You are not Cruikshank

David Bromwich: Gillray’s Mischief, 21 September 2023

James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire 
by Tim Clayton.
Yale, 400 pp., £50, November 2022, 978 1 913107 32 1
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Uproar! Satire, Scandal and Printmakers in Georgian London 
by Alice Loxton.
Icon, 397 pp., £25, March, 978 1 78578 954 0
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Media Critique in the Age of Gillray: Scratches, Scraps and Spectres 
by Joseph Monteyne.
Toronto, 301 pp., £49.99, June 2022, 978 1 4875 2774 7
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... Offering to Avarice. Gillray’s visual commentary took in, among others, West’s Fool from King Lear, Fuseli’s Bottom and John Opie’s Perdita. The cram of mock-laudations has the effect of reducing the stature of every painter who strove to exalt himself by association with Shakespeare. The claim to distinction by any of the crowd is sunk and scrambled ...