Word: gillray
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...some the new context of exile provided a degree of artistic stimulus. In London, Kokoschka got to know--largely through his Marxist friend the refugee German art historian Francis Klingender--the tradition of English caricature, the mordant images of Hogarth and Gillray; they are reflected in such paintings as Anschluss--Alice in Wonderland, 1942, with its trio of figures, the appeaser Neville Chamberlain, a German soldier and an Austrian Catholic bishop, imitating the Chinese monkeys that see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. And the ever alert Salvador Dali managed to include a number of proto...
Artists have favorite tropes, metaphors to which they resort semiconsciously over and over again. Rowlandson's chief one was the opposition between youth and age, freshness and decay, virility and impotence. He was not in any real sense a political artist -- unlike his colleague James Gillray. Beneath Rowlandson's comedy there was a clawing, nagging fear of falling apart. As well there should have been, the censorious might add: he was a rake, too fond of cards, women and the bottle for his own good. And his work is full of Dreadful Elders, gouty, poxed, many-chinned, snouted, toothless, cunning...
...left, sketchily furnishes the key: it is the Adam from Masaccio's Expulsion from Paradise. Kokoschka was being driven from his European paradise. He went to England and remained throughout the war. There he painted a number of harsh, hard-to-read political allegories, inspired by the cartoons of Gillray and other Georgian caricaturists, and supported himself by teaching and portraiture...
Among the more conspicuous exhibits on the walls of the society's sedate Georgian library were the rowdy etchings of James Gillray; he and his bibulous contemporary Thomas Rowlandson had fathered English cartooning. Working above Mistress Humphrey's print shop in Piccadilly where his etchings sold for 18 pence, Gillray had scorched the court of George III with his acid portrayals of spendthrift profligates and pompous politicians. Rowlandson's needle-sharp stylus had deflated many a Regency swell and belle...
Newspapers then were few and bad; the public paid up to a shilling a print for what were, in effect, editorial cartoons. George III complained that he "could not understand" Caricaturist James Gillray's pictorial attacks on him. The King would have had to be stupider than history has made him to miss the venom of Gillray's cartoon showing "Farmer George" sleepily sloffing up a soft-boiled...