Habits of New French Legislators
London: H. Humphrey, 1798. Item #02603
One of the Great Rarities of Gillray's Political Caricature
The Complete Twelve-Plate Habits of New French Legislators in Contemporary Hand-Color
[GILLRAY, James.] Habits of New French Legislators and other Public Functionaries. London: H. Humphrey, 1798.
First edition. Complete, comprising both published series.
Folio (plate marks approximately 260 x 195 mm.). Twelve magnificent contemporary hand-colored engravings, executed in etching with stipple and aquatint, each numbered 1-12 and captioned in both English and French.
Preserved loose, as issued, in a blue cloth portfolio. An exceptionally fresh and beautifully colored set.
A remarkable survival and among the rarest of all Gillray's published suites.
Published by Hannah Humphrey during the turbulent years of the French Revolutionary Wars, these twelve caricatures constitute one of Gillray's most sustained political campaigns. Rather than attacking the French Revolution directly, Gillray brilliantly imagines leading members of the English Whig opposition transformed into absurd officials of a revolutionary French republic. By dressing Charles James Fox, the Duke of Bedford, Lord Erskine, Francis Burdett, and their political allies in extravagant pseudo-French official costume, he satirizes what he regarded as their dangerous sympathy for revolutionary principles.
Each plate assigns one of Gillray's political opponents an imaginary republican office - from Minister of State and Member of the Executive Directory to Public Executioner, Judge, Treasurer, and Messenger of State - creating a visual parody of revolutionary government whose wit and inventiveness remain among the finest achievements of eighteenth-century political caricature. Individually the prints are celebrated; complete sets are of the utmost rarity.
The series appeared in two parts. The first, published on 18 April 1798, depicts Charles James Fox, the Duke of Norfolk, the Marquis of Lansdowne, the Duke of Grafton, Francis Russell (Duke of Bedford), Horne Tooke, George Tierney, and other prominent opposition politicians. A second series, issued on 21 May 1798, extends the satire to Lord Erskine, Sir George Shuckburgh, William Courtenay, Sir William Pulteney, Sir Francis Burdett, and additional Whig figures, completing one of the most ambitious political print sequences of Gillray's career.
David Low rightly observed that Gillray's genius lay in transforming political invective into enduring works of art. His caricatures may be exuberantly vulgar, but they are never merely comic; each plate is carefully constructed to expose political pretension through costume, gesture, and theatrical staging. In the present series, his invention reaches a particularly high level, using the language of official portraiture itself as the vehicle for devastating satire.
Exceedingly rare complete. The work is unrecorded by Abbey, Tooley, and Ray. The British Museum preserves only an incomplete series, while OCLC locates only a single complete institutional copy, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Such evidence suggests that remarkably few complete sets have survived, making this one of the great rarities among Gillray's published political suites.
A superb example of one of the most elusive monuments of eighteenth-century British caricature - complete, brilliantly hand-colored, and preserved exactly as collectors hope to find it.
Price: $11,500.00