Provocative Prints
30 October 2020
Why satire never loses its sting.
Jo Lawson-Tancred
Jo Lawson-Tancred writes about art and the art market for Apollo Magazine, The Financial Times, and The Economist's 1843 magazine, among others. She is also currently finishing her MSc in Data Science.
‘The Genuine Works of James Gillray’ engraved by himself, 1830. Sold for £28,000.
With Spitting Image making a comeback earlier this month, after 25 years off-air, it is clear that the British public has not lost its appetite for satire since William Hogarth, working in the early eighteenth-century, took the society of his own time to task. The new show’s tagline ‘there’s something funny about these people’, gets to the heart of satire’s timeless attraction. With its exaggerations, cruel ironies and sometimes crass double entendres, satirical humour makes us laugh because we can recognise in it our own human vices and hypocrisies.
Hogarth’s visions of 18th-century England are filled with tales of debauchery, recklessness and greed told through the lives of rakes, harlots and alcoholics. These characters have been magnified for our amusement and their stories, told to us as cautionary tales, have a dark humour. Engravings produced from Hogarth’s original paintings increased their visibility and popularity.
Later in the century an explosive political rivalry between the Whigs and the Tories inspired the main satirists of the day, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, who ridiculed royals and politicians among other familiar figures, whether from the public eye or our own private lives. From Gillray and Rowlandson we have inherited the captioned cartoon format still familiar to us today, and these images could be mass-produced as prints and circulated through London’s coffee houses.
If the format has remained more or less the same, new generations of cartoonists have left their own mark, from the colourful worlds of George Cruikshank, moving into the Victorian era, to the more gentle, sympathetic humour of Max Beerbohm and Vanity Fair’s ‘Spy’ (Sir Leslie Matthew Ward) at the turn of the century. Depicting perhaps more recognisable subjects to us now are modern day humorists like Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe, Richard Wilson, Steve Bell and Chris Riddell.
John Nixon (c.1750-1818), ‘Brighton’, Signed with monogram l.r., inscribed l.c: Brighton, numbered 112, pen and grey ink and watercolour over pencil, 18.4 x 13 cm.
Commenting on cult-like enthusiasm that caricaturists often inspire, British art dealer and specialist Karen Taylor says they are usually prolific in their output, meaning works regularly come on the market, and the artists ‘tend to develop a recognisable style and stick with it, which is definitely part of their appeal’. It is unsurprising then that, popular as they are with the public, satirical cartoons are also highly coveted by collectors.
As ever, it takes all sorts, and collectors’ interests range from a straightforward appreciation of illustrative style to a much more in-depth understanding of the historical context. Social satire is usually particularly popular. Exposing adulterers, gamblers, the corrupt and the vain, Taylor says ‘we can recognise the situations because they’re universal really, and the way he pokes fun makes people smile’.
Despite their comedic tone, the works are also layered with historical significance. Roddy Newlands of Shapero Rare Books finds they ‘provide an insight into the times on multiple levels; costume, class, customs, vices, respective moral norms and of course politics’. Commenting on how styles and attitudes change, Newlands adds ‘the tone and grotesquery seems to be slightly more repressed in the Victorian era, but there is a lot of similarity between the visceral humour of the eighteenth-century examples and many of the more modern political cartoons, notably perhaps from the ‘Maggie’ era onwards’.
Despite their Victorian propriety, many 19th-century illustrators are still appealing to us today because of their association with popular novels and children's books. George Cruikshank, for example, is still associated with Charles Dickens, and his work was influential for many well-known illustrators like ‘Phiz’ (Hablot Knight Browne), John Tenniel and Edward Lear.
!['The Bottle [and] The Drunkard's Children’, by George Cruikshank, 1847-48. Published in the same year that Cruikshank himself swore a vow of sobriety and became a forceful advocate for the Temperance Movement, which brought him into some minor conflict with Dickens.Shapero Gallery - A26](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d7a07648324b87be515c59b/1603804185089-D2G5RO5LPUPTAJIHC23G/cruikshank_bottle.jpg)
'The Bottle [and] The Drunkard's Children’, by George Cruikshank, 1847-48. Published in the same year that Cruikshank himself swore a vow of sobriety and became a forceful advocate for the Temperance Movement, which brought him into some minor conflict with Dickens.
On the more accessible end of art collecting, satirical prints tend to be reasonably affordable. More recent works are particularly budget-friendly, with an original 1979 cartoon of the writer Nabokov by Richard Willson offered by Shapero Rare Books for £450. At the top end, competition for prized historical pieces can push prices into the tens of thousands, with Shapero’s last set of The Genuine Works of James Gillray engraved by himself (1830) selling for £28,000. Of a similarly high quality, Comforts of Bath: The Assembly Ball, a 1798 ink and watercolour by Rowlandson, possibly a design for his lithograph prints on the same subject, is offered by Karen Taylor Fine Art for £9,500.
At auction too most prints have estimates in the range of £1,000-£10,000, but these prices can be far exceeded. At Sotheby’s ‘The Political Cartoon Collection of Jeffrey Archer’ sale in 2018, a Max Beerbohm watercolour of Churchill sold for £47,500, several times its £6,000-£8,000 estimate, no doubt thanks to the name of its subject as well as its author.
Published in multiple editions, the value of a print today comes down to its rarity and its condition. This can be affected by a variety of factors, such as whether the hand colouring is original or added later. A proliferation of fakes means buying can be risky and correctly identifying authentic works is complicated by the existence of genuine Rowlandsons, for example, with forged signatures added later.
Keen to proudly display their finds, most collectors of satirical prints like to hang them on the wall. Damage from bright daylight can thankfully be avoided by hanging them in more dimly lit rooms and investing in museum-quality protective glass. Taylor notes of Rowlandsons, ‘a lot of them are faded and not in brilliant condition, and that shows you that people have always liked them and had them on the wall’. Touching on what really draws people to satirical works, she adds ‘among the collecting community there is often more of a tolerance of slightly less good condition than there is with some other artists because there is an understanding of that, and what people really like is his mind’.
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