CARIBBEE ISLANDS, a name chiefly of historical importance, sometimes applied to the whole of the West Indies, but strictly comprehending only the chain of islands stretching from Porto Rico to the coast of South America. These are also known as the Lesser Antilles, and the bulk of them are divided into the two groups of the Leeward and Windward Islands.
CARIBS, the name, used first by Columbus (from Cariba, said to mean “a valiant man”), of a South American people, who, at the arrival of the Spanish, occupied parts of Guiana and the lower Orinoco and the Windward and other islands in what is still known as the Caribbean Sea. They were believed to have had their original home in North America, spreading thence through the Antilles southward to Venezuela, the Guianas, and north-east Brazil. This view has been abandoned, as Carib tribes, the Bakairi and Nahuquas, using an archaic type of Carib speech and primitive in habits, have been met by German explorers in the very heart of Brazil. It may thus be assumed that the cradle of the race was the centre of South America; their first migrating movements being to Guiana and the Antilles. A cruel, ferocious and warlike people, they made a stout resistance to the Spaniards. They were cannibals, and it is to them that we owe that word, Columbus’s Caribal being transformed into Cannibal in apparent reference to the canine voracity of the Caribs. They are physically by no means a powerful race, being distinguished by slight figures with limbs well formed but lacking muscle, and with a tendency to be pot-bellied, due apparently to their habit of drinking paiwari (liquor prepared from the cassava plant) in great quantities. Their colour is a red cinnamon, but varies with different tribes. Their hair is thick, long, very black, and generally cut to an even edge, at right angles to the neck, round the head. The features are strikingly Mongoloid. Among the true Caribs a 2-in. broad belt of cotton is knitted round each ankle, and just below each knee of the young female children. All body-hair in both sexes is pulled out, even to the eye-brows. Among the women the lower lips are often pierced, pins of wood being passed through and forming a sort of chevaux de frise round the mouth. Sometimes a bell-shaped ornament is hung by men to a piece of string passed through the lower lip. The Carib government was patriarchal. Though the women did most of the hard work, they were kindly treated. Polygamy prevailed. Very little ceremony attended death. The Caribs of the West Indies, known as “Red” and “Black,” the first pure, the second mixed with negro blood, after a protracted war with the British were transported in 1796 to the number of 5000 from Dominica and St Vincent to the island of Ruatan near the coast of Honduras. A few were subsequently allowed back to St Vincent, but the majority are settled in Honduras and Nicaragua.
CARICATURE (Ital. caricatura, i.e. “ritratto ridicolo,” from caricare, to load, to charge; Fr. charge), a general term for the art of applying the grotesque to the purposes of satire, and for pictorial and plastic ridicule and burlesque. The word, “caricatura” was first used as English by Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), in his Christian Morals, a posthumous work; it is next found, still in its Italian form, in No. 537 of the Spectator; it was adopted by Johnson in his dictionary (1757), but does not appear in Bailey’s dictionary, for example, as late as 1773; and it only assumed its modern guise towards the end of the 18th century, when its use and comprehension became general.
Little that is not conjectural can be written concerning caricature among the ancients. Few traces of the comic are discoverable in Egyptian art—such papyri of a satirical tendency as are known to exist appearing to belong rather to the class of ithyphallic drolleries than to that of the ironical grotesque. Among the Greeks, though but few and dubious data are extant, it seems possible that caricature may not have been altogether unknown. Their taste for pictorial parody, indeed, has been sufficiently proved by plentiful discoveries of pottery painted with burlesque subjects. Aristotle, moreover, who disapproved of grotesque art, condemns in strong terms the pictures of a certain Pauson, who, alluded to by Aristophanes, and the subject of one of Lucian’s anecdotes, is hailed by Champfleury as the doyen of caricaturists. That the grotesque in graphic art conceived in the true spirit of intentional caricature was practised by the Romans is evident from the curious frescoes uncovered at Pompeii and Herculaneum; from the mention in Pliny of certain painters celebrated for burlesque pictures; from the curious fantasies graven in gems and called Grylli; and from the number of ithyphallic caprices that have descended to modern times. But in spite of these evidences of Greek and Roman humour, in spite of the famous comic statuette of Caracalla, and of the more famous graffito of the Crucifixion, the caricaturists of the old world must be sought for, not among its painters and sculptors, but among its poets and dramatists. The comedies of Aristophanes and the epigrams of Martial were, to the Athens of Pericles and the Rome of Domitian, what the etchings of Gillray and the lithographs of Daumier were to the London of George III. and the Paris of the Citizen King.
During the middle ages a vast mass of grotesque material was accumulated, but selection becomes even more difficult than with the scarce relics of antiquity. With the building of the cathedrals originated a new style of art; a strange mixture of memories of paganism and Christian imaginings was called into being for the adornment of those great strongholds of urban Catholicism, and in this the coarse and brutal materialism of the popular humour found its largest and freest expression. On missal-marge and sign-board, on stall and entablature, in gargoyle and initial, the grotesque displayed itself in an infinite variety of forms. The import of this inextricable tangle of imagery, often obscene and horrible, often quaint and fantastic, is difficult, if not impossible, to determine. We recognize the prevalence of three great popular types or figures, each of which may be credited with a satirical intention—of Reynard the Fox, the hero of the famous medieval romance; of the Devil, that peculiarly medieval antithesis of God; and of Death, the sarcastic and irreverent skeleton. The popularity of the last is evidenced by the fact that no fewer than forty-three towns in England, France and Germany are enumerated as possessing sets of the Dance of Death, that grandiose all-levelling series of caprices in the contemplation of which the middle ages found so much consolation. It was reserved for Holbein (1498-1554), seizing the idea and resuming all that his contemporaries thought and felt on the subject, to produce, in his fifty-three magnificent designs of the Danse Macabre, the first and perhaps the greatest set of satirical moralities known to the modern world.
It is in the tumult of the Renaissance, indeed, that caricature in its modern sense may be said to have been born. The great popular movements required some such vehicle of comment or censure; the perfection to which the arts of design were attaining supplied the means; the invention of printing ensured its dissemination. The earliest genuine piece of graphic irony that has been discovered is a caricature (1499) relating to Louis XII. and his Italian war. But it was the Reformation that produced the first full crop of satirical ephemerae, and the heads of Luther and Alexander VI. are therefore the direct ancestors of the masks that smirk and frown from the “cartoons” of Punch and the Charivari. Fairly started by Lucas Cranach, a friend of Luther, in his Passionale of Christ and Antichrist (1521), caricature was naturalized in France under the League, but only to pass into the hands of the Dutch, who supplied the rest of Europe with satirical prints during the whole of the next century. A curious reaction is visible in the work of Pieter Breughel (1510-1570) towards the grotesque diablerie and macaberesque morality of medieval art, the last original and striking note of which is caught in the compositions of Jacques Callot (1593-1635), and, in a less degree, in those of his followers, Stefano della Bella (1610-1664) and Salvator Rosa (1615-1673). On the other hand, however, Callot, one of the greatest masters of the grotesque that ever lived, in certain of his Caprices, and in his two famous sets of prints, the Misères de la guerre, may be said to anticipate certain productions of Hogarth and Goya, and so to have founded the modern school of ironic genre.
In England one of the earliest caricatures extant is that in the margin of the Forest Roll of Essex, 5, ed. 1, now at the Record Office; it is a grotesque portrait of “Aaron fil Diabole” (Aaron, son of the devil), probably representing Cok, son of Aaron. It is dated 1277. Another caricature, undated, appears on a Roll containing an account of the tallages and fines paid by Jews, 17. Henry III., belonging to 1233 (Exch. of Receipt, Jews’ Roll, No. 8). It is an elaborate satirical design of Jews and devils, arranged in a pediment. During the 16th century, caricature can hardly be said to have existed at all,—a grotesque of Mary Stuart as a mermaid, a pen and ink sketch of which is yet to be seen in the Rolls Office, being the only example of it known. The Great Rebellion, however, acted as the Reformation had done in Germany, and Cavaliers and Roundheads caricatured each other freely. At this period satirical pictures usually did duty as the title-pages of scurrilous pamphlets; but one instance is known of the employment during the war of a grotesque allegory as a banner, while the end of the Commonwealth produced a satirical pack of playing cards, probably of Dutch origin. The Dutch, indeed, as already has been stated, were the great purveyors of pictorial satire at this time and during the early part of the next century. In England the wit of the victorious party was rather vocal than pictorial; in France the spirit of caricature was sternly repressed; and it was from Holland, bold in its republican freedom, and rich in painters and etchers, that issued the flood of prints and medals which illustrate, through cumbrous allegories and elaborate symbolization, the principal political passages of both the former countries, from the Restoration (1660) to the South Sea Bubble (1720). The most distinguished of the Dutch artists was Romain de Hooghe (1638-1720), a follower of Callot, who, without any of the weird power of his master, possessed a certain skill in grouping and faculty of grotesque suggestiveness that made his point a most useful weapon to William of Orange during the long struggle with Louis XIV.
The 18th century, however, may be called emphatically the age of caricature. The spirit is evident in letters as in art; in the fierce grotesques of Swift, in the coarser charges of Smollett, in the keen ironies of Henry Fielding, in the Aristophanic tendency of Foote’s farces, no less than in the masterly moralities of Hogarth and the truculent satires of Gillray. The first event that called forth caricatures in any number was the prosecution (1710) of Dr Sacheverell; most of these, however, were importations from Holland, and only in the excitement attendant on the South Sea Bubble, some ten years later, can the English school be said to have begun. Starting into active being with the ministry of Walpole (1721), it flourished under that statesman for some twenty years,—the “hieroglyphics,” as its prints were named, graphically enough, often circulating on fans. It continued to increase in importance and audacity till the reign of Pitt (1757-1761), when its activity was somewhat abated. It rose, however, to a greater height than ever during the rule of Bute (1761-1763), and since that time its influence has extended without a check. The artists whose combinations amused the public during this earlier period are, with few exceptions, but little known and not greatly esteemed. Among them were two amateurs, Dorothy, wife of Richard Boyle, 3rd earl of Burlington, and General George Townshend (afterwards 1st Marquess Townshend); Goupy, Boitard and Liotard were Frenchmen; Vandergucht and Vanderbank were Dutchmen. This period witnessed also the rise of William Hogarth (1697-1764). As a political caricaturist Hogarth was not successful, save in a few isolated examples, as in the portraits of Wilkes and Churchill; but as a moralist and social satirist he has not yet been equalled. The publication, in 1732, of his Modern Midnight Conversation may be said to mark an epoch in the history of caricature. Mention must also be made of Paul Sandby (1725-1809), who was not a professional caricaturist, though he joined in the pictorial hue-and-cry against Hogarth and Lord Bute, and who is best remembered as the founder of the English school of water-colour; and of John Collet (1723-1788), said to have been a pupil of Hogarth, a kindly and industrious humorist, rarely venturing into the arena of politics. During the latter half of the century, however, political caricature began to be somewhat more skilfully handled than of old by James Sayer, a satirist in the pay of the younger Pitt, while social grotesques were pleasantly treated by Henry William Bunbury (1750-1811) and George Moutard Woodward. These personalities, however, interesting as they are, are dwarfed into insignificance by the great figure of James Gillray (1757-1815), in whose hands political caricature became almost epic for grandeur of conception and far-reaching suggestiveness. It is to the works of this man of genius, indeed, and (in a less degree) to those of his contemporary, Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827), an artist of great and varied powers, that historians must turn for the popular reflection of all the political notabilia of the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. England may be said to have been the chosen home of caricature during this period. In France, timid and futile under the Monarchy, it had assumed an immense importance under the Revolution, and a cloud of hideous pictorial libels was the result; but even the Revolution left no such notes through its own artists, though Fragonard (1732-1806) himself was of the number, as came from the gravers of Gillray and Rowlandson. In Germany caricature did not exist. Only in Spain was there to be found an artist capable of entering into competition with the masters of the satirical grotesque of whom England could boast. The works of Francesco Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) are described by Théophile Gautier as “a mixture of those of Rembrandt, Watteau, and the comical dreams of Rabelais,” and Champfleury discovers analogies between him and Honoré Daumier, the greatest caricaturist of modern France.