Images that bite
From the ridiculously pretentious to the merely pathetic, Rowlandson created comic images of familiar social types of his day

Whatever way one looks at, caricature — as "rough truth", like George Meredith described it, or as "putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth", like Joseph Conrad did — it is meant to bite. One can try and define or describe it in sober terms, as dictionaries do: "a picture, description, etc, ludicrously exaggerating the peculiarities or defects of persons or things"; "a representation, especially pictorial or literary, in which the subject’s distinctive features or peculiarities are deliberately exaggerated to produce a comic or grotesque effect"; "loaded portraits of real-life people"; and so on. But, at least in the visual world, one has to see a great caricature to realise the power it can wield. And, of course, the wound that it can, jokingly, inflict.

Satirising public men in picture or verse goes back a long time, of course, even in Europe: Roman legions are known to have composed doggerel verses or drawn images to lampoon some excessively disciplinarian leader, and in the Middle Ages strolling minstrels are known to have moved about from town to town parodying kings and heroes. But the golden age of caricatures, at least in England, was from the middle of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th.

The period is rich in names of caricaturists that might not be familiar to us in our part of the world, but were on everyone’s lips at that time: Hogarth, Bunbury, Gillray, Rowlandson, a little later, Cruickshank. And the establishment, whether political or social, was constantly being brought to its knees through satire, mockery, parody, travesty, even bawdy laughter. Everyone was grist to the caricaturist’s mill: the monarch George III himself, Pitt the prime minister, Fox the statesman, Lord Nelson the great admiral and Lady Hamilton, his love, Dr Johnson and James Boswell the litterateurs, the arch enemy Napoleon, of course, lords and ladies of all rank, especially lecherous old men and well-endowed women. The times were delicious.

William Hogarth (1697-1764), one knows, was a celebrity. The range of his work, from serious, observed portraits to stinging caricatures, everyone who could read and write in England knew. The series of moralising but witty engravings that he produced, including the Rake’s Progress, the Harlot’s Progress, are a part of England’s literary history, and when he died — on his tomb were "adorned in relief the mask of Comedy, the wreath of laurel, the palette and the book on Beauty" — a poet friend of his wrote this epitaph for ‘the great artist of comedy’:

But the man, who elicited the greatest admiration, perhaps, was Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827), the man who, it is said, "learnt to draw before he learnt to write". Born not in the most affluent of families, Rowlandson had to struggle early in life, but never gave up: studying at Eton, and then at the Royal Academy, travelling to the continent and spending extended time in Paris, always, ceaselessly, drawing and painting.

He illustrated literary works, including those of Henry Fielding and Smollett and Oliver Goldsmith. But the money was small, and even though the generous bequest left by an old aunt helped for some time, he had to fall back upon doing something that would bring him the means to sustain himself and his gambling ways. He went into caricaturing, charting out for himself a path that eventually brought him great fame, and a measure of much needed money.

While other caricaturists concentrated mainly on political cartoons, Rowlandson’s inclination was to create comic, sometimes outrageous, images of the familiar social types of his day: such as "the antiquarian, the old maid, the blowsy barmaid, and the Grub Street hack", the last mentioned street much inhabited, in Samuel Johnson’s famous description, "by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems". His characters ranged, as has been remarked, "from the ridiculously pretentious, with their elaborate coiffures, widely frogged uniforms, and enormous bosoms and bottoms, to the merely pathetic, whose trailing handkerchiefs expressed their dejected attitudes".

The cuckold, the wastrel, the braggart, the perfumed coquette, attracted his attention specially, and while he might make fun of Napoleon — "little Boney" as he was called — on occasions, or of the king, he went back again and again to the social foibles and pretensions of his time. He was as willing to poke fun at himself — consider his caricature of himself as an overfed epicure — as at others. Some of his drawings might have been picked on for being ‘crude and unseemly’, and his erotic works might have been found to be too daring, but in his view, the times asked for the surgeon’s knife that he wielded.

Consider one of his most famous caricatures: the Exhibition Stare Case: the Somerset House. The House was the place on the upper floors of which art exhibitions of the Royal Academy were held, but contemporaries also saw it as "a place where art and female bodies vied for the male gaze", and persons, who visited the exhibition were described as being of two kinds: "those who perambulate the rooms to view the heads" and those "who remain at the bottom of the stairs to contemplate the legs", obviously of the ladies. Taking his cue from remarks such as these, and using a pun upon the words ‘staircase’ and ‘stare case’, Rowlandson created a rollicking image of a crowd of women tumbling down the bannister of a winding staircase, elegant dresses flying in all directions and lustful men, with lewd eyes and hungry limbs, enjoying the sight of exposed behinds and heaving cleavages. There is more, far more, than this in Rowlandson’s work. The cartoons he drew and published were not merely such as reflected public opinion, but were aimed at guiding it. And as for his seemingly salacious caricatures, there is something in them that is well directed and the point is seldom lost. At this distance, and for lack of familiarity with the exact context of each work, we are apt to miss some of the nuances, but it is easy to sense the bite. The face, as Conrad put it, might have been that of a joke, but the body, everyone knew, was that of truth.

Captions of the photographs in the March 11 issue in these columns got mixed up inadvertently. The black and white image was by Surinder Dhami while the one in colour was from the snow show in Finland.

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