When assessed with its partner print "Harmony before Matrimony," this print entertained viewers with a comic rendering of the loss of courtship-induced naïveté to painful marital discord.
A viscountess sits between a portrait of a peasant woman breastfeeding a baby, the frame of which reads “Maternal Love," and a window revealing a carriage waiting outside, its attendant holding its door open. The viscountess wears a loosely fitting polka-dot dress and a large feather headpiece.
Dressed as nursemaids with patriotic ribbons, Prime Minister Henry Addington, Lord Hawkesbury, and Charles Fox gather around Britannia as an oversized baby squeezed into a crib, the top of which reads “Requiescat in Peace.” In the crib, Britannia sucks her thumb and rests her head on her arm, her shield and scepter lying on her blanket.
Sitting atop a chest inscribed “Bank of England,” a wrinkled and thin woman dressed in paper one- pound notes throws her hands back as Prime Minister William Pitt (the Younger) reaches into her pocket with his left hand and wraps his right arm around her waste, his legs bent as he thrusts his upper body forward and his face into hers.
This print has a twofold purpose: to entertain the public with a scene from the life of highly viewed figures: royalty and actresses or courtesans together provided a double-delight. It also comments on the moral repercussions of inverting gender roles.
Lady Archer and Lady Buckinghamshire, chained at the Pillory, are being battered with eggs and mud by an undefined crowd that disappears into the foreground of the print. Both women don large feather headpieces, heavy gold earrings, and swell-dresses. Buckinghamshire is clearly the shorter and wider of the two.
Patience on a Monument is a social caricature that made use of traditional romantic aesthetic preferences to mock the presumptions of "high" style. It also chastised its highly public victim, Lady Cecilia Johnstone, and in doing so warned the public of following her example.
As a social caricature satirizing a scandalous failure of the upper-class and nobility, The Siege is a piece of entertainment that relays the scandal a la mode to its viewers. It also provides one vehicle for chastisement of its victims’ behavior.
This gallery explores how James Gillray’s caricatures of women convey the paradoxical nature of feminine power in Romantic culture. To effect his satire, Gillray utilizes ironic presentations that juxtapose discrepant images, imply a discrepancy between image and word, or create discrepancy by inverting traditional connotations of an image, person, or event. At times this means the irony exists within the frame of the print; at times within the relation between print and viewer; at times within the dialogue between the caricaturist and Romantic aesthetic paradigms; and at times of all these modes operate together.
A young, nude boy is depicted against a dark background in a bust medallion. Two cornucopias entwine above his head, spilling forth fruit and foliage as a border around the frame. Below is a smaller scene in which a teacher and pupil sit at a round table for a lesson in literacy. This smaller panel is flanked by a snake on the left and a badminton racket and birdie on the right.
