Are there connections that can or have been made to literature of the period?
Why has the artist chosen to distort a character’s physical features in a particular way?
In the case of political satire, are there strong references which illustrate a particular
political ‘leaning’?
Is there a specific point/purpose to the joke? Or is this merely a humorous observation?
What role does the theatre/performance play in this image?
Going further
It is fair to say that every culture has its own specific references that make their humour distinct,
and which in some ways can therefore make it difficult to understand or interpret from the
outside. An American person, for example may watch the comedy show ‘Gavin and Stacey’
[see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3jtZB-Gx1c ] and find Stacey’s accent funny, or Ness’s
size or extreme gothic style funny, but they may not see the humour in: an ‘essex boy’ dating a
welsh girl from a small town, or the fact they both shop in River Island, or that their double date
started in Leicester Square in London. All of these more detailed cultural references provide a
different viewing experience for British viewers. Georgian satirical prints are similar, in that
many of the visual or textual references would have only made sense to well read aristocratic
Englishmen. That said, humour, by its very nature, references both our similarities and
differences.
So, taking this whole activity on board, do you think that visual humour can be universal?
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