I am pretty thrilled to have won at auction on eBay copies of four prints by James Gillray, the great British satirical artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Gillray had a sharp pen and a merciless and brilliantly comic sensibility that must have reduced the targets of satire to tears and rage. One of the four prints is Sir Richard Worse-Than-Sly, exposing his wifes bottom; O Fye!, first published, March, 1782. It shows a naked Lady Worsley–who looks quite different in the military costume she wears in Sir Joshua Reynolds‘s portrait of her that hangs in Harewood House mansion in Yorkshire–stepping into a sunken bath while her husband helps one Captain Bisset to peep at her through a window.
Another print, “Bologna Sausages, or Oppositions Flux’d”, takes on the leader of the opposition, the formidible Charles Fox. First published during the Regency Crisis of 1788. it depicts the scene in Parliament, which was wracked by debate between the the advocates of the Prince of Wales‘ regency (including Fox, Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan), against the supporters of the mad (temporarily, as it turned out) King George III, chief among them William Pitt. Gillray depicts Pitt chasing Fox from the House of Commons with the threat “I’ll unwhig the gentleman.” This period of history–the era of George III, Pitt, Nelson, Napoleon, Austen–is one of my favorites, and Gillray’s trenchent illustrations make it especially vivid.