20 Essential Works by James Gillray – Ranked
James Gillray worked at a moment when political prints were sold in shop windows and followed almost as closely as newspapers. Kings, ministers, revolutionaries, fashionable society and Napoleon all passed through his work. These twenty prints show how wide that territory became.
Alecto and Her Train, at the Gate of Pandaemonium
Gillray was born in Chelsea in 1756 and trained as an engraver. Long before Napoleon became his best-known target, British domestic politics and fears about revolution were already supplying him with material.
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A Sphere, Projecting Against a Plane
Physical exaggeration was one of Gillray’s basic tools. Here William Pitt’s thin body and Albinia Hobart’s much larger figure are pushed so far that the joke becomes almost geometric.
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Monstrous Craws at a New Coalition Feast
The royal family was never protected from Gillray’s appetite for ridicule. George III, Queen Charlotte and the Prince of Wales appear here consuming public money with grotesquely swollen throats.
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Parasols for 1795
Politics was only part of Gillray’s output. Fashion offered another steady supply of shapes to exaggerate, from hats and hair to shoes, coats and the changing silhouette of fashionable London.
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Characters in High Life
Gillray watched elite society with much the same attention he gave Parliament. The rituals of dress, leisure and status could be reduced to a few recognisable bodies and accessories.
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Lady Godina’s Rout
Card parties, theatre and fashionable gatherings gave Gillray a cast outside Westminster. His jokes often depended on viewers knowing exactly which dress, game or social habit was being mocked.
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A Peep at Christies
Gillray’s London included auction rooms as well as Parliament and royal residences. Art collecting, celebrity and private relationships could all become public material once they reached the print-shop window.
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Substitutes for Bread
Food became political shorthand more than once in Gillray’s work. Rich tables, empty plates and swollen bodies gave him a direct way to talk about taxation, privilege and scarcity.
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Tales of Wonder!
The popularity of Gothic fiction also entered Gillray’s work. A group listening to a sensational story gave him another chance to caricature fashionable taste without relying on party politics.
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The Graces in a High Wind
This is one of the latest works in the selection. By then Gillray’s health was deteriorating, but fashion and the behaviour of London society still provided subjects alongside the political battles that had made his name.
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The Gout
Gillray could make pain itself into a character. The tiny creature biting into a swollen toe turns a familiar illness into a visual joke that works without knowing anything about cabinet politics.
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Tom Paine’s Nightly Pest
Thomas Paine gave British caricaturists a highly visible revolutionary target. Gillray connected the author of Rights of Man with the legal and political fears surrounding radical publishing in Britain.
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Ci-devant Occupations
Gillray did not separate political attack from gossip. Napoleon and Joséphine could be treated through rumours, sexual scandal and court stories just as easily as through military events.
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French Volunteers Marching to the Conquest of Great Britain
The renewed war with France in 1803 brought invasion fears back into British public life. Gillray answered them with armies that were deliberately ragged, grotesque and far removed from heroic military imagery.
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A Voluptuary Under the Horrors of Digestion
The Prince of Wales was one of Gillray’s most reliable subjects. Debt, food, drink, fashion and private behaviour all became part of the public image he constructed around the future George IV.
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The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver
Jonathan Swift gave Gillray a ready-made scale joke. George III becomes the giant king of Brobdingnag while Napoleon is reduced to a tiny Gulliver standing in his hand.
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The Zenith of French Glory; – The Pinnacle of Liberty
The execution of Louis XVI sharpened Gillray’s hostility toward the French Revolution. His response was not detached observation; the image was part of a British political argument about what revolution meant.
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French Liberty – British Slavery
Gillray builds the comparison around food. A starving Frenchman praises liberty while a well-fed Briton complains about taxes, reducing an international political argument to two bodies at two tables.
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The Cow-Pock – or – the Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation!
Vaccination gave Gillray a subject outside party politics but inside public anxiety. The new procedure developed around Edward Jenner becomes a room full of patients sprouting miniature cows.
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The Plumb-Pudding in Danger; – or – State Epicures Taking un Petit Souper
William Pitt and Napoleon sit across from one another and carve the world as if it were dinner. Gillray reduced the struggle between Britain and France to a table, two knives and a pudding shaped like the globe.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art records the print as published by Hannah Humphrey on 26 February 1805.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗
