Enfilade

The exhibition recently closed in Dublin with the catalogue available from Churchill House Press and Centro Di:

Artists and Pirates: Satirical Prints in Georgian London and Dublin

Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin, 13 November 2025 — 8 January 2026

Curated by Silvia Beltrametti and William Laffan

Single-sheet satire emerged in the louche milieu where politics and high society of late Georgian London intersected. Artists such as James Gillray (1756–1815) and Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827) combined devastating wit with graphic brilliance to lampoon the great and the good, the vain and the vacuous, creating timeless images inspired by moments of fleeting controversy or scandal. Availing of a legal loophole under which copyright law protecting images did not apply to Ireland, a business of pirating caricatures by London satirists also flourished in Regency Dublin. The work of these Dublin plagiarists—which though derivative is paradoxically inventive and vibrant—as well as prints of Irish subject matter by English caricaturists such as Gillray, is the subject of this exhibition and the accompanying publication. Caricature dealt with the great political issues of the day, including religious toleration and contested concepts of liberty, but was also a vehicle to explore less elevated and often risqué (sometimes scatological or pornographic) subject matter. Single-sheet satire, Georgian England’s greatest artistic innovation, and its smaller but still dynamic offshoot in early nineteenth-century Dublin offer a fascinating—and very funny—chronicle of the human comedy.

Silvia Beltrametti and William Laffan, eds., Artists and Pirates: Satirical Prints in Georgian London and Dublin (Fenit, County Kerry: Churchill House Press with Centro Di, 2025), 184 pages, ISBN: 978-8870385939, €30. With additional contributions by James Kelly (Professor of History at Dublin City University), David Fleming (Professor of History at the University of Limerick), and Ben Casey (PhD candidate, University of Maynooth).

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Note (added January 2026) — The Centro Di website suggests that the exhibition will open at the Driehaus Museum in Chicago in May 2026, though the museum’s website makes no mention of it.