Farting, defecating and fornicating are synonymous with James Gillray’s prints and in Tim Clayton’s book there’s plenty of it on show, eye-poppingly so on occasion. But as James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire shows, it is also true that Gillray’s prints were beautifully rendered and colored as well as being politically acute and often viciously funny.
Two prints may help to explain Gillray’s enduring appeal for today’s political cartoonists. Fashionable Contrasts; or The Duchess’s Little Shoe Yielding to the Magnitude of the Duke’s Foot is his contemptuous reaction to a sycophantic press fatuously drooling over Frederica, the eldest daughter of the King of Prussia, who had married George III’s second son, the Duke of York, in 1791. She was plain and tiny, but had in particular a celebrated “smallness of foot”. The rutting duke’s much larger feet prise her bejeweled shoes apart in an image of surprising elegance given the vigorous activity involved. Powerful, but simple.
