caricature and cartoon

▪ graphic arts

Introduction

      in graphic art, comically distorted drawing or likeness, done with the purpose of satirizing or ridiculing its subject. Cartoons are used today primarily for conveying political commentary and editorial opinion in newspapers and for social comedy (humour) and visual wit in magazines.

Definition of terms

Caricature

      Caricature is the distorted presentation of a person, type, or action. Commonly, a salient feature or characteristic of the subject is seized upon and exaggerated, or features of animals, birds, or vegetables are substituted for parts of the human being, or analogy is made to animal actions. Generally, one thinks of caricature as being a line drawing and meant for publication for the amusement of people to whom the original is known; the personal trait is usually present.

      The word caricature derives from the Italian (Italy) verb caricare (“to load,” “to surcharge” as with exaggerated detail) and seems to have been used first by Mosini in Diverse Figure (1646). The 17th-century sculptor-architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Bernini, Gian Lorenzo), who was a skilled caricaturist, seems to have introduced the word caricatura into France when he went there in 1665. There is perhaps, in the choice of the verb caricare as a source for the noun, some influence from the idea of carattere (Italian: “character”) or even from cara (Spanish: “face”). At any rate, the face is the point of departure for most caricatures. It is conceivable that underlying the series of overlapping profiles with varieties of extraordinary noses and chins and brows which Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer (Dürer, Albrecht) drew independently about 1500 was an observation not only of contemporary human types but of the fact that the heads of rulers on coins (coin) and medals, when worn with age, often became ridiculous. A latter-day case is the penny showing Queen Victoria, whose coiffure began to look like an elephant's head when the coin was well worn down.

      Caricature, after its spread as idea and practice from Italy and France to Great Britain in the 18th century, became rather a broad term. In the late 19th century, Gilbert and Sullivan, the English creators of comic operettas, spoke of one of their subheroines as having “a caricature of a face.” Perhaps, therefore, it is not surprising that, although cartoons as they are now known developed gradually out of caricature from the 15th century, cartoon is a 19th-century word.

      Satirical deformations and comic analogies in sculpture, the drama, and vase painting are older than purely graphic caricature. The ancient Egyptians represented men as animals; Greek comedy had by-products in burlesqued figures on vases and in terra-cotta statuettes; Romanesque and Gothic sculptors made fun of human failings in stone capitals and wood miserere seat carvings all through the Middle Ages. The marginal flourishes of illuminated manuscripts contain grotesque faces and occasional exaggerated scenes from daily life, or references to the morality plays, which have the same relationship to those plays as Greek clay representations have to the stage. All such works verged upon caricature in the narrow personal sense; some were caricature in a broad sense. In the generations since caricature became a clearly defined idea, there have been occasional examples in painting and sculpture alongside the more usual drawing for reproduction.

cartoon

      A cartoon originally was and still is a drawing, a full-size pattern for execution in painting, tapestry, mosaic, or other form. The cartoon was the final stage in the series of drawn preparations for painting in traditional Renaissance studio practice. In the early 1840s, when that studio practice was rapidly decaying, cartoon rather suddenly acquired a new meaning: that of pictorial parody, almost invariably a multiply reproduced drawing, which by the devices of caricature, analogy, and ludicrous juxtaposition (frequently highlighted by written dialogue or commentary) sharpens the public view of a contemporary event, folkway, or political or social trend. It is normally humorous but may be positively savage. Just as the personal caricature was for an audience that knew the original, so the cartoon was and is based on wide acquaintance with the subject. It serves as a capsule version of editorial opinion when it makes political satire, and it is a running commentary on social change, sometimes intended as a corrective to social inertia. (For treatment of animated cartoons, see motion picture: Animation (motion-picture technology).)

Winslow Ames

Origins of caricature and cartoon

Individual satire

      Caricature was a product of the Renaissance and Reformation emphasis on the importance of the individual. If a man was seen officially as an emperor, he was seen unofficially to have feet of clay or to be wearing no clothes. From about the first third of the 16th century, the emphasis on decorum was so strong in Italy and spread so fast northward and westward, reinforced by a still more solemn decorum from Spain, that it produced a reaction. Desiderius Erasmus' In Praise of Folly was both a Renaissance effort at satire and a carryover of medieval mockeries; the marginal drawings made in one copy of it by early 16th-century members of the German-Swiss Holbein family are neither caricature nor cartoon in the modern sense, but they are in the same stream of subjective comment on objective observation as the series of exaggerated profiles drawn by Leonardo and Dürer. In the 16th century the work of the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder) is full of near caricature, as in the familiar drawing of an artist who is troubled at his easel by a nosy peering connoisseur behind his shoulder. In the work of Bruegel and that of his contemporary, the Dutch (Netherlands, The) painter Hieronymus Bosch (Bosch, Hiëronymus), there are witty and sometimes horrendous dislocations of parts of the body, combinations of human anatomy with fishes, birds, animals, and windmills, and exaggeration of obese or emaciated physical types that are likewise near cartoons.

      Yet true caricature in the sense of the satirical portrait of an individual is almost impossible to identify before the work of a late 16th-century Bolognese painter, Agostino Carracci. The first caricatures of persons whose names are still known today are by Bernini. Artists of their time could at last afford to be easy about their position and occupation, about what was objective and what was subjective. They impartially caricatured one another in the studio and the types in the street. The rise of connoisseurship and collecting in the 17th century soon produced appreciation of these caricatures outside the studio, leading to the gathering of such drawings into albums and their transformation into multiple etched or engraved publications.

Social satire

      The less personal and caricature-like features of the modern cartoon developed slowly through the 16th century and up to the last third of the 17th. In part consciously based on Bosch and Bruegel, in part an autonomous protest against the Renaissance belief in order, symmetry, and fixed canons of beauty, there rose a European family of grotesqueries with sources as mixed as its appearance. Its only visible overall characteristic might be said to be that it reacted, from the depth of old folkways, against the novelty of the Renaissance, the New World, and the various hierarchies. Echoes of the dark Gothic forests mixed with fantastic reports of travel (some of them not really new but rehashed from Marco Polo) and with travesties of the Renaissance ornament of such works as Raphael's decorations for the loggias of the Vatican Palace. One result was the double images of faces and landscape or of human figures built of books, fish, or pots and pans by the 16th-century Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (Arcimboldo, Giuseppe). In a slightly different area lay two types of pictorial comedy. The first type was the conscious satire by professional printmakers (printmaking), illustrating such works as the Ship of Fools (1494), an allegory by the German (Germany) poet Sebastian Brant, or issued as independent prints. Some of them were tendentious to the point of libel (such were Lucas Cranach's attacks on the papacy, inspired by Martin Luther); others were merely mockery, such as the 16th-century German painter Hans Beham's satirical view of mercenary soldiers and their camp followers. The second type was the unconscious pictorial comedy by comparatively untutored practitioners of woodcut or etching, hastily made and issued as newspaper extras might be issued now. These works were the ancestors of 18th- and 19th-century broadsides.

      If caricature deals with the individual and with what makes him individual, cartoons may be said to deal with groups and with their corporate characteristics; both are connected with the Renaissance love of classification and categorizing. Up to the time in the mid-17th century when both caricature and cartoon jelled in forms which answer to the modern definition, caricature had been prepared on the whole by knowledgeable artists; and cartoons had been prepared (though often with the assistance of professional artists) at a somewhat lower level. Thereafter, cartoons (in the modern sense of the term) came to be created in response not merely to artistic impulses but to the same sorting-out impulses that were creating the modern state and its society, its science, and its religion. Besides the sublime–ridiculous and the artist–layperson dualisms in this field, there is a sort of class (social class) dualism that is a result of historical factors rather than of general human disposition. The history of caricature and cartoon is intimately connected with the history of the way in which one class has looked at another. Dürer looked down on the heavy-bodied man whom he called farmerish; yet within two generations Bruegel was drawing peasants in a sympathetic manner. A 16th-century Swiss engraver, Jost Amman, treated trades and professions dispassionately, as did the 17th-century French engraver Abraham Bosse, although Bosse did create some lampoons on unpopular types and callings. Jacques Callot (Callot, Jacques), an early 17th-century French etcher, satirized dandies, beggars, and all classes between, and he even made the generally detested Gypsies (who were not yet romantic) almost sympathetic.

      A rather comfortable social climate developed in the 17th century: the wars of religion had quieted in France and the Low Countries, though civil war occupied Britain in the middle of the century. But by the time the Restoration had quieted Britain, a general European threat appeared in the form of Louis XIV. Against his absolutism and against his influence through agents in Britain (United Kingdom) and the Netherlands, the first modern cartoon campaign was made. It was modern in that it was on a large scale—cartoons were published on a fairly regular serial basis, much like that of the modern daily newspaper's editorial cartoon (though the newspaper was still in the letter-and-gazette stage); and it was based on a fairly large and general acquaintance with the persons satirized if not always with the literary analogies used. The cartoons, which as yet made no particular use of personal caricature (that was still on a friendly studio footing), were prints made in Holland by a group of artists of whom Romeyn de Hooghe was the chief, and they were sold cheap. There had been Dutch political cartoons before, but they were laborious and appeared irregularly. The Dutch–English connection in the person of William III, the continuing threat of Louis XIV, and a succession of shattering events in various spheres stimulated a vast production of cartoons from the 1680s on.

      As the cartoon spread—along with its almost indispensable element, caricature—it began to divide; and although the periodical carrying cartoons was not to appear regularly until the third quarter of the 18th century, nor the true comic periodical until early in the 19th century, the divisions were real enough to follow from that time.

Personal and political satire (pure caricature)

18th century

      About 1740 the English printmaker Arthur Pond published together 25 caricatures after original drawings by a number of artists. This collection must have been effective in spreading the idea and the word, for it was an excellent publication. Pier Leone Ghezzi (Ghezzi, Pier Leone), one of the artists included, was probably the first professional caricaturist, for he made a living with his pen portraits of Romans and visitors to Rome, many of which he engraved. He was a minor master in comparison to his contemporary the Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista), yet the caricatures by the latter, delightful though they are, appear to deal with types or at least with anonymous individuals rather than with nameable ones. Tiepolo's pen-and-wash drawings were a small side issue in his enormous production, and they were not engraved or otherwise multiplied in his lifetime. Both artists had an eye for ungainly legs and posture and for odd clothing and the obvious features of the face.

      On the heels of Pond's reproductions came handbill-like personal caricatures. Apparently begun in the 1760s by the Englishman George Townshend (later Marquess Townshend), these were comic portraits with punning titles or accessories, intended by disingenuous means to avoid being outright libellous. A flood of imitations followed. Soon Townshend's cards became comic illustrations in magazines such as The London Magazine, the Political Register, and the Town and Country Magazine.

Early 19th century

Great Britain (United Kingdom)

      Thomas Rowlandson (Rowlandson, Thomas) created the comic images of a great many public characters in his day: royal dukes, actresses, auctioneers, hack writers of Grub Street. He was the perfect professional to carry on what the amateur Townshend had begun. Like Tiepolo, he was able to make the person and the costume assume a homogeneously ludicrous or pathetic–bathetic look, with factitious coiffures, wildly frogged uniforms, enormous bosoms and bottoms, and the dejected attitudes of trailing handkerchiefs.

      Rowlandson's contemporary James Gillray (Gillray, James) was less of an artist and more of a professional cartoonist in the modern sense. Coming from the theatre to the political scene, he brought a highly dramatic sense of situation and analogy, but he was peculiarly violent and often scurrilous or scatological. His greatest talent was with patterns and ornaments of costume, which he would allow to take on a luxuriant life of their own. The Swiss-born English painter and teacher Henry Fuseli (Fuseli, Henry), though hardly a professional caricaturist, stood halfway between the painted Italianate caricature groups of Sir Joshua Reynolds, an academic English painter, and the Rowlandson–Gillray drawings and etchings; he had something of Gillray's theatrical manner, but his satirical drawings were more often sensual than scatological.

France

      The French painter and engraver Philibert-Louis Debucourt might have equalled Rowlandson if he had not been so occupied with the intricacies of colour prints; but he produced a few superb cartoons of the Paris of his day, full of caricatures of fashionable personages.

      The whole Napoleonic period gave rise to such passion that a school of French caricature was generated, the effect of which was to come after the Restoration. Two members of an older generation, Louis-Léopold Boilly (Boilly, Louis-Léopold) and Jean-Baptiste Isabey (Isabey, Jean-Baptiste), really began the work. Boilly, starting where Debucourt left off, satirized the modes and manners of the French. He was not in the direct sense a political caricaturist but frequently used satirical portraits.

      Isabey was primarily a portrait painter, but he was in contact with all the great continental political personalities of the first half of the 19th century, and he caricatured many of them privately. Most of the caricatures were not published, but they had an effect among artists, as did the satirical prints of Francisco de Goya.

      The tendency of the Restoration to suppress Napoleonic enthusiasms provided another rich ground for cartoon as political complaint. As soon as the first stage was over (in 1830), a change of administration was accompanied by the appearance of Charles Philipon (Philipon, Charles)'s periodical La Caricature, the first great vehicle of Honoré Daumier (Daumier, Honoré), Henri Monnier (Monnier, Henri), “Grandville” (J.-I.-I. Gérard), and others. The presiding genius had great politico-legal skill and knew exactly how far he and his artists could go. The famous likening of Louis Philippe (Louis-Philippe) to a pear, which was both a visual and a verbal pun, was not the least of La Caricature's successes. Daumier's colossal gifts included personal caricature, though in his later life he dealt almost entirely in more general social satire. In the early '30s he created for Philipon “Le Ventre legislatif” (“The Legislative Belly”), at once a political indictment, a rogue's gallery of caricatures, and a monumental composition; not to mention a long series of more detailed single antiportraits. Daumier's composite sociopolitical villain, Robert Macaire, and Monnier's Joseph Prudhomme, the sum of bourgeois pettiness, served as butts of satire when censorship caught up with directly personal caricature in Philipon's three or more overlapping papers.

Middle 19th century

Great Britain (United Kingdom)

      The specifically cartoon-bearing journal was by this time an established fact. The Monthly Sheet of Caricatures had begun publication in London in 1830, lithographed like Philipon's journals. In these and other ventures, the publisher Thomas McLean issued hundreds of political caricatures during a great formative period of modern legislation; his artist, Robert Seymour, was in the Gillray line rather than the later one of John Doyle, who also worked for McLean. John Doyle's son Richard (Doyle, Richard) became one of the masters of the mid-century British school of subtler cartooning. The younger Doyle was one of the initial staff of Punch when Henry Mayhew (Mayhew, Henry) started it in 1841.

      Punch began as a fiercely democratic weekly which applied to the young Queen Victoria and her growing family, as a matter of course, the same savage treatment that had been given by caricaturists of the previous hundred years to the Hanoverians. Punch was born in the years when the new Westminster Palace (Houses of Parliament (Parliament, Houses of)) was under construction. Prince Albert (Albert, Prince Consort of Great Britain and Ireland) and his team of artistic advisers, wishing to revive fresco painting as a means of decorating the vast wall spaces of the new buildings, opened a competition. When the cartoons (in the original sense of the word) of the proposed compositions were exhibited, it was evident that many of the painters were unfamiliar with work on so heroic a scale, and some of their designs were ludicrous. Punch was quick to satirize them in a series of “Punch's Cartoons.” One of the reasons for “Punch's Cartoons” on the Westminster hall exhibition was that the unpopular foreign Prince Albert had fomented the competition. But Punch was not so much merely antiroyal as it was antihumbug (the novelist W.M. Thackeray, after all, was another of the staff). Though its first few years were marked by some of the worst puns in a punning age, it not only kept up, with its fairly small fixed staff, a remarkable fire of lampoon but soon developed the weekly full-page political cartoon, certainly one of the chief ancestors of the modern editorial cartoon. Nineteenth-century British and general European politics might be briefly comprehended in a few dozen of these. The most famous is probably still that farewell to Otto von Bismarck, “Dropping the Pilot,” by Sir John Tenniel.

      The woodcut technique used for many decades in Punch caused the cartoons on the political page, the largest in scale of the cartoons, to be almost invariably dull in surface. The speed required of the divided-labour teams which produced the cuts from the artists' drawings did not allow for subtleties.

Other countries

      The earliest really impressive makers of personal caricature and political cartoon in the United States were David Claypoole Johnston (Johnston, David Claypoole) and Thomas Nast (Nast, Thomas). Nast first made his name with American Civil War cartoons in Harper's Weekly (Harper's Magazine), which like Punch used the woodcut process with an elaborate division of labour in the back shop for the rapid reproduction of cartoons.

      The middle and late century produced in Italy the brilliant political caricaturist Virginio, who was to the rise of Italian nationalism what Nast had been to the North in the American Civil War; he worked for Il Fischietto of Turin. In 1848 Kladderadatsch started in Berlin. Munich had Fliegende Blätter and Punsch. Punsch was more political than the others, which were long-lived comic weeklies in the social-comment style. J.C. Schleich's Punsch cartoons were a running Bavarian comment on Prussianism.

Late 19th century

The United States

      In the boom days of the 1870s, Nast became a master of personal satire; his long practice in dealing with the professional wood engravers gave him at last a style and scale that triumphed over finicky crosshatching and gave full effect to his ruinous attacks on William Magear (“Boss”) Tweed and other grafters; he was one of the most fertile of symbol makers outside the personal field and is probably the creator of the donkey of the Democratic Party as well as of the Tammany Hall tiger of the New York Democratic organization.

      In 1876 Puck was founded. It was soon to develop new artists, notably Joseph Keppler (Keppler, Joseph) and Bernhard Gillam (Gillam, Bernhard). They worked in a lithographic style of considerable artistic competence, without the force of Nast or the effortless flow of Daumier, but with plenty of clever analogies and with an understanding of the sort of likeness required in caricature.

England

      Punch meanwhile had settled into its richest period, with Tenniel and Harry Furniss as political cartoonists. Vanity Fair (from 1868) offered some competition, especially at first with its regular coloured lithographic antiportraits. These were signed “Ape” (Carlo Pellegrini (Pellegrini, Carlo)) and “Spy” (Leslie Ward (Ward, Sir Leslie), later knighted); they kept up a steady supply of big-headed comic figures against an almost invariably blank background. They also kept up the old device of never quite naming the subject in so many words, but as they were directed at a public which was “in the know,” this was part of the fun. These colour caricatures were much loved, and were often framed and hung on private walls. Max Beerbohm (Beerbohm, Sir Max) (knighted in 1939) devoted himself largely to social and literary satire but almost always on a basis of personal caricature. His deceptively understated outlines and pallid washes, the latter used as local colour for the sake of the overall design, were the perfect means for parodying the good taste of the fin de siècle. His symbols for the writers G.K. Chesterton, G.B. Shaw, Joseph Conrad, and W. Somerset Maugham have become almost the standard views of those writers.

Technical developments

      Toward the end of the century there was a rebirth of personal satire which accompanied new techniques of reproduction and perfected enrichments of such older techniques as colour lithography. Photomechanical reproduction, especially after the development of halftone (halftone process), allowed direct reproduction of the artist's drawing without personal interpretation by wood engravers or other technicians. Colour lithography, which had been either limp or turgid on the whole, found a new life. The caricaturists who had been able to draw directly on the stone, as Daumier did, had always had more freedom and better control over results than those who worked with pen and paper; now the latter could depend upon themselves and a photomechanical process.

France

      Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de) produced largescale posters and, earlier, polychrome lithographs for the Parisian publication Le Rire (from 1894) and for independent distribution. He created a new style of informal composition, somewhat influenced by Japanese prints, with bright clear colour, broad, rather casual outlines drawn largely with the brush, a trick of making tone by means of spatter, and a wit that saw through ugliness to a new sort of eloquence. His view of Oscar Wilde was economical and devastating, and his caricatures of theatre and music hall personalities are unmatched. Another French artist, Caran d'Ache (Emmanuel Poiré), worked on a smaller scale with pen and brush and was one of the most effective continental commentators on the South African War.

Germany

      The artists of the Munich satirical publication Simplicissimus (from 1896) were all somewhat influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec in their use of white space, spatters, and often random outline; they all commented on those features of German life that were most disliked outside Germany—the didactic professor, the tourist, and the military dandy. Their caricatures in the last field were very thinly veiled; Eduard Thöny, one of this group, was especially popular for the way he conveyed the upper-class boorishness of Prussian officers.

20th century

The United States

 Charles Dana Gibson (Gibson, Charles Dana) was a virtuoso of the pen, using the manner of Punch's Phil May as a point of departure. He used the pen as he pleased, sometimes in a direct descriptive manner, sometimes with colouristic suggestion, sometimes almost anti-graphically. Though he helped to create the caricature types of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, he was more a social than a personal caricaturist. He is mentioned chiefly because he introduced American physical types called Gibson girls and Gibson men.

      A position much like that of Simplicissimus was occupied in the years 1911–17 by The Masses (Masses, The) of New York, which had an editorial policy based on socialist idealism. It was served by a group of artists whose fine drawing made their often sharp propaganda tolerable in quarters where it might not otherwise have gotten a hearing. John French Sloan (Sloan, John French), George Bellows (Bellows, George Wesley), Boardman Robinson (Robinson, Boardman), and Art Young (Young, Art) were as likely to deal in social terms as in personal ones, for by this time personal caricature was moving into the newspaper editorial cartoon or the pages of theatrical or sporting news.

      Photomechanical reproduction not only allowed greater freedom for comic artists; it made possible the daily newspaper cartoon and later the syndicated editorial cartoon and the comic strip. About the same time as the new generation of weeklies there was a rise in the use, the autographic character, and the influence of pictorial journalism. John T. McCutcheon (McCutcheon, John T) of the Chicago Tribune, (Chicago Tribune) though he used a rather dry and old-fashioned pen technique, was able to range over politics, the “good old days,” the mores of the moment, and sports. His cartoon world, like that of The Masses, was almost entirely urban, but he was one of the first of a generally imperturbable type of American cartoonist, whose view is amused rather than aroused. His career ran from before Theodore Roosevelt to after Franklin D. Roosevelt's time. In his line of succession stood such men as Edwin Marcus and S.J. Woolf in The New York Times, Oscar Cesare of The Sun, Herbert Block (“Herblock”) of The Washington Post, Daniel Fitzpatrick of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Rollin Kirby of the New York World-Telegram, Bill Mauldin of the Chicago Sun-Times, John Fischetti of the Chicago Daily News, and others too numerous to list.

England and the Continent

      The outstanding political commentator of the first half of the 20th century was David Low (Low, Sir David), a New Zealander, who worked for the Sydney Bulletin before going to Britain. Low was perhaps the best all-around man in the field of caricature since Daumier. His brush drawing was of an Oriental economy, his invention of analogy gleeful without being really outside the classic British educated tradition, and his hatred reserved for a few needful occasions. Like many before him, he employed hackneyed devices (e.g., the heads of a pack of British politicians on dogs' bodies) but by slyness of expression always managed an original twist. There was almost no one in the political field to touch Low except for the Dutchman Louis Raemaekers (Raemaekers, Louis) during World War I, and Raemaekers was bitter where Low was dry and crisp, with footnotes of rumbling laughter. Jean-Jacques Sennep (pen name of J.-J.-C. Pennès) of Paris' Le Figaro and Fritz Meinhard of the Stuttgarter Zeitung were important French and German caricaturists of the 20th century.

Comedies of manners (manners, comedy of) (the cartoon)

      Types and groups, rather than politics and the politician or any nameable individuals, are the concern of the comedian of manners. He may love mankind for its imperfections or set out to seek improvement, but his method will be much the same. He does not need, as the political cartoonist does, to set up allegories and analogies or to write names on labels, but he may sometimes sharpen his comment by treating human beings as animals (monkeys and apes for obvious reasons have long been the favourites, along with dogs and birds). If the personal caricature is an antiportrait, the cartoon on human foibles is often a sort of anti-sumptuary law or a countergrammar which says, “The exceptions are more fun than the rules.”

16th to 18th centuries

      Bruegel (Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder) and Callot (Callot, Jacques) were certainly comedians of manners. Bruegel's picturizing of Flemish proverbs, themselves often comments on foibles, and his prints of the Seven Deadly Sins with satirical examples filling the backgrounds combine a bit of moralizing with the delighted empathy of a participant. Callot is slightly more detached, possibly because of his more conscious style and because he was himself the printmaker (Bruegel drew for professional engravers and woodcutters); but in the catalogs of byplay in his panoramic scenes of fairs and in his trick of making the beggar wear his rags handsomely, he is always balancing and measuring.

      Parallel to two-dimensional comment in this vein ran the theatre, notably the commedia dell'arte, puppet theatre, and the performances of the jester and clown. Both appeared in the late 17th and early 18th centuries in the rather courtly comic drawings of the Frenchman Claude Gillot (Gillot, Claude), Antoine Watteau's predecessor. These are not really comedies of manners, for the clowns are used as if they were monkeys aping human ways at a remove toward greater elegance rather than toward apishness. They point the way to a good many 18th-century practices: Gillot and Watteau both made decorations that included monkeys (singerie) just as François Boucher and later artists were to use pseudo-Chinese scenes (chinoiserie) occasionally as ways of commenting on contemporary European life.

      It is with William Hogarth (Hogarth, William) that the cartoon of manners reached great stature. His series “Marriage à la Mode,” “A Rake's Progress,” “A Harlot's Progress,” the “Four Stages of Cruelty,” and the unfinished “Industrious and Idle Apprentices” were loaded with observation not only of human beings but of objects and their ecology, as if he were using his own proliferation of comic images in protest against waste of time, talents, life, and pride. Hogarth, like Sir Joshua Reynolds after him, even painted comic subjects, but he kept to social satire and avoided personal caricature. His pictures of depravity and ferocity are hard to beat, but he could put an expression of by no means unholy delight on a wicked face. In the “Laughing Audience” he gave a full measure of laughter. Hogarth's engravings (engraving) ran to very large editions and were recut and reissued and then copied at reduced scale for books of the Complete Works.

19th century

Spain

      Francisco de Goya (Goya, Francisco de) is hard to place in the historical development of the comedy of manners. His “Caprichos” (1796–98), etchings prepared by some of the most simple and trenchant brush drawings ever made, appeared in the last years of the 18th century and can be called comedies of manners only insofar as they are related to folk sayings and the bittersweet Spanish folk wisdom. Thus, they stand in the line of Bosch and Bruegel, so many of whose paintings were in Habsburg collections in Madrid. The “Proverbios” of 1813–19 are even more monumental transfigurations of various states of the human condition. Like the “Caprichos,” they used the caricaturist's means for irony and satire, but there was little of the comic left in them and none at all in the “Desastres de la guerra” (1810–14, “Disasters of War”), which used the Peninsular phase of the Napoleonic Wars as a point of departure. They are closer to universality than even Callot's similarly inspired series and are searching comments on more stages of cruelty than Hogarth covered. In them, Goya was really a political cartoonist using no names; yet he was hardly a public cartoonist in the normal sense because censorship and other factors allowed only a very small circulation of his later work until a sizable edition was printed a generation after his death. The earlier work, which contains elements of comedy, did get abroad and had influence in France and England probably before Goya's death. Artistically, if not politically, his work would have had the same powerful effect whenever “discovered” or circulated.

France

      “Paul Gavarni (Gavarni, Paul)” (Sulpice-Guillaume Chevalier) was more purely a comedian of manners than Daumier, though he was no less perceptive and no less sympathetic with the petit parisien. He had a grace derived from his apprenticeship in fashion illustration that produced enchanting jokes on young people in love, dandies, and the theatre and circus. He worked late in life for the Illustrated London News, as did Constantin Guys (Guys, Constantin), the French foreign correspondent who reported the Crimean War to the British. Guys, a prolific draftsman who always kept a comic touch, was peculiarly subtle in reporting the great but contrived elegance of Napoleon III's court. He helped both British and French to see themselves as others saw them. “Grandville” was a comic artist on La Caricature whose work recalls some of the complicated inventions of Arcimboldo.

      Daumier was, of course, the great master of social comedy with or without political content. His series of affectionate if disenchanted comments on married life, the theatre, the courts, concierges, musicians, painters, bluestockings, bathhouses, and children constitute as full a report on Paris in his time as Rembrandt's drawings were for 17th-century Amsterdam. The words were often important, especially when Daumier was indicating in his text the unspoken thoughts of his characters (thus anticipating the 20th-century cartoon in which a thought or vision is indicated as a balloon with cloud-scalloped edges and a picture rather than words inside). His often untidy line and knowingly casual accents of tone produced (at will) sensations of chill weather, of ecstasies of gluttony, of juvenile pride, or of legal craftiness.

England

      Rowlandson, as noted earlier, was a political caricaturist part of the time, but above all he was a lampooner of ludicrous and excessive behaviour. He created almost unaided a gallery of types missed by Hogarth, many of which persist in British life—the antiquarian, the old maid, the harried foreign servant, the pleasantly blowzy barmaid, the decent old parson. He was by no means as bawdy as he is supposed to have been, but he liked to push action, like appearance, to an extreme. His Dr. Syntax may be called an ancestor of comic strips.

      George Cruikshank (Cruikshank, George) carried Rowlandson's methods almost beyond extremes in his youth. He used superfantastic costume and sometimes that device of enormous heads which some 17th-century caricaturists used and which is still used by sports-page cartoonists and comic advertising artists.

      The longest continuing habit and tradition of humorous comment on the passing world has been made by the English humour magazine Punch. Though it began in puns and peevishness, it warmed up during the 19th century with John Leech (Leech, John), Charles Keene (Keene, Charles Samuel), George Du Maurier (du Maurier, George), and in the 20th century with George Belcher, “Fougasse” (Kenneth Bird (Bird, Kenneth)), H.M. Bateman (Bateman, H M), Nicolas Bentley, E.H. Shepard, and Osbert Lancaster. Leech was in a sense the pictorial equivalent of Thackeray (Thackeray was an excellent comic draftsman but better at getting the feel of past time with a comic flavour than at considering his contemporaries other than in words). Leech and Keene belong to the era of wood-engraved reproduction; when one sees their original drawings and manuscript captions or dialogue, it is apparent that something was lost in detail and finesse of line but nothing in sense of comedy, in the affectionate tone. The enormous self-confidence of the optimistic Victorians, expressed at first through the violent or bumptious Regency manner of the young Cruikshank, was tempered by the staff-meeting or meeting-of-minds conduct of Punch. The “manners” part of the phrase “comedy of manners” became subjective as well as objective. Punch became an upper-class weekly and continued as such for three or four generations, reflecting the large knowledge of all classes it was possible for its staff to offer its readers, and the large delight of the upper class in seeing its own foibles and those of its servants, tradesmen, lame ducks, and “climbers” exposed. The swing of a crinoline by Leech and the curl of a cabdriver's hat brim by Keene were perfect selective imitation, themselves almost inimitable; the crinoline and the hat are gone with those who knew how to wear them, but the picture in Punch remains.

      Photomechanical reproduction came in during Du Maurier's day but hardly affected his generation of artists. May's pen was better served by the camera and the zinc block than Leech's had been by end-grain boxwood and gravers, but the general language was the same. With the generation of Belcher there was a great change. His own crumbly charcoal or crayon strokes were perfectly adapted to the new process—indeed it was mutual—as were the fat black lines of the Frenchman Jean-Louis Forain and the mid-20th-century cobwebs of Rowland Emett. Fougasse's highly personal little curly stick men, drawn perhaps with a signwriter's pen, could be reproduced by almost any method, but the sharp lines and solid black areas of Bateman (deriving ultimately from Aubrey Beardsley's decorative style) and the thick–thin pen strokes of Shepard (more in the Keene tradition) were well served by modern processes. Shepard was more truly an illustrator than a cartoonist, but Bateman's towering humours and bulging-eyed apoplectic businessmen were in the direct line from Edward Lear (Lear, Edward) to such frantic American cartoonists as Virgil Partch.

      Lear practiced as a comic draftsman an economy and geniality that are hard to improve upon, but like Daumier he supposed that his own best gifts lay in another field. Humour had been brought into satire by Hogarth; a truly funny style of drawing was brought into cartooning by Lear. Hitherto, standard drawing techniques had been applied to grotesque shapes and comic situations, but Lear's line went wandering off into a sort of joke on calligraphy. Furthermore, he travelled into areas of fantasy previously barely hinted at.

      Aubrey Beardsley (Beardsley, Aubrey) used a caricaturist's methods, but little of his work, except perhaps the illustrations to The Rape of the Lock, was actually in intent or effect caricature or cartoon. If some of Cranach's prints can be called illustrated libels, some of Beardsley's can be called illustrated yearnings by unfrocked lechers. They are important in this connection because their combination of large white spaces, clear lines, and solid or slightly irritated blacks could be reproduced successfully in a choice of dimensions and thus laid down a discipline for illustration, commercial art, and the comic strip.

20th century

      The whole tenor of pictorial comedy was shifted by World War I and by the boom times thereafter. Some previously forbidden subjects became admissible. Political caricature during and after the war was excessively partisan, while the cartoons about the war itself tended to alleviate the pain of the struggle. Bruce Bairnsfather's Old Bill and his colleagues in Britain got through it by joking. After it was over, the public for comic publications was greatly enlarged; while the newly rich were standard butts for cartoonists catering to all classes, they were themselves buying comic weeklies.

      In the United States the usually monthly comic magazines of universities and colleges had a sudden flowering, to such an extent that an anthology for their cartoons called College Humor was published for several years in the 1920s and '30s. The tendency of previously serious weeklies to use small cartoons here and there or to insert a funny page somewhere created not only new markets for cartoonists but also a temporary decline in the purely humorous magazines, and Punch, Life, and Judge had difficulty surviving the Depression of the 1930s. The title of Puck had already passed to a newspaper chain which used it for a Sunday supplement, and the title of Life eventually passed to a periodical of different character. Simplicissimus never quite rose between wars to its pre-1914 stature; the effort which went into Dada and Surrealist publications in Germany and France in the '20s, when art itself became an object of social satire, meant a loss to other comic publications. Meanwhile, the public in general gradually became aware of modern art, and its presumed incomprehensibility became almost as routine a subject by 1940 as mothers-in-law or freshly painted park benches.

      In the United States an older generation of humorists somewhat of the upper-class Punch style lingered briefly after World War I. Of such were Oliver Herford, whose Alphabet of Celebrities and other comic verses with pictures were published as small books; Peter Newell, whose highly original Slant Book, Hole Book, etc., had a sharp eye to late prewar costume, and Gelett Burgess (Burgess, Gelett), whose Goops for children were spaghetti-like little figures whose behaviour illustrated a moral.

      But to these was now added a new generation of sophisticated but slightly flashier performers, many of them with theatrical connections, many at first employed by the fashion magazine Vanity Fair and later by The New Yorker (beginning in 1925); Ralph Barton, who did superb roués; Rea Irvin of the thin trembly line, poached eyes, and almost oriental splendour; John Held, Jr., whose angular young women helped define the Jazz Age; Gluyas Williams and Ellison Hoover, who satirized business, industrial labour, and other subjects not well known to the Punch tradition; and Alfred Frueh, whose caricatures of theatre people recalled Toulouse-Lautrec. The Depression of the 1930s brought forward a few artists with a genius for social protest, few of whom had any real sense of comedy because tragedy was not to them, as it had been to Daumier, the other side of the same coin. In the United States the Communist Daily Worker had the services of William Gropper (Gropper, William), a distinguished lithographer and editorial cartoonist who was sometimes able to capture something of the humorous tone of the prewar Masses. And it gradually became known that in the Soviet Union a comic magazine called Krokodil was allowed to gibe at the ways of its brothers and even occasionally of its masters.

      The two most interesting features of cartoon and caricature in the first half of the 20th century were the rise of the one-line joke and of the pictorial joke without words, and the enormous diversity of styles of drawing. The New Yorker (New Yorker, The) was probably the inventor or reinventor of the one-line joke and certainly its chief fomenter. Five-decker dialogues with headings were swept away even from Punch, and there was a greater unity of words with picture, paralleling the tendency toward tabloid newspapers with large photographic halftones and very pithy text. The joke without words, often in two or more frames, was the extreme of economy of language. One result of this change was that the comedy-of-manners cartoon must convey its comment entirely through costume, setting, and (to a lesser extent) situation, and the emphasis thus tended to fall more on comic situation than on plays on words, class differences, or marked action. The New Yorker and magazines whose cartoons had been influenced by it aimed at a sophisticated audience. The New Yorker itself, while enjoying in its maturity a position equivalent to that of Punch in the 1880s, aimed its advertising and much of its writing at upper-income classes, but its cartoons were aimed at the classes described as highbrow and upper-middle-brow. Such features of the old-fashioned British-style upper class as servants were always treated by New Yorker cartoonists (notably Mary Petty) as necessarily comic fossils of an old order and hence in, rather than out of, that old upper class. Whole new areas of social-comedy subject matter arose in this magazine: the life of the Jewish community, the fauna of bars, the managerial class and its flavour, the lighter side of the well-kept woman, commercialized sports, the imagined life of colonies or races of antisocial beings, and what might be termed the comedy of the upwardly mobile.

      The diversity of styles of drawing reflected the influence of Postimpressionist art quite as much as did the use of modern art as a subject for jokes. The great draftsmen who were on the edges of Impressionism (such as Toulouse-Lautrec) had much influence on caricature and cartoon; while the same photomechanical reproduction that advanced the latter communicated modern painting to a vast public. The loose, almost deliberately ugly method of the Expressionists got into some of the single-cartoon commentators to such an extent that their shorthand was sometimes difficult for those who did not read them daily. The meandering willful line of the 20th-century Swiss painter Paul Klee certainly influenced Saul Steinberg; the Cubists' studies in African sculpture were echoed in cartoons by Miguel Covarrubias and Partch; the “classical” period of Pablo Picasso in Richard Taylor and others; the curving economical line of Henri Matisse (oddly enough) in Richard Decker. Occasionally, cartoonists parodied one another: Oliver Herford once presented Gibson girls as paper dolls without expression; Al Capp (Capp, Al) in the comic strip “Li'l Abner” parodied “Dick Tracy” and “Mary Worth.” Mad magazine parodied everybody: style, subject, everything from politics to pornography.

      The comic strip having taken over the comic presentation of events almost completely, especially since the rise of the one-line joke or picture caption, the modern cartoon became one largely of situation or of predicament that was stated without a solution's being worked out or suggested. The mother of a sideshow circus family, confronted with more than she can manage, simply says that after all she has only three hands; a young girl is in ecstasies over a sunset, while behind her a bearded artist-stereotype says, “Too much purple.” Meanwhile, the longer sort of comic anecdote retreated to a purely oral–aural life or to the bound volume of jokes, where it sometimes had a vignette-like illustration.

      The cartoon of situation was certainly not new, but it predominated in the first half of the 20th century. A Daumier lithograph showing a very fat woman in a crinoline climbing into an omnibus bore no dialogue, but simply the caption, “A mere nothing, and the bus is full.” This was a cartoon of predicament. There has tended to be a cluster of these situation subjects: the desert island no larger than a hearthrug, the man who meets a woman walking and (in a scalloped balloon) imagines her naked, the flying carpet with novel chauffeur or passenger, the picture gallery with mutual reaction between work of art and viewer, the psychoanalyst's couch, the big-game hunter's trophy room. If the situation was clear, not even one line of joke was required. Such cartoons had a sort of family connection with the earliest caricatures, but they were not merely antiportraits of types, they were portraits with accessories that created the predicament. So were the tiny single woodcut figures that were inserted as pictorial puns into the text pages of Punch in the 1840s. But the latter-day predicament may be highly complicated; in the hands of such a cartoonist as George Price (Price, George), whose split pen line built up tattered edifices of dowdiness, or Emett, whose fantastic locomotives and wispy codgers were half infernal and half heavenly, the comedy came from an accumulation of frustrating but ludicrous detail. Frustration, that renowned companion of modern life, was dissolved by laughter. Even the presumably invincible American businessman was often represented in cartoons in frustrating situations, often briskly indicated by the graphic lines on the charts in his office (Whitney Darrow excelled in this genre). André François, who worked for both French and British papers, was a master of the rapidly sketched situation; so was “Anton” of Punch (a man and a woman jointly using the name), who kept up the tradition of satire through clothes, being particularly good at pseudo-Edwardian nattiness. Herb Stansbury's “Smart Chart,” a one-frame comic for the financial page, satirized stock market graphs. In the drawings of the Romanian-born Saul Steinberg (Steinberg, Saul) there was almost a parody of the cartoon of situation, for his lines doubled back on themselves and bit their own tails: the hand was indicated as drawing the portrait of which it was a part, or the frustrating details positively engulfed the subject (a wicker chair taken over entirely by its curlicues; tattooing extended beyond the tattooed man; the woman with a lozenge-shaped face, on her lap a baby whose lozenge-shaped face is one-quarter of the larger lozenge).

      Yet there were also extraordinarily simple performances; the unassuming little people of Jean Effel (François Lejeune) moved gently through the trials of Adam and Eve; Jacques Faizant's bad children produced hilarious effects by conveying their concentration in a few lines; Otto Soglow's stenographic vocabulary of forms for human bodies (perhaps slightly indebted to Burgess' Goops) was so graphic that it could be used in minuscule dimensions with perfect legibility. On the other hand, Peter Arno (Arno, Peter)'s large-scale and heavy outlines, despite simple straightforward design, made his beaky and bosomy figures almost jump off the page (for many years one of his near-bawdy cartoons almost invariably occupied a position in The New Yorker on the full page immediately after “The Talk of the Town,” which suggested that the political cartoon of Punch was being ridiculed). Ronald Searle (Searle, Ronald), after a long British career of making spiky and raffish pseudo-Edwardians and fiendish schoolgirls, had a success as an artist for American advertising. A pair of delightful opposite numbers were W. Heath Robinson and the slightly later Rube Goldberg, who on both sides of the Atlantic created wild half-anthropomorphic parodies of intricate machinery. During World War II, Bill Mauldin's disenchanted soldiers were proper descendants of Bairnsfather's.

Winslow Ames

Additional Reading

British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, from 1320 to date of compilation by Frederic G. Stephens and Mary D. George, 11 vol. in 12 (1870–1954); Mary D. George, English Political Caricature: A Study of Opinion and Propaganda, 2 vol. (1959); “champfleury” (Jules Fleury), Histoire de la caricature antique, 3rd ed. (1879), Histoire de la caricature au moyen-âge et sous la renaissance, 2nd ed. (1875), Histoire de la caricature sous la république, l'empire et la restauration, 2nd ed. (1877), Histoire de la caricature sous la réforme et la ligue: Louis XIII à Louis XVI (1880), and Histoire de la caricature moderne, 3rd ed. (1885); Marion H. Spielmann, The History of Punch (1895, reprinted 1969); Eduard Fuchs, Die Karikatur der europäischen Völker, 4th rev. ed., 2 vol. (1903–21), a rather Marxian view; Charles R. Ashbee, Caricature (1928); Ernst H.J. Gombrich and Ernst Kris, Caricature (1940), which goes to the psychological root of the matter, and “The Principles of Caricature,” in Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, pp. 189–203 (1952, reprinted 1964); Werner Hofmann, Caricature from Leonardo to Picasso (1957; originally published in German, 1956), a purely European view; William Murrell, A History of American Graphic Humor, 2 vol. (1933–38, reprinted 1967); Allan Nevins and Frank Weitenkampf, A Century of Political Cartoons: Caricature in the United States from 1800 to 1900 (1944, reprinted 1975); David Low, Years of Wrath: A Cartoon History, 1931–1945, with a chronology and text by Quincy Howe (1946), Low's Cartoon History, 1945–1953 (1953), and The Tearful Fifties: A History of the Decade (1960); James Parton, Caricature and Other Comic Art in All Times and Many Lands (1878, reprinted 1969); William G. Rogers, Mightier Than the Sword: Cartoon, Caricature, Social Comment (1969); Thomas Wright, A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art (1865, reprinted 1968); Ralph E. Shikes, The Indignant Eye: The Artist As Social Critic in Prints and Drawings from the Fifteenth Century to Picasso (1969, reprinted 1976); Bevis Hillier, Cartoons and Caricatures (1970). Ashbee, Hofmann, and Murrell have ample bibliographies. There have been numerous reprints of cartoons. See also Einar Nerman, Caricature (1946); John Hohenberg (ed.), The Pulitzer Prize Story II: Award-Winning News Stories, Columns, Editorials, Cartoons, and News Pictures, 1959–1980 (1980); Richard Hedman, Stop Me Before I Plan Again (1977, reprinted 1981), political cartoons on city government; Roy T. Matthews and Peter Mellini, In “Vanity Fair” (1982), a history of the 19th-century British magazine.Winslow Ames

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