Enfilade

The exhibition is mounted in connection with Ronald Searle: ‘Obsessed with Drawing’. From the press release. . .

Cradled in Caricature: Visual Humour in Satirical Prints and Drawings
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 13 October 2015 — 31 January 2016

Cradled in Caricature: Visual Humour in Satirical Prints and Drawings looks at how artists, caricaturists and cartoonists from Hogarth to the present day create visual jokes to make their audiences laugh.

In [Ronald] Searle’s timeline of caricature, he highlighted the high and low points of its history. In the time of Hogarth, Gillray and Rowlandson he described caricature as ‘a vigorous weapon’, whereas he felt it had declined in the 19th century to ‘drawing-room gentility’. He was happy to be a part of its recovery during the 20th century, making the final point of his timeline Private Eye.

Making visual jokes is hard and not every artist has the skill. Gillray was sent designs by enthusiastic amateurs, which he would translate into print. Cradled in Caricature focuses on the techniques and tricks that worked, and which still have the power to amuse us today. These methods range from simple exaggeration of facial features, costumes and fashion fads; clever juxtapositions and contrasts of body types; absurd, nonsense comedy; physical, burlesque comedy; dark humour; bawdy humour; and more complicated word-play, with the interplay of word and image or ironic literary allusions. The works are drawn from the Fitzwilliam’s collection with key loans from Andrew Edmunds and Benjamin Lemer.