James Gillray, Fashionable Contrasts; – or – the Duchess's little shoe yeilding to the magnitude of the Duke's foot, 1792

Image here via: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fashionable_contrasts_james_gillray.jpg

Perhaps it was the English who started it.

In the 1720s, the engraver William Hogarth produced his first prints lampooning politicians and their scandals. By the following decade he had finessed this art form, and realized that he had discovered a much better source of income than producing fine easel paintings for his still rather philistine countrymen. A painting can be sold once, a popular print (better still, a series of prints) many times.

His first two series - The Harlot’s Progress and The Rake’s Progress - have all the classic ingredients: an inexhaustible eye for detail, an ability to ridicule all that was false and tawdry within society, and a healthy disdain for every social class.

James Gillray took the art of satire – not just social but political too – to new heights. Every public figure, up to the very highest in the land, was pricked, prodded, and pilloried through his unbelievably prolific career, which spanned the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Nobody can skin the English like an Englishman. The same claim could be made for Honoré-Victorin Daumier and the French. This nineteenth-century genius really does rank with the greatest artists of the day – most of whom freely acknowledged the fact. His disdain for bourgeois manners and taste, indeed all that was corrupt absurd, or just third-rate in cultural and political life, spared absolutely no-one.

We will enjoy skewering at its best with these three masters, along with a selection of their contemporaries and rivals.

RJW F2422 Online (via Zoom)

A 5-hour short course, delivered via 2 x 2½-hour sessions on consecutive Saturdays (6 & 13 July, 10.30-1.00).

£40 (individual registration); £72 (for two people sharing one screen).