BOOKS The Face of Caricature
By OSBERT LANCASTER
It would be hard to think of any British artist of comparable stature who has been so long and so undeservedly neglected as the subject of this scholarly and admirably produced bio- graphy.* Even given the fact that among us the label 'comic' automatically shifts an artist on to a plane where all praise is tinged with condescen- sion, Gillray's fate seems by continental stan- dards incomprehensible. (Imagine a history of French art in the nineteenth century that made no mention of Forain!) Rowlandson has, during the last half-century, gradually assumed his proper place; Keene, praised during his lifetime by Degas, is now held in high regard by his fellow- Countrymen; even Cruickshank won, as an old man, the enthusiastic approval of Ruskin. But Giliray has until now remained down among the footnotes, his works valued not so much for themselves, but rather for the light that they cast on contemporary events and personalities. .
Admittedly the difficulties in the way of a just nopreciation are considerable; Gillray habitually went too far and his approach to his subject- matter is hard to reconcile with our cherished idea of English humour--jolly, robust, even, very occasionally, coarse, but never tinged with that savagery which all too often disfigures the pro- ductions of foreign cartoonists. His attack was invariably uninhibitedly ferocious; indeed, it is hard to think of any cartoonist until the coming of Simplicissimus, who was so seldom restrained by any consideration of charity or good taste. Moreover, he never, at any time in his career made the smallest effort to disembarrass himself of the stigma that always, in matter of art, here attaches to the unashamed, 100 per cent pro- fessional. Rowlandson had a deep feeling for the English countryside which found expression in innumerable exquisite water-colours; Cruick- shank was a superb illustrator; Dicky Doyle charmed the public with his fairy-stories; but Gillray stuck resolutely to his last and never em- barked on any mitigating sideshows.
Such unusual singlemindedness, while com- pelling our admiration, at the same time provokes speculations that are tinged with regret. Gillray's Powers as a draughtsman were so great, his sense of, composition so exceptional, that one cannot help wondering what his achievements might have been had output not been so necessarily topical and so strictly conditioned by the exist- ing methods of reproduction. He remains, in fact, one of the very few performing seals one would have been interested to see play Hamlet.
That one entertains such fantasies is due to the enthusiasm aroused by a virtuosity that has little or no immediate connection with any in- spiration that his subject-matter could have afforded. His gift for imposing his own images of political figures on the public consciousness is one proper to the caricaturist and was almost equally well displayed by David Low; likewise, his awareness of the public mood and ability to crystallise it visually has been common to many good cartoonists; but his power of handling vast crowds of figures, setting them in motion while Hill.* MR. GILLRAY : THII CARICATURIST. By Draper (Phaidon, 40s.) preserving their individuality, and fixing them firmly in a three-dimensional space is one that is rare enough in European art and almost unknown in English. As one studies more carefully his great allegorical plates, the crowded Apotheoses, the tumultuous Visions, it is not of Thornhill, but rather of Luca Giordano, or even Rubens, that one is reminded. And.it is this, at first glance so extraordinary, adaptation of the Mannerist conventions of the High Renaissance to purposes for which they were never intended which saves his bacon. So unwavering a concentration on the more sordid aspects of the human condition, if expressed in, say, the conventions of Pop Art, would too often reduce his message to the level of a public-lavatory graffito.
Just how highly developed Gillray's ability for the marshalling of large numbers in a compre- hensibly expressed space was, is perhaps most dramatically demonstrated by a comparison with Hogarth. In much of the latter's work—the first episode of Marriage a la Mode provides a good example—the figures themselves, admirably and persuasively developed, seem to be disposed in the picture-space in a manner that verges on the arbitrary, or, rather, •in accordance with some formula developed to meet symbolic rather than purely.aesthetic requirements, in front• of a background that in its almost total failure to express the third dimension suggests that the whole scene is being played in an all-equipped provincial theatre. By contrast, in such a plate as L'Assenthide Nationale, Gillray has disposed his familiar cast in an interior that is perfectly realised in depth and by skilful use of chiaroscuro has graded and intensified the attention we are to pay to the various individuals. This is not to• say that Gillray was .the greater artist (although he was undoubtedly incomparably the better en- graver), but that he customarily displayed in the restricted area of a copper plate a skill which eluded almost all his countrymen on a larger scale (how dreary and incompetent in comparison with such a plate as The Lover's Dream appear all those tedious allegorical machines turned out by Romney and Sir Joshua!), but which on the Continent made the fortunes of the great masters of the Baroque.
Gillray was fortunate in that his temperament was such that he was spared .the embarrassment common to all cartoonists when Faced with the problem of representing the figures or causes of which they are in favour. Not fOr him those starry-eyed representatives of Youth striding purposefully off into a New Dawn to whom even such masters as Low and Vicky have on occasion had recourse; despite his government subsidy and close relation with Canning, individual Tories fare little better visually 'at his hands than do the Whigs. And this total lack of any bogus idealism enables him to portray the national symbol of John Bull,,which 1)e invented, not as that clean- living, forthright old farmer, on the delineation of whom Sir Bernard • Partridge lavished such loving care, but as a dirty, beer-swilling, mentally defective yokel. But while all his victims are equal in his eyes, some of them are more equal than others. That so great and good a man as
Charles James Fox should always have inspired such concentrated venom is perhaps attributable to his larger-than-life personality, but what, one wonders, lay behind the calculated savagery with which poor Sheridan is invariably depicted? It seems impossible to believe that political pre- judice was not to some degree fortified by per- sonal bias. Unfortunately even Mr. Draper Hill's scholarship, which has uncovered so much of the political background of Gillray's world (in- cidentally making it rather difficult to claim for his hero the highest degree of integrity), throws little or no light on his personal relationships with his models, except Canning and, to a • lesser degree, Pitt.
However, it is as a political cartoonist that Gillray's reputation must ultimately be assessed (as a social satirist he seems to me inferior both to Rowlandson and to Cruickshank), and thanks to the exhaustive researches and controlled en- thusiasm of Mr. Draper Hill, all the evidence has at long last been properly assembled. (Or almost. all; as the author himself admits, it is a thousand, pities that the publishers could not have allowed us one- coloured illustration, pointing out how immeasurably- some of the best plates lose by this subtraction. f) The verdict cannot, I think, be in doubt. While certain of Gillray's best productions may very occasionally have been equalled, his total achievement has only once been surpassed. Low, whose gift for caricature was certainly as great and political awareness no less, was farther from the mainstream of European art and could never attain to the Grand Manner which Gillray so brilliantly, if perversely, employed at will. Gulbrannson was his equal as an artist and ' on occasion surpassed him in savagery, but never wholly escaped from that ensnaring provincialism which flavours almost all German art. Georg Grosz, whose outlook on the human race was in some ways markedly similar, was at his best for a far shorter time. One thing alone Gillray lacked --compassion; had he possessed it, he would be, what he so nearly is, the equal of Daumier.
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