On Bended Knee: James Gillray's Global View of Courtly Encounter

5 On Bended Knee: James Gillray’s Global View of Courtly Encounter Douglas Fordham On an unspeciied day in late 1793, James Gillray stood on the threshold of King George III’s chambers waiting for his irst and only royal audience. Described by contemporaries as “a straightforward, unassuming character” with “slouching gait and careless habits,” it is diicult to imagine Gillray dressing for the occasion.1 It is even harder, although no less intriguing, to imagine what he may have been thinking. Might farcical images have raced through his head, perhaps George III slurping gold into his “monstrous craw,” or a wigless monarch pulled by the ears over an executioner’s block?2 Did he ask himself—what on earth am I doing here? Here was additional proof that Gillray was living in exceptional times: when a history painter called upon a caricaturist to travel to Flanders and make batleield studies of the recent British victory at Valenciennes; when the king invited both of them, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg and James Gillray, to show him their studies and preparatory drawings; and when a graphic satirist, well known for his brutal royal caricatures, then received artistic advice from the King of England. According to Gillray’s exact contemporary and acquaintance, Henry Angelo: De Loutherbourg was complimented; whilst the only reward obtained by Gillray was a look which seemed to express,—Mr. Gillray, you might as well have remained at home; in short, his Majesty freely confessed that he could not read the likenesses, as he did not understand the stenography of the painter’s art. Gillray, not overpleased with his reception, observed, “I was a fool for going abroad, and a greater fool for going so far out of my way—at home;” but consoled himself with utering a determination to try whether the great King of the isles would know himself …3 While there are good reasons to doubt the literal accuracy of this story, the royal meeting itself remains an intriguing possibility.4 George III’s predilection TODD PORTERFIELD.indb 61 19/08/2010 15:10:41 62 the efflorescence of caricature, 1759–1838 for highly inished pictures was well known, and a few of Gillray’s sketches from the front deploy a visual shorthand inimical to the king’s taste and, quite possibly, to his understanding. There is also something poignant and persuasive about Gillray’s statement that the court was further “out of my way” than Flanders, which constituted his only known trip to the Continent. It is ultimately the restraint of Angelo’s account that makes it plausible, particularly given the volatile characters involved. This slight episode in Gillray’s opaque career condenses a central preoccupation of British art in the period 1792 to 1794. These were critical years in the progress of the French Revolution, spanning its “internationalization,” the execution of Louis XVI, the height of the Terror, and the fall of Robespierre. While domestic peace reigned in Britain, the culture wars were well under way, most pointedly in the contest between Edmund Burke’s conception of royal authority and political continuity in Relections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Thomas Paine’s radically egalitarian Rights of Man (1791) and deist Age of Reason (1793–94). Revolutionary pressures also impacted British imperial policy, as the later sought to counter French inluence abroad through increasingly regimented colonial administration and military aggression.5 While these macrohistorical concerns remain peripheral to much ine art, they provocatively converge into one artistic theme that recurs with frequency and urgency in the period. That theme can be described as scenes of courtly encounter, and Gillray’s personal experience hints at the social, political, and professional anxiety that courtly scenes elicited in these years. It was a theme that spanned serious and satirical artistic genres, and which, given the overheated political rhetoric of the day, oten blurred boundaries between them. Take for example James Gillray’s elegantly etched, meticulously composed, and critically barbed vision of courtly encounter in China. Gillray published The Reception of the Diplomatique & his Suite at the Court of Pekin (Figure 5.1) for the London print market before Macartney had even departed on September 14, 1792. In it, he imagined the kind of reception that Lord Macartney might receive at the Chinese court, correctly predicting not only the reception but also the representational preoccupations of the British embassy. In Gillray’s imaginative projection, Macartney kneels before the emperor with a leter from King George III requesting greater trading privileges and a permanent ambassador at the Chinese court. In return, Macartney ofers manufactured goods of dubious value, including a portrait miniature of the king, dice, and an array of children’s toys. Gillray’s satire appears to have been inspired by notices in the London papers regarding gits then in preparation for the Macartney voyage. These included two magniicent carriages (one for winter and one for summer), irearms, ield pieces, and mechanical toys.6 The crowning jewels of this TODD PORTERFIELD.indb 62 19/08/2010 15:10:41 Douglas Fordham 63 5.1 James Gillray (1756–1815), The Reception of the Diplomatique & his Suite at the Court of Pekin, September 14, 1792. Hand-colored etching, 320 × 399 mm. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University elaborate ofering were astronomical and scientiic devices (including an orrery and an astronomical clock) that showcased the coordination of British Enlightenment thought and manufacture. Gillray reduces this miscellany of gits to child’s play, and he goes one step further through the inclusion of Boydell’s Shakespearean prints placed at the emperor’s feet. Three years earlier, Gillray had skewered Boydell’s entrepreneurial enterprise with a print entitled Shakespeare Sacriiced;—or—The Ofering to Avarice, which scratched at the thin veneer of Royal Academy disinterestedness to reveal pure commercial greed.7 A similar critique appears to be at work in The Reception of the Diplomatique with a royal embassy and its cultural trappings veiling a vulgar commercial endeavor. Gillray hints at this process of ceremonial transformation in the magic lantern at Macartney’s feet. Devils appear on either side of the magic lantern strip, only to appear as a igure of Punch in the central viewer. Unalloyed greed takes on a more pleasant aspect, in other words, even bearing something of the girth and TODD PORTERFIELD.indb 63 19/08/2010 15:10:42 64 the efflorescence of caricature, 1759–1838 pomp of King George’s portrait below. As Finbarr Barry Flood has argued, Gillray and his contemporaries deployed optical devices and distorting lenses within their prints in order to parody the distortions of imperial representation, particularly for a London audience trapped within the Platonic cave of the Warren Hastings trial (1787–95).8 In the Reception of the Diplomatique the British export a magic lantern to China in the hope that aggressive commercial expansion might be viewed as anodyne cultural exchange. It would be diicult to identify a moment when art anticipated life more profoundly than in Gillray’s satire. Not only did the Macartney expedition fail to wrest trade concessions from the Chinese, but the embassy’s lavish gits fell comically short of expectations. This was particularly acute in the case of optical devices and the value that the British placed on representation more generally. One of the irst signs that the embassy was going badly, according to the irst-hand account of Aeneas Anderson, was that “two camera obscuras were returned, foolishly enough, as more suited to the amusement of children, than the information of men of science.”9 Détente deteriorated as the optical, mechanical and mathematical instruments … were found to fail in the operations and powers atributed to them; and others of them did not excite that surprise and admiration in the breasts of the Chinese philosophers, which Dr. Dinwiddie and Mr. Barrow expected.10 The European Enlightenment’s preoccupation with visual cognition, in terms familiar to us from the work of Martin Jay, Jonathan Crary, and Barbara Maria Staford, failed to assert its authority in China.11 If a genial rapport was diicult to establish on the scientiic front, it was nearly impossible to establish in more subjective realms, like the emphasis that the British placed on ine art as an index of commercial and imperial power. Lord Macartney engaged two artists on the embassy, by then de rigueur for scientiic and exploratory expeditions, although their purpose was less clearly deined than it had been on previous voyages.12 The most diligent and proliic artist on the embassy was William Alexander, who returned to England with a stunning portfolio of drawings and watercolors of Chinese life. These delicate and closely observed sketches have been the principal focus of art historians and others intrigued by the embassy.13 For Alexander and his contemporaries, however, these sketches were the means to a more professional end. Like Gillray’s stenographic drawings from the front, these raw materials would be transformed into inished and coherent works of art for a metropolitan audience. Chief among those inished products was to be a representation of Lord Macartney’s reception by the Chinese emperor, not unlike that already imagined by Gillray.14 Lord Macartney inally gained admitance to Emperor Chi’en Lung on September 14, 1793, at his summer lodgings in Jehol. In a TODD PORTERFIELD.indb 64 19/08/2010 15:10:42 Douglas Fordham 65 5.2 William Alexander (1767–1816), The Emperor Receiving the Embassy, ater September 1793. Pencil, pen-and-ink, wash and watercolor on paper. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved highly detailed pen-and-ink drawing, Lord Macartney kneels before the emperor in what was the only major concession the British succeeded in wresting from the Chinese—namely Macartney’s ability to kneel rather than bow before the emperor15 (Figure 5.2). When the embassy failed to resolve anything in Britain’s favor, Lord Macartney was unceremoniously run out of China. Or as Aeneas Anderson evocatively phrased it: “we entered Pekin like paupers, we remained in it like prisoners; and we quited it like vagrants.”16 Macartney retaliates, in Alexander’s drawing at least, with a particularly lively spout of plumage that maintains some degree of height parity with the emperor. Unlike Alexander’s lively sketches, however, this composition was cobbled together from second-hand accounts and portrait studies. For one of the great ironies of Alexander’s visit to China was that he was ordered to stay in Peking and sketch British manufactures while Lord Macartney visited the Great Wall of China and held court with the Chinese emperor. Among the British Library’s collection of drawings by Alexander is a highly inished pen, ink and watercolor sketch of the planetarium, orrery, and astronomical clock that the British considered “the Principal present to the Emperor of China,” as a note reads at the botom of the sketch.17 This was the TODD PORTERFIELD.indb 65 19/08/2010 15:10:43 66 the efflorescence of caricature, 1759–1838 kind of work to which Alexander was reduced while history was being made at the emperor’s summer palace. Alexander understood, just as clearly as Gillray, that the royal reception of Lord Macartney was the symbolic fulcrum of the journey, and that it would be the scene most desired by the London public. To be denied the chance to sketch it “from the life” was one of Alexander’s great disappointments. As he lamented in his journal, “That the artists should be doomed to remain immured at Pekin during this most interesting Journey of the embassy, is not easily to be accounted for.”18 Whatever their initial impetus may have been, Alexander’s drawings of British manufactures now read as documents of material anxiety in an age that conceived itself to be both courtly and commercial, politically conservative (in the Burkean sense) and scientiically progressive. Alexander’s absence hardly precluded him from commemorating the ambassadorial reception. Gillray’s satire proves how litle irst-hand knowledge an artist needed to construct a plausible courtly encounter. For unlike the narrative complexity of Shakespearean scenes or the exemplum virtutis of classical history painting, courtly encounter scenes replicated a world of ritual objects, ornate costumes, and static poses.19 Gillray pinpoints this diference with the string emerging from Macartney’s lips and leading to a hot-air balloon, which puns on the hot air about to be pumped into a speech bubble. Given Macartney’s ignorance of Chinese, the childish balloon does the speaking for him, and not terribly well, if we are to judge from the stif poke in the eye that the heraldic English lion receives from a Chinese dragon. Suspended from the balloon is a “cock in breeches,” which is described in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor as a favorite shape of gingerbread sellers, oten decorated with gold foil.20 The Victorian memoirist George Nathan provides additional insight into this form of “toy gingerbread” in an account of his Sufolk youth in the 1830s: One of the most popular devices for these gingerbread cakes, perhaps, was the Cock in Breeches. This was given very frequently (so says a writer) as a sort of make-weight to good customers. This git naturally lent itself to small jokes; for since the world was young, who is to wear the breeches and rule the roost has aforded a theme for mild pleasantries.21 And this pleasantry would appear to carry over into Gillray’s satire.22 The cock’s breeches are stif and upright in contrast to the more pliant breeches of Macartney and company. Symbols speak louder than words in courtly encounter scenes, and here they appear cheap and gilt. The cock’s makeweight conidence is about to be punctured, in any case, by the ruler of the roost. Siting immovable upon a cushion, the Chinese emperor commands atendants who refuse to acknowledge the embassy. A sword bearer stands ready to either dub or decapitate on command. Gillray encourages the spectator to assume a position on the right hand of the emperor, in a position TODD PORTERFIELD.indb 66 19/08/2010 15:10:43 Douglas Fordham 67 roughly equivalent to that of the sword bearer on his let, thereby witnessing the embassy from a Chinese perspective. All of the ritual objects that a London audience might expect to ind in courtly encounter scenes turn, like Cinderella’s carriage, into homely equivalents. Scepters, chalices, and crowns mutate into batledores, shutlecocks, and rat traps. With a chivalric gesture Macartney hovers above a toy windmill in a mass-produced La Mancha. Behind Macartney stands a gentleman holding the balloon’s string in such a manner that he appears to control Lord Macartney like a marionete. While he may represent Sir George Staunton, the embassy’s secretary, his muti may equally signify the generic mercantile interests underpinning the embassy.23 In this light, a nameless, faceless army of merchants, willing to abase themselves and the national interest for proit, pulls the strings of a royal representative in pursuit of private interests. The recurring juxtaposition of royal, or national, insignia with toys reinforces this point. Crowded into the background a merchant holds a Union lag in his let hand and a weathercock in his right. The later opposes north to east and south to west, ridiculing both the quality of British manufactures and the contradictory winds of the market. There is an emphasis on locomotion in the toys, particularly in the carriage, hot-air balloon, and model sailing ship that surround Macartney. Contrasting the peripatetic British to the immovable Chinese, these conveyances suggest a new form of Universal Empire, unconstrained by national boundaries and guided by global proits. Most striking in this regard is the way in which the model sailing ship propels Macartney’s arm forward, although it sails precariously close to the vortex of a roulete wheel. George III’s leter is launched, to continue the metaphor, between the Scylla of a stone-faced emperor and the Charybdis of a freewheeling mercantilism.24 Together these details add up to a remarkable conirmation of P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins’s deinition of the “gentlemanly capitalist” as well as a deep suspicion of his authority. As Cain and Hopkins have argued: Imperialism … was neither an adjunct to British history nor an expression of a particular phase of its industrial development but an integral part of the coniguration of British society, which it both reinforced and expressed … It was spearheaded, not by manufacturing interests, but by gentlemanly elites who saw in empire a means of generating income lows in ways that were compatible with the high ideals of honor and duty.25 Gentlemanly capitalism’s simultaneous engagement with imperial proits and patrician values forged a powerful political élite that persisted right up to 1850, at which point “free trade destroyed the old colonial system and, in combination with the new rise of wealth, ensured the gradual demise of the landed aristocracy, thus bringing one phase of gentlemanly capitalism to an end.”26 It would be premature, according to Cain and Hopkins, to refer to the demise of the British aristocracy or the mercantile system prior to this date. The TODD PORTERFIELD.indb 67 19/08/2010 15:10:43 68 the efflorescence of caricature, 1759–1838 Reception of the Diplomatique recognizes this marriage of convenience, between a faltering aristocracy and a faltering mercantile logic, for what it was: a deeply disingenuous diplomatic style that would wilt, Gillray hypothesized, under the Chinese emperor’s uninterested gaze. Astonishingly, Gillray was entirely prophetic on this point. As the emperor declared to George III in his oicial reply to the embassy, “We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures.”27 Macartney becomes the opposite, in Gillray’s print, of the well-known igure of the Nabob, the imperial proiteer who returns to England in an atempt to purchase gentlemanly status.28 Projecting the cultural authority of the landed aristocrat outwards, Lord Macartney legitimates imperial proits under the sign of national interest. As a recently elevated viscount, George Macartney provides a particularly acute specimen of the gentlemanly capitalist, or at least the capitalist’s “ambassador.” Prior to the Chinese embassy, this son of an Irish landowner served as trade envoy to Russia, Chief Secretary to the Irish Viceroy in Dublin, Governor of Grenada, Tobago and the Grenadines, and then Governor of Madras—the irst non-company servant to be appointed. A new breed of career diplomat, Macartney acquired titles appropriate to his imperial postings, although it was not until his appointment as Governor of the Cape in 1796 that he inally leveraged his Irish peerage into a British barony.29 Macartney’s career arc was determined, it could be argued, by a broad cultural impulse to map aristocratic codes of conduct onto aggressive mercantile expansion. Gillray accords Macartney an astonishing degree of respect, leaving his proile exclusively unmarred by caricature. Macartney becomes a strikingly digniied pivot between kowtowing merchants and a sinister Chinese court. The conspicuous insignia of the Bath on Macartney’s lapel is ultimately debased, however, by the trinkets at his feet, just as his far-lung postings made him the shutlecock of a new imperial game. The failure of the Macartney expedition to extract any trade concessions from the Chinese was a blow not just to Macartney’s ego but also to the clever juxtaposition of Enlightenment aims, imperial force, royal authority, and mercantile exchange that shaped the mission’s style and substance. The embarrassing failure of these jury-rigged symbolic codes to persuade the emperor come dangerously close to Gillray’s predictions, and in some ways exceeded them. Where Gillray depicted a handsomely atired ambassador with a single honoriic sash, Macartney actually approached the emperor in a suit “of spoted mulberry velvet, with a diamond star, and the red riband; over which he wore the full habit of the order of the Bath, with the hat, and plume of feathers, that form a part of it.” Likewise, Sir George Staunton, who remains indistinguishable from the merchants in Gillray’s print, donned “full court dress, over which he wore the robe of a doctor of laws in the English universities, with the black velvet cap belonging to that degree.”30 One of TODD PORTERFIELD.indb 68 19/08/2010 15:10:43 Douglas Fordham 69 the most striking narrative structures in Aeneas Anderson’s account of the embassy is the recurring, and oten farcical, frustration of Macartney’s desire to imbue the embassy with suicient pomp and circumstance. There are episodes in Anderson’s account when the Chinese reveal a shocking disrespect for British royal authority, particularly for an English audience already shaken by the French Revolution. Take, for example, the precipitous light of the Macartney embassy out of Peking: The portraits of their Majesties were taken down, but as the cases in which they had come from England, had been broke up for ixtures in the apartments, a few deals, hastily nailed together, were now their only protection. As for the state canopy, it was not taken down, but absolutely torn from the wall … we could not help feeling a considerable degree of astonishment at seeing the carriage opposite the house appointed for the reception of the embassy, surrounded by crowds of Chinese, and many of its ornaments defaced.31 Gillray’s own vision of the Macartney expedition was followed within a week by the brutal Petit Souper a la Parisienne; — or — a family of sans-culots refreshing, ater the fatigues of the day, which condenses news reports of the September Massacres into a cannibalistic feast.32 These juxtapositions invariably raise questions about the ways in which scenes of courtly encounter relected upon the deterioration of French royal authority. As the engine behind Warren Hasting’s impeachment trial for corruption in India (1788–95) and the author of the Relections of the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke wrestled with these parallel developments in a particularly sustained manner. How, Burke wondered, could Britain “govern a large Empire upon a plan of freedom?”33 How was a stable balance to be achieved between local institutions and centralized power, obligation and independence, convention and reason? These are the same questions that were raised, albeit implicitly and oten supericially, by images of courtly encounter in the 1790s. And they were questions that seemed equally relevant to representations of St. James’s Palace, the Chinese emperor’s summer lodgings at Jehol, the Tuileries Palace, and the Peshwa’s palace in Poona, India. It was in the later location that a small group of British artists produced yet another substantial visual and textual archive in the years 1792 to 1795 that provides a signiicant counterpoint to that produced by the Macartney expedition. Brought to Poona at the request of Sir Charles Warre Malet, the East India Company Resident at the Maratha court in Poona (present day Pune), James Wales and his assistant Robert Mabon produced a vivid portfolio of daily and courtly life in western India. I have examined this archive on its own terms elsewhere, and it is striking that in Poona, as in Peking, a vast visual portfolio was mined for essentially the same purpose.34 In both cases, a heterodox collection of drawings and paintings was boiled down to a few images of courtly encounter for the London public. TODD PORTERFIELD.indb 69 19/08/2010 15:10:44 70 the efflorescence of caricature, 1759–1838 James Wales died before he could complete the large public canvas that he had projected, but the commission was picked up by Thomas Daniell who exhibited A representation of the delivery of the Ratiied Treaty of 1790 by Sir Charles Warre Malet to his Highness Narrain Peshwa at the 1805 Royal Academy Exhibition in London.35 Despite the exoticism of the locale and the variety of Maratha dress, the painting it comfortably within a rubric of courtly encounter scenes, now familiar to the London public. The cumulative impact of work by Alexander, Daniell, and a great many of their colleagues was to construct a potent iconography for an emergent British “ornamentalism.” Coined by David Cannadine, “ornamentalism” refers to a renewed emphasis on aristocratic signs and courtly protocols in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that helped to assuage and extend British imperial might. It is a term meant to balance what Cannadine sees as the racial preoccupations of “orientalist” discourse with a renewed emphasis on class, arguing that to “the extent that there was a uniied, coherent British imperial enterprise, there is a case for saying that it was the efort to fashion and to tie together the empire abroad in the vernacular image of the domestic, ranked social hierarchy.”36 Compared to the classicizing gestures of academic history painting, scenes of courtly encounter present a “vernacular image” of royal authority embedded in speciic, cultural contexts, which, however exotic their exterior, nonetheless resonate with Burkean theories of government and public common sense. It was in the decisive years of the French Revolution that ornamentalist painting irst came of age, thanks to a unique conjunction of events in Europe and Asia. To take one signiicant example, the treaty between the British and the Marathas of 1790 (commemorated by Wales and Daniell) contributed to the irst major defeat of Tipu Sultan in 1792, whose kingdom of Mysore constituted one of the last major obstacles to British hegemony in southern India. At the conclusion of this military victory General Cornwallis took two of Tipu’s sons as hostages, in order to guarantee Mysorean compliance with the terms of surrender. This exchange became one of the most frequently represented moments in Anglo-Indian history of the eighteenth century, oten assuming the euphemistic title “Lord Cornwallis Receiving the Sons of Tippoo Sahib,” as if the Mysorean princes were received at the “court” of Cornwallis as Macartney had been received in China. While Robert Home produced the only “eye-witness” account of this “courtly” exchange, a host of other, mostly London-based, artists, including Robert Smirke, Arthur William Devis, and Mather Brown, provided their own interpretations.37 The American-born Mather Brown made a specialty of lachrymose parting scenes, including a bombastically overwrought canvas of Louis XVI Saying Farewell to His Family (1793, Hartford Athenaeum).38 Brown interpreted Cornwallis’s victory in a sequence of two paintings, The TODD PORTERFIELD.indb 70 19/08/2010 15:10:44 Douglas Fordham 71 departure of the sons of Tippoo from the zenana and The delivery of the deinitive treaty by the hostage princes to Lord Cornwallis. In the later, Brown cleverly turned a hostage exchange into a legalistic exchange of documents. As Constance McPhee has demonstrated, Brown crafted these images with subtle references to well-known representations of Richard III, effectively equating Tipu’s sons with the Little Princes in the Tower.39 This paradoxically posited Lord Cornwallis as the princes’ knight in shining armor. This is ornamentalism of a particularly condescending stamp, in which Indian governance is compared to the deepest, darkest annals of British medieval history. In actuality, the 1792 hostage exchange reveals a dramatic breakdown in the ability of treaty documents and political giting to ensure mutual compliance between the East India Company and Indian courts. The paternalism implicit in Cornwallis’s “reception” of the Mysorean princes shited British imperial identity in a bold new direction. Cornwallis, standing in for the East India Company and the British throne, did not simply overthrow Tipu’s kingdom, according to this iconography, he replaced it with a more enlightened alternative. This ornamentalist gesture was necessitated, in part, to distinguish it from a parallel set of events in Paris, where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinete were imprisoned and then executed. James Gillray’s prints provide running commentary on this new imperial style—efectively deconstructing a tentative and self-conscious national identity in these fateful years. If ornamentalism proposed a relatively seamless continuity between Britain’s traditional hierarchical structure and those of its colonial possessions, then the Reception of the Diplomatique exposed issures in which Britain’s commercial, constitutional past seemed to preclude a genuinely imperial future. The magpie held in a cage by an ingratiating merchant is both allusive and slippery in this regard. In sailor’s lore a single magpie portended bad luck, while in popular tales it embodied the frivolity of the courtier or the acquisitiveness of the miser. It was perhaps best known from Aesop’s Fables where it chastened the multitude’s recent acclamation of a peacock as their king; “for the eyes of the multitude are so dazzled with pomp and shew, noise and ceremony, that they cannot see things really as they are.”40 The magpie is an anomalous git in Gillray’s satire, falling outside the general economy of toys and games. In true Enlightenment fashion, Gillray may imply that the Chinese emperor represents not simply the exotic “other” but absolute monarchy as it was feared at home—the peacock in our midst. What are the British willing to bow before, the print seems to ask, in pursuit of trade, proit, and empire? This may equally hold the key to Gillray’s use of the French term diplomatique in the title, suggesting something foreign, and even underhanded, about Britain’s new diplomatic style. TODD PORTERFIELD.indb 71 19/08/2010 15:10:44 72 the efflorescence of caricature, 1759–1838 5.3 James Gillray (1756–1815), Presentation of the Mahometan Credentials, or the Final resource of French Atheists, December 26, 1793. Hand-colored etching, 305 × 356 mm. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University These terms are neatly reversed in a perplexing satire that Gillray published one year later entitled Presentation of the Mahometan Credentials, or the Final Resource of French Atheists (Figure 5.3). The print places the expansionist designs of the new French Republic in the hands of the Turkish ambassador to England. The treaty document, which had been the centerpiece of works by Alexander, Daniell, Brown, and others, is converted into a phallic display of national “credentials.” More scandalous than the size of these credentials, however, is the fact that they now penetrate the British throne room. The treaty document reads “Powers for a new Connexion between the Port, England & France” and ridicules the eforts of Whig politicians, including Charles James Fox, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Joseph Priestley, to ind common ground with Revolutionary France. Why Gillray represents the Turkish “Port” as a third, or mediating party, in this courtly encounter remains TODD PORTERFIELD.indb 72 19/08/2010 15:10:45 Douglas Fordham 73 a mystery.41 The obscurity of the allusion only airms “imperial encounter” as a self-perpetuating phantasmagoria, perfectly legible within an ornamentalist visual tradition. The satire’s sexual innuendo is easier to locate, drawn directly from a salacious popular song from the 1780s. The song ridicules the Turkish ambassador at the English court in a series of verses that share a single preoccupation: When he came to the court, oh! what giggle and sport, Such squinting and squeezing to view him; What envy and spleen in the women were seen, All happy and pleas’d to get to him: They vow’d in their hearts if man of such Parts Were found on the Coast of Barbary, Twas a shame not to bring a whole guard for the King, Like the great Plenipotentiary.42 What Gillray’s print gets so terribly right is the notion, running throughout representations of courtly encounter in these years, that Britain’s rivalry with Revolutionary France extended across the globe in displays of national potency. The carnivalesque transformation of treaty into phallus reduces the legalistic rhetoric of painters and politicians to base human desire and virile display. Whether Gillray projected those desires onto greedy merchants, French revolutionaries, or Turkish ambassadors, they unfailingly doubled back onto British anxieties and domestic politics. There is a inal anecdote from Gillray’s biography that complements, or at least complicates, the satirist’s meeting with George III. The story comes from the artist John Landseer who sent a leter to the editor of The Athenaeum magazine in 1830, responding to an overwhelmingly negative review of Gillray’s career, published two weeks earlier.43 Some time between 1792 and 1794, based on the skeletal timeline provided by Landseer, Gillray atended a “Society for the relief of decayed artists,” where toasts were raised around the room. When it came to Gillray, the Juvenal of caricature surprised those who knew him but supericially, by proposing that we should drink David! (the French painter). He was by this time a litle elated, having become pleased with his associates, and having drowned his reserve in the low of soul, and, kneeling reverentially upon his chair as he pronounced the name of the (supposed) irst painter and patriot in Europe, he expressed a wish that the rest of the company would do the same.44 Richard Godfrey opened the 2001 Gillray exhibition catalogue with this story, noting that “Proposed in drunken irony or not, this must be one of the most incongruous toasts in the history of art. The two artists stood at the furthest extremes of style and purpose.”45 TODD PORTERFIELD.indb 73 19/08/2010 15:10:45 74 the efflorescence of caricature, 1759–1838 While their style could not have been more diferent, I am not so sure about their purpose. At least in the heady months that composed 1792, 1793, and 1794, artistic hierarchies, like their social and political equivalents, had never looked more tentative or arbitrary. Never had the style of governance been more transparent or luid. There is no point diminishing, of course, the diferent venues in which James Gillray’s and Jacques-Louis David’s work appeared, or the generic limitations on history painting and graphic satire in Enlightenment culture. And yet, one of the most striking aspects of Gillray’s toast, if Landseer is to be trusted, is the intense personal identiication that Gillray seems to have felt for the “painter and patriot” Jacques-Louis David. Taking that ainity seriously, if even for a moment, reveals deep allegorical impulses in the work of both artists that linked their ostensible subject mater to the health and welfare of the Nation. And it is here, as Angus Fletcher has noted, that the highest and lowest forms of art occasionally converge. For both Gillray and David produced “symbolic power structures” in which “satirical criticism and the apocalyptical escape into an ininite space and time tend toward high human goals.”46 This is a deeply Romantic view of Gillray’s mission, and one that Gillray himself may have sensed only in manic or drunken episodes. But for all of Gillray’s political opportunism and xenophobic vitriol, this anecdote captures something essential about his work—about the very excessiveness that is a hallmark of it. Gillray’s prints demolished the “natural” world, presenting it as a complex assemblage of signs and painfully transparent ideologies. This made his work indispensable, I am suggesting, to our understanding of British ornamentalism at its inception. It also opens up a space through which to view the idealism of Macartney’s mission, and in Gillray’s print, his features. I have yet to mention the most obvious contrast in the Reception of the Diplomatique, between an obese, talon-nailed emperor and a genteel British lord. On a fundamental level, Gillray believed in the superiority of Western culture and expressed a patriotic atachment to the British state. Even on bended knee Macartney retains a dignity to which Gillray could relate when “kneeling reverentially,” he ofered a toast to “the painter and patriot” Jacques-Louis David. More subtle than a denunciation of Britain’s expanding global inluence, Gillray denounced those who would trivialize that power through greed and self-interest. In these satires Gillray articulates an ornamentalist ideal even as he ridicules its symbolic failures and lapses. And as critical as Gillray may be of the elorescence of consumer goods at Macartney’s feet, there is a nagging sense that graphic satire belonged to this world of commodities. The collection of Boydell engravings at the emperor’s feet brings this paradox to the surface, recalling the dependence of Gillray’s satires upon the commercial ambition of others. This is not to undermine the power of Gillray’s critique, but rather to suggest that his engravings were both symptom and palliative of a feverish TODD PORTERFIELD.indb 74 19/08/2010 15:10:45 Douglas Fordham 75 conjunction of royal, mercantile, and imperial iconographies in the 1790s. It was a conjunction strange enough to bring a notorious caricaturist to the king’s door, where Gillray was extended the privilege of kneeling before His Majesty. Notes This chapter has beneited greatly from invitations to speak on the subject by Finbarr Barry Flood, Nebahat Avcioglu, and Geof Quilley, the critical insights of Todd Porterield and Carmenita Higginbotham, and the support of my colleagues in the McIntire Department of Art, University of Virginia. 1. These descriptions come from the German journalist Johann Christian Hütner and Henry Angelo respectively, and are cited in Richard Godfrey, James Gillray: The Art of Caricature, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), p. 18. 2. I refer to Gillray’s Monstrous Craws at a New Coalition Feast (1787) and The Hopes of the Party, prior to July 14th — “From such wicked Crown and Anchor-Dreams, good Lord deliver us” (1791). The innovations of the former are the subject of Lora Rempel, “Carnal Satire and the Constitutional King: George III in James Gillray’s Monstrous Craws at a New Coalition Feast,” Art History, 18/1 (March 1995): 4–23, which helpfully sets the stage for satirical representations of monarchy on the eve of the French Revolution. 3. Henry Angelo, The Reminiscences of Henry Angelo (2 vols, New York: B. Blom, 1969), vol. 1, p. 297. Angelo irst published his Reminiscences in 1828. This passage is quoted with some inaccuracy in Godfrey, James Gillray: The Art of Caricature, p. 17. 4. Angelo goes on to claim that Gillray “immediately sketched out on the copper that most humorous print, A Connoisseur looking at a Cooper, which so far from ofending, exceedingly amused the King.” Ibid., p. 297. This is chronologically inaccurate, since the print was published on June 18, 1792, one year before Gillray departed for Valenciennes. Malcolm Fare refers to the Reminiscences of Henry Angelo as “entertaining, if oten unreliable.” Fare, “Angelo, Domenico (1717–1802),” in H.C.G. Mathew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) (htp://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/544, accessed September 12, 2007). 5. C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989); Maya Jasanof, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York: Knopf, 2005). 6. London Chronicle, July 6–7, August 2, August 16, 1792, etc…. Cited in M. Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum (London: British Museum Publications for the Trustees of the British Museum, 1978), vol. 6, pp. 926–7. This print is catalogue number 8121. 7. “Gillray’s basic premise is that it was greed not patriotism that motivated Boydell.” Godfrey, James Gillray: The Art of Caricature, p. 82. 8. Finbarr Barry Flood, “Correct Delineations and Promiscuous Outlines: Envisioning India at the Trial of Warren Hastings,” Art History, 29/1 (February 2006): 47–78. 9. Aeneas Anderson, A Narrative of the British Embassy to China, in the years 1792, 1793, and 1794; containing the various circumstances of the embassy; with accounts of the customs and manners of the Chinese; and a description of the country, towns, cities, &c. (2nd edn, London: printed for J. Debret, 1795), pp. 262–3. 10. Ibid., pp. 264–5. 11. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 1–147; Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); and Barbara Maria Staford, Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment, and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 12. Thomas Hickey was employed as “painter” and William Alexander as “draughtsman,” although the former did litle to earn his wages. Compare this with the more conscientious division of TODD PORTERFIELD.indb 75 19/08/2010 15:10:45 76 the efflorescence of caricature, 1759–1838 artistic labor that took place on the Captain Cook voyages to the South Paciic. David Bindman, “‘Philanthropy seems natural to mankind:’ Hodges and Captain Cook’s Second Voyage to the South Seas,” in Geof Quilley and John Bonehill (eds), William Hodges, 1744–1797: The Art of Exploration (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press for the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 2004), pp. 21–6. 13. This emphasis is summarized by Frances Wood: “Alexander’s contribution lay above all in the direct communication of the China he saw from the boats on which he travelled.” Wood, “Closely Observed China: From William Alexander’s Sketches to his Published Work,” The British Library Journal, 24/1 (Spring 1998): 98–121, p. 98. 14. The approach of the Emperor of China to his tent in Tartary to receive the British Ambassador, the other major composition that Alexander worked up from second-hand studies, depicted a slightly earlier moment of the same event. For a detailed analysis of the evolution of this design, see Susan Legouix, “Lord Macartney’s Audience with the Emperor of China; a Composition by William Alexander,” Connoisseur, 250/804 (February 1979): 122–7. 15. This was no minor concession, and the historical import of Macartney’s modiication of “The Tribute System” constitutes a major theme in the historiography of Chinese foreign relations. See James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 16. Anderson, A Narrative of the British Embassy to China, p. 271. 17. BL Image 011158 from Album of 278 “Drawings of Landscapes, Coastlines, Costumes and Everyday Life Made During Lord Macartney’s Embassy to the Emperor of China.” 18. BL Add 35174: William Alexander, “Journal of a Voyage to Pekin in China on board the Hindostan EJM which accompanied Lord Macartney on his Embassy to the Emperor,” p. 24. 19. Todd Porterield distinguishes between these rhetorical modes, and examines the emergence of a reactionary modernist visual vocabulary in Jacques-Louis David’s representation of Le Sacre. Todd Porterield and Susan L. Siegfried, Staging Empire: Napoleon, Ingres, and David (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), pp. 115–85. The works discussed in this essay provide an intringuing anticipation of this visual vocabulary, and suggest the relevance of Porterield and Siegfried’s analysis to British art of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period. 20. “Indeed, what was formerly known in the trade as ‘toy’ gingerbread is now unseen in the streets, except occasionally, and that only when the whole has not been sold at the neighbouring fairs, at which it is still ofered. But, even at these fairs, the principal, and sometimes the only, toy gingerbread that is vended is the ‘cock in breeches;’ a formidable-looking bird, with his nether garments of gold.” Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London: Cass, 1851), vol. 1, p. 200. 21. Undated manuscript entry from volume IV of the Maynard Collection in the County Record Oice, Cambridge. Cited in Judith Allen, “It Is the Custom in This Village,” Folklore, 92/1 (1981): 56–76, p. 73. 22. While making no reference to gingerbread, Dorothy George cites a similar motif in a Rowlandson print entitled Procession to the Hustings ater a Successful Canvass, No: 14 (1784) in which the Duchess of Devonshire holds “up on a pole a pair of breeches inscribed Man of the People, and surmounted by a crowing cock,” reinforcing the symbols’ politial resonance. George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, vol. 6, catalogue number 6564. 23. Dorothy George notes that “the two most prominent are identiied as Sir George Staunton, secretary to the Embassy, and Hutner,” although who made this identiication is unclear, since I remember no handwriten identiications on the BL copy of the print. George nonetheless continues that “Staunton … does not conspicuously resemble his portrait ….” Ibid., vol. 6, p. 927. 24. Gillray would go on to produce Britannia between Scylla & Charybdis. The Vessel of the Constitution steered clear of the Rock of Democracy and the Whirlpool of Arbitrary Power, published April 1793. 25. P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688–2000 (2nd edn, New York and London: Longman, 2001), p. 46. 26. Ibid., p. 102. 27. J.L. Cranmer-Byng (ed.), An Embassy to China; Being the Journal Kept by Lord Macartney during his Embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-lung 1793–1794 (New York: Longman, 1962), p. 340. 28. For more on the problematic representation of the nabob, see David H. Solkin, “‘Conquest, usurpation, wealth, luxury, famine:’ Mortimer’s Banditi and the Anxieties of Empire,” in Tim TODD PORTERFIELD.indb 76 19/08/2010 15:10:45 Douglas Fordham 77 Barringer, Geof Quilley, and Douglas Fordham (eds), Art and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 120–38. See also E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800–1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001) for a fascinating examination of the “transformation of the early nineteenth-century nabob from the lamboyant, efeminate and wealthy East India Company servant, open to Indian inluence and into whose self-identity India was incorporated, to the sahib, a sober, bureaucratic representative of the Crown” (p. 3). 29. Roland Thorne, “Macartney, George, Earl Macartney (1737–1806),” in H.C.G. Mathew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) (htp://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/17341, accessed September 12, 2007). 30. Anderson, A Narrative of the British Embassy to China, p. 219. 31. Ibid., pp. 272–5. 32. This print was published on September 20, 1792. Diana Donald captures the tone and frenetic energy of the print when she notes that “the treatment of their outrages suggests a kind of comic phenomenology, rather than a serious moral indictment—pathos is conspicuously absent.” Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 145. 33. From Burke’s “Ryder Diaries,” cited and discussed at greater length in Richard Bourke, “Liberty, Authority, and Trust in Burke’s Idea of Empire,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 61/3 (2000): 453–71, p. 455. See also Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 1–74. 34. Douglas Fordham, “Costume Dramas: British Art at the Court of the Marathas,” Representations, 101 (Winter 2008): 57–85. 35. This painting is currently in Tate stores, London, waiting to be accessioned. 36. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. xix. 37. Mildred Archer, India and British Portraiture, 1770–1825 (London and New York: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1979), pp. 263–5, and 308–309. 38. For precedents and ideological implications of this kind of scene, see Alexandra K. Wetlaufer, “Absent Fathers, Martyred Mothers: Domestic Drama and (Royal) Family Values in A Graphic History of Louis the Sixteenth,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 23/3 (1999): 1–37. 39. Constance C. McPhee, “Tipu Sultan of Mysore and British Medievalism in the Paintings of Mather Brown,” in Julie F. Codell and Dianne Sachko Macleod (eds), Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 203–215, pp. 202–203. 40. Samuel Croxall, Fables of Aesop and Others: Translated into English. With Instructive Applications (London: A. Millar, 1797), pp. 254–5. The quote is taken from Croxall’s “instructive applications.” 41. According to Dorothy George, “The print has litle political relevance and probably derives from jests on the Turkish plenipotentiary,” although it is possible that a speciic reference has yet to be identiied. George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, vol. 7, pp. 46–7. Neither political party fares well in the print with Fox, Sheridan, and Priestley grovelling on the side of the Turks, while a pygmy-like creature with Pit’s features clutches at the king’s leg. Gillray’s satire may draw upon the French fashion for Turkish masquerades, examined in Julia Landweber, “Celebrating Identity: Charting the History of Turkish Masquerade in Early Modern France,” Romance Studies, 23/3 (2005): 175–89. 42. Captain Morris, “The Plenipotentiary,” A Complete Collection of Songs by Captain Morris (5th edn, London: [s.n.], 1787), p. 3. This verse was also transcribed beneath a more discreet social satire by Isaac Cruikshank entitled A Peep at the Plenipo from 1794. 43. Anonymous, “James Gillray and his Caricatures,” The Athenaeum, 205 (1 October 1831): 632–34. 44. John Landseer, “Mr. Landseer’s Apology for James Gillray,” The Athenaeum, 207 (15 October 1831): 667–8, p. 667. 45. Godfrey, James Gillray: The Art of Caricature, p. 11. Landseer clearly suggests that the toast was in earnest, and uses it to exculpate Gillray’s later capitulation to the Tories. Gillray “was a reluctant ally of the Tory faction,” and, despite the fact that he accepted a Tory pension in the later 1790s to avoid political and religious prosecution, “his heart was always on the side of whiggism and liberty.” Landseer, “Mr. Landseer’s Apology for James Gillray,” p. 667. TODD PORTERFIELD.indb 77 19/08/2010 15:10:46 78 46. the efflorescence of caricature, 1759–1838 Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1964), p. 23. It is worth recalling that David made his own anti-British satires during the French Revolution, possibly revealing a debt to Gillray. Vincent Carreta, “Satires on Seats of Power in the Age of Hogarth and Gillray,” in Joachim Moller (ed.), Hogarth in Context: Ten Essays and a Bibliography (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1996), pp. 87–105. In the most extreme form of this convergence, it has been suggested that David adapted Gillray’s Sin, Death, and the Devil for Les Sabines. Karen Domenici, “James Gillray: An English Source for David’s Les Sabines,” The Art Bulletin, 65/3 (September 1983): 493–5. TODD PORTERFIELD.indb 78 19/08/2010 15:10:46