Exhibition | Love Bites: Caricatures by James Gillray
From the Ashmolean:
Love Bites: Caricatures by James Gillray
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 26 March — 21 June 2015
Curated by Todd Porterfield
James Gillray, Design for a Naval Pillar, 1800
(New College, Oxford)
To mark the 200th anniversary of the death of British caricaturist James Gillray (1757– 1815), the Ashmolean presents more than 60 of Gillray’s finest caricatures from the outstanding collection of New College, Oxford.
James Gillray trained as a professional copyist at the Royal Academy and then staked his professional life on caricature, amongst the first generation of artists to do so. He produced more than a thousand prints, some the fruit of months of reflection, others banged out at lightning speed, responding to but also creating instant controversies on the very day of the event. His prints were divisive and partisan: in 1798 a Tory Lord would congratulate him for having “been of infinite service in lowering them [the Whigs] and making them look ridiculous,” while the exiled Napoleon, well aware of Gillray’s anti-French propaganda, was reported to have said that the British engraver did more than all the armies of Europe to bring him down.
Love Bites: Caricatures by James Gillray is curated by Professor Todd Porterfield of the University of Montreal. The exhibition has been generously supported by The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Friends of the Ashmolean.
In connection with the exhibition, the Ashmolean Museum will host a conference, James Gillray@200: Caricaturist
without a Conscience?, on the 28th and 29th of March 2015.
Conference | James Gillray@200: Caricaturist without a Conscience?
James Gillray, Enchantments Lately Seen upon the Mountain of Wales, 1796
(New College, Oxford)
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From New College, Oxford:
James Gillray@200: Caricaturist without a Conscience?
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 28–29 March 2015
Organised by Todd Porterfield, Université de Montréal; Martin Myrone, Tate Britain; and Michael Burden, New College, Oxford; with Ersy Contogouris, Université de Montréal
To commemorate the 200th anniversary of Gillray’s death, and in conjunction with the Ashmolean Museum’s exhibition, Love Bites: Caricatures of James Gillray, based on New College’s outstanding collection, we are organizing a two-day symposium at the Ashmolean Museum to hear and see the latest Gillray scholarship.
James Gillray’s reputation in the two centuries since his death has been as varied and layered as his prints. Trained at the Royal Academy, he failed at reproductive printmaking, yet became, according to the late-eighteenth-century Weimar journal London und Paris, one of the greatest European artists of the era. Napoleon, from his exile on St Helena, allegedly remarked that Gillray’s prints did more to run him out of power than all the armies of Europe. In England, patriots had hired him to propagandize against the French and touted him as a great national voice, but he was an unreliable gun-for-hire. At a large public banquet, during the heat of anti-Revolutionary war fever, he even raised a toast to his fellow artist, the regicide, Jacques-Louis David. Gillray produced a highly individual, highly schooled, and often outlandish body of work with no clear moral compass that undermines the legend of the caricaturist as the voice and heart of the people.
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S A T U R D A Y , 2 8 M A R C H 2 0 1 5
10.00 Registration and coffee
10:30 Session I: Gillray in the Media Age
• Douglas Fordham, University of Virginia, ‘A Media Critic for the Intaglio Age’
• Esther Chadwick, Yale University, ‘Gillray’s Tree of Liberty: Political Communication and Epistolary Networks in the Radical 1790s’
• Kate Grandjouan, Visiting Associate Professor, Department of Art History, University of Belgrade, ‘Gillray’s French Jokes: The “Sick-list” Casualties of the 1790s’
12.00 Lunch
1:00 Session II: Gillray in the Colonial Networks: Positionings on Race and Slavery
• Julie Mellby, Graphic Arts Curator within Rare Books and Special Collections at Firestone Library, Princeton University, ‘The Sale and Resale of English Beauties in the East Indies’
• Amanda Lahikainen, Aquinas College, ‘James Gillray and Representations of Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign: Islam as Republican Sacrilege’
• Katherine Hart, Senior Curator of Collections & the Barbara C. and Harvey P. Hood 1918 Curator of Academic Programming, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, ‘James Gillray, Charles James Fox, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade: Caricature and Displacement in the Debate over Reform’
2.30 Coffee
3:00 Session III: The Artist and Formal Means
• Ersy Contogouris, Université de Québec à Montreal, ‘Gillray’s Preparatory Drawings’
• Cynthia Roman, The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, ‘James Gillray and the Satiric Alternative to Painting History’
6.30 Reception
7.00 Dinner
S U N D A Y , 2 9 M A R C H 2 0 1 5
9.00 Visit to the exhibition, Love Bites: Caricatures of James Gillray
10:15 Session IV: The Artist and Literary Means
• David Taylor, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, ‘Gillray, Milton, and the “Caricatura Sublime”’
• Rachel M. Brownstein, Professor of English, City University of New York, ‘James Gillray and Jane Austen: Aesthetic Affinities’
11.15 Coffee
11:45 Session V: Gillray, the People, the Academy and Revolution
• Vic Gatrell, Caius College, Cambridge, ‘Gillray Reconsidered: ‘The Voice and Heart of the People’?
• Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, Associate Lecturer, Department of History of Art, Birkbeck College, University of London, ‘Caricature’s Unconscious: James Gillray and the Academy’
• Ian Haywood, Professor of English Co-Director, Centre for Research in Romanticism University of Roehampton, London, ‘Gillray’s Valediction: The Life of William Cobbett’
1.15 Lunch
Enfilade 
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