The cartoon art form began with 'caricatura'. A
caricature - from the Italian caricare, to load or exaggerate - is a drawing
that gives weight to the most striking features of its subject for comic
effect.
The great Italian masters such as Leonardo da Vinci,
Annibale Carracci and Gian Lorenzo Benini, all drew caricatures. These
were technical exercises in virtuosity with the aim of defining the essence of
a person in a few deft strokes of the pen.
Many English artists looked to Italy for inspiration, but
one man did not. William Hogarth, painter and engraver, believed:
"Everything requisite to compleat the consummate painter or
sculptor may [be had] with the utmost ease without going out of London".
Hogarth created a new form of picture-story, 'comic
history-painting' full of 'characters', not 'caricatura', copies of nature, not
exaggerations. His 'modern moral subjects', that can be seen in The Harlot's Progress and The Rake's Progress, depict
critical moments in life, in act and consequence. Time is represented in
space, between and within each scene. It is for this reason that Hogarth
is widely regarded as the father of British caricature, in spite of himself,
and of the comic strip.
'The Golden Age', 1770 - 1830
From the 1770s it was the gentleman amateur and
semi-amateur, such as Townshend, Bunbury, Woodward and Nixon, who transformed
the artform, introducing a more playful style and a strong element of personal
caricature. Social satire blossomed, offering humorous observations on
current fashions and social pretensions.
In the 1780s political satire ripened. Print-shops
flourished in the City, Westminster and St. James's, many holding caricature
exhibitions. The hand-coloured copper-plate etching, freer in style that
the engraving, became fashionable: often priced at 2 shillings (10p) or more it
was a luxury item, and beyond the means of most.
The French Revolution in 1789 ignited a fusillade of
satirical propaganda in France and Britain. Both 'Loyalist' members of the Pitt
coalition and the opposition 'Reform' Whigs around Fox sponsored partisan
political prints. At first, the Foxites took the upper hand, creating a new
type of sophisticated visual and verbal satire. But news from France of the
excesses of the Terror damaged the reform cause. By 1795 the Foxites were in
decline, and a blast of repressive measures, culminating in the Treason and
Sedition Acts, subdued not only the press and opposition, but also the print
publishers.
In August 1819, the local Yeoman Cavalry attacked a crowd of
peaceful protestors in St Peter's Fields, Manchester. The government
response was the repressive Six Acts, including an increase in stamp duty that
tripled the price of many papers. The publisher William Hone and George
Cruikshank, the foremost caricaturist of the Regency, answered these attacks on
Reform with a little 24-page shilling (5p) pamphlet, The Political House That Jack
Built. It would go through 50 editions and sell 100,000 copies.
Hone had revived the technique of wood-engraving. The
hardwood relief block was more durable that the copper-plate, and could be set
with the metal type and printed together, thereby cutting costs. Image and text
could now support each other, and reach a wider audience.
The Illustrated Magazine 1830 - 1914
The Reform Bill crisis of 1830-2 stirred up a flurry of satirical
prints, but topical satire was finding a new home. Following an example in
Paris, a number of humorous magazine were launched in Britain. In 1841 the
journalist Henry Mayhew and the printer-engraver, Ebenezer Landells founded the
most famous of them all: Punch. It was to be a weekly comic paper 'without
grossness, partisanship, profanity, indelicacy, or malice'. In its long life it
cultivated the talents of more comic artists than any other British magazine.
Vanity Fair was founded in 1868 and revived the
tradition of the single-figure caricature in genial colour portraits of
celebrities and professional men, a style perfected in this country by Carlo
Pellegrini ('Ape').
In the 1880s printers began to use the new photochemical
process. A truer facsimile of the artist's work, its tone, texture and
detail, was now possible. The greater fidelity benefited two great innovators,
Max Beerbohm and Phil May.
Modern Times 1914 - 1961
In the First World War, cartoonists rallied to the patriotic
cause portraying an encounter between the national symbols and
personifications. The morale-boosting works of Bert Thomas and Bruce
Bairnsfather proved popular with British troops at the front.
The first half of the twentieth century saw the heydey of
the popular magazine, and cartoons helped to determine its graphic style and
character. William Heath Robinson joined The Sketch in 1906 and entertained
its readers through two world wars. H.M. Bateman perfected the wordless
strip cartoon, and his 'The Man Who...' series of colour cartoons
filled the centre-spread of The Tatler in the 1920s and 1930s.
Victor Weisz, 'Vicky', one of Britain's best post-war
political cartoonists, was forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1935. When he
started at the News Chronicle in 1939 his editor advised a
crash course in British culture: he soon had a witty command of a British
cartoonist's stock references and motifs, including Shakespeare and
Tenniel's Alice drawings.
Ronald Searle has been described as 'arguably the foremost
graphic artist of [the twentieth] century', and is unquestionably one of the
most influential. The malevolent schoolgirls of Searle's 'St Trinian's'
appealed to a new public taste for black, cynical humour cultivated in wartime.
In his later work a baroque extravagance of detail is painstakingly built
up with his extraordinary line - stuttering, fidgety, barbed.
The New Satire 1961 -
Britain was finally coming out of a post-war period
dominated by deference and social conformity. A younger generation of
comedians was appearing on stage, radio and television. In 1961 a new satirical
magazine Private Eye was founded. It was a magazine of
political gossip and disclosure that ripped aside the curtains of gentility and
decorum that Punch had upheld for over a century. For
cartoonists it was a breath of fresh air, publishing cartoons that no other
newspaper would print.
For the first time in many decades caricature took centre
stage. Two revolutionary artists pushed British satire to the extreme, both
visually and politically: Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe. Wally Fawkes,
'Trog', brought intense focus to caricature and political cartooning through
his ability to condense a complex situation into a single memorable image.
Peter Fluck and Roger Law had worked together since the
1960s. In the 1970s they began producing three-dimensional caricatures
for the [Sunday] Times and other publications. Out of
this work grew the satirical show Spitting Image, first screened in Britain
in 1983, featuring Fluck and Law's latex puppets.
