The life of George Cruikshank Author:Blanchard Jerrold Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Emerald cut Emerald :—" Are yon a vafdk-man ? "—From .' More Mornings at Bow Street." CHAPTER IV. CRUIK8HANK AS A POLITICAL CARICATURIST. It is rec... more »orded that when it was proposed to cast a statue of Sir Robert Peel, the portrait selected as most striking in its resemblance, most faithful to his natural expression, was found in a cartoon by John Leech, published in Punch; and that from this drawing the head was modelled. The caricaturist is something more than the mere portrait-painter, who produces his work after a few sittings, and with his model in a set position. Gillray, for example, spent his life in studying his subjects. He had never finished observing Pitt, and Fox, and Burke, and Sheridan. From his vantage-ground over Mrs. Humphrey's shop in St. James's Street, he caught his victims unawares. He was familiar with every angle and every shade of expression of the public men who were his unconscious sitters. In the same way, Leech snatched a sitting Pitt, however, paid the great pictorial satirist the compliment of giving him sittings for a serious portrait. from Peel and Palmerston, Lord John and Wellington, and thrust the sketch safely into his waistcoat pocket, in that small note-book which he always carried. And thus the public figures which Sandby and Gillray, Sayer, Bunbury, Rowlandson, the Cruikshanks, the elder Doyle, Leech, Doyle, and Tenniel have fixed with their needles or pencils upon their cartoons, present to us men and manners living as they rose, with a vividness and truth and force the value of which can hardly be exaggerated. Estimate, if you can, the treasure a Gillray of the time of Henry VIII., a Leech of the Commonwealth, a Cruikshank contemporaneous with Shakspeare, would be! As I have already noted, the art of the caricaturist ...« less