CARICATURE

in graphic art, comically distorted drawing or likeness, done with the purpose of satirizing or ridiculing its subject, whether it be a person, type, or action. Plentiful examples of comic distortion may be found in gargoyles, the marginal illuminations of manuscripts, medieval broadsheets, and elsewhere, but the first known portrait caricatures are from late 16th- or early 17th-century Italy. The Italian word caricatura (from caricare, to load, or to surcharge) is said to have been coined by the painter Annibale Carracci, who is also credited with inventing the device in its modern sense, put to virulent use by subsequent political caricaturists, of transforming a face into an animal, vegetable, or indeed anything, while retaining a likeness. Political caricature appeared first in 18th-century England. Aristocratic English amateurs, having encountered the cunning likenesses done by Pier Leone Ghezzi in Rome, took them and the craze for caricature home. One of the most successful exponents of the fashionable new art form, George Townshend, extended its range of targets from personal acquaintances and artistic celebrities to politicians. Political caricature quickly achieved wide popularity; between 1780 and 1820, in a feverish political atmosphere, huge numbers of satirical prints were produced for sale or hire. In these political squibs, by now included in the widening term caricature, the tradition of moral pictures is as strong as that of Carracci and Townshend. Nevertheless, the 18th-century amateurs, whose insouciant draftsmanship often conveyed an unintentional humour, shaped the characteristic style of caricature. A similar lively crudeness of expression was deliberately cultivated by the following generation of professional caricaturists, and preeminent among them was James Gillray, whose manner of drawing nicely complemented the grossness of his subjects. Many familiar cartoon conventions were established at this time: captions, speech balloons, and, particularly in the prints of Mustard George, the division of the paper into frames to present a series of related or contrasted pictures (though not a narrative)the comic strip in embryo. Among the first artists to use these devices specifically for the purpose of narrating a comic story was the Swiss Rodolphe Tpffer, who published his Adventures of Dr. Festus as lithographs in 1829. The invention of lithography in the late 18th century was quickly exploited in France as a means of publishing pictures. Caricature became connected with journalism. Two satirical periodicals in particular, the weekly La Caricature and the daily La Charivari, both founded by Charles Philipon in the 1830s, exerted a far-reaching influence through the thousands of masterly lithographs they published. The trend in caricature toward a rapid, expressive style was confirmed by the use of lithography, a fast and direct method in which the artist drew directly onto the stone from which the prints were taken. The relentless political campaigns of La Charivari, including that against King Louis-Philippe, which transformed his fat face into a pear (poire, dullard), resulted in its eventual muzzling by official censorship. The journal consequently turned to social satire and established the genre of the portrait charg, or loaded portrait, in which the subject is allegorized as well as caricatured. Philipon's journals, in both phases, had many imitators: politicalsatirical in continental Europe and the more purely comic, as in the increasingly respectable Punch, in England. Punch, with its high standards of draughtsmanship and inoffensive caricatures, often no more than illustrated jokes, contrasted strongly with the political aggressiveness of its European counterparts and its own English predecessors. Popular art did not survive long after 1830 in the lower strata of English society, except in the ancient form of woodcut broadsheets. During most of the Victorian age, periodicals like Punch, in which the tradition of British caricature was carried on, were available at threepence or sixpence a copy for those who could afford them. In England it was the adoption of wood engraving, rather than lithography, to replace copperplate etching that brought caricature into periodicals such as Punch in the 1840s; and wood engraving, a medium in which the artist's original drawing is worked over by craftsmen, produced a more restrained and conventional style than that of continental lithographs, thus reflecting a similar contrast of national attitudes in the caricaturists' approaches. It was Punch that caused the word cartoon to supplant the overworked designation caricature, by parodying, with great popular success, a series of genuine cartoons, or full-size sketches to be used as patterns, for the new House of Commons frescoes in 1843. The meaning of cartoon was then further stretched with the appearance, largely in the 1860s, of serious cartoons. Perhaps the most famous was Sir John Tenniel's Dropping the Pilot (1890, referring to the dismissal of Otto von Bismarck by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany). This sort used analogy, symbols, or allegorical figures, with no distortion or humorous intent, to comment on contemporary events. The revolution in printing caused by photo-process engraving in the 1880s democratized caricature. The cheapness of the new process made it possible, and so commercially obligatory, to illustrate daily newspapers; in 1888 the Pall Mall Gazette employed the first staff cartoonist, F.C.G. (Francis Carruthers Gould). Cheap comic papers, combining photo-process engraving with simple forms of colour printing, proliferated and brought caricature within reach of all classes; in England the comic-strip weekly Ally Sloper's Half Holiday, at a halfpenny a copy, became the poor man's Punch. American newspapers in the 1890s began to include comic strips as well as political cartoons; The Katzenjammer Kids, a continuing story, appeared in 1897. Process engraving also brought about a relaxation of style; it faithfully reproduced the artist's drawing, whether in broad brushstrokes or, like Phil May's, in swift pen scribbles. Cartoonists began to take advantage of this to develop a line as individual as possible; Caran d'Ache, Albert Hirschfeld, David Low, Max Beerbohm, Jean Cocteau, Miguel Covarrubias, and Vicky became household words, each indicating not merely a cartoonist but a type of drawing. Simultaneously a number of painterssuch as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz, Paul Klee, William Gropper, and Ben Shahnadvanced caricature in the fine arts. As single-panel gag cartoons, comic strips, and comic books grew in popularity during the mid-20th century, caricature was not so much in evidence. A number of cartoonists, however, invigorated and gave new life to the mediumincluding England's Cecil Beaton, Gerard Hoffnung, Ronald Searle, and Gerald Scarfe and the United States' Robert Osborn, David Levine, Edward Sorel, and Patrick Bruce Oliphant.