In these pages we have traced together the record of that century in English Caricature; and if we have been compelled to note but hastily the lesser men, have, in so doing, at least gained breathing space to study four great and typical figures. We saw how William Hogarth, when he handles the graver as humourist and delineator of character, stands forth immortally great; how, when he sought to place himself at the head of the nascent English School, he fell beneath his own level. We saw in Henry William Bunbury the cultured artist, soldier, and man of society, the welcome guest in many a great country-house, who could bring his host's pretty daughters into some charming sketch, or take his part in the improvised theatricals; but whose prints have real humour, charm, and the sweet, wholesome breath of English country life. Then we watched Gillray tower aloft in political satire, and Rowlandson's pencil touch every side of life.
If we noticed at the same time a certain coarseness of fibre come to the surface in much of their work, finding expression often both in subject, and still more in treatment and in type, we must remember that this quality belongs not to the men alone, but to the age. The more sensitive modern may feel himself at first repelled rather than attracted, and many a print of Rowlandson or Gillray find a place in his Index Expurgatorius; but the brutality of these men is the brutality of Nature in some of her moods, and their work, like Nature, fertile, fresh, and vigorous, attracts us (as all strong work will and must) the more we study it by its masterly drawing, its free, open humour, and often its high imaginative grasp.
Behind these men, these Masters of English Caricature, appears, never entirely absent from our thought, the history of the century, with its magnificent record of English achievement. Behind them, too, a corrective and a stimulant to their best effort, is that wonderful revelation of English eighteenth-century pictorial art. For just as when, in years to come, men think on that stirring epoch, the two words England and Liberty will leap unbidden to their thought; so, too, in the record of the greatest epoch of our country's art, a place must be found for the English Caricaturists of the Eighteenth Century.
Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
London & Edinburgh
Footnotes:
[[1]] A fine collection of lithographs of Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) has this year been exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
[[2]] "The Works of William Hogarth, elucidated by Descriptions." By T. Clerk. London, 1810.
[[3]] "William Hogarth," by Austin Dobson; with a valuable technical introduction by Sir W. Armstrong. London, 1902.
[[4]] "Bartolozzi and his Pupils in England" (Langham Series). By Selwyn Brinton. London, 1903.
[[5]] "History of Caricature and of Grotesque in Art." By Thomas Wright, M.A., F.S.A. London, 1863.