Low's Forebears

Last week England's great Cartoonist David Low returned for the third time to gaze his fill at an art exhibition in London. What fascinated him was not the work of any contemporary, but 317 devilish clever and prodigiously scurrilous drawings, French and English, from the Great Age of Caricature--1750 to 1850. A bit of hands-across-the-sea, this show was timed by its sponsors, the Anglo-French Art & Travel Society, to coincide with Anglo-French political rapprochement, as a similar show of English caricatures in Paris last spring anticipated the visit of the King & Queen (TIME, March 14, 1938).

David Low at his most biting is gentlemanly compared to his cartooning forebears. Hogarth set the pace for English caricaturists in the 18th Century, and his followers, Rowlandson, Gillray, the Cruikshanks et al., set the pace for the French. In their work the age of the first three King Georges and the Regency appears unmatched in history for sheer beef-eating, blowzy, bullyragging license. Famous caricatures in the show included Isaac Cruikshank's credited Belly Piece Shop in which various court ladies of marked posterior inflation are being fitted to boot with anterior pads labeled one, two, four, six and nine months.

French caricaturists like Debucourt and Vernet were more delicate if less vigorous draftsmen, though they early showed a fondness for scatological as well as lubricous humor. To such a gross commentary as Rowlandson's The Arch Duchess Marie Louise going to have her Nap (showing the future Empress of France in bed with Napoleon), Satirist Carle Vernet was able to reply with an incomparably more subtle study called Les Anglais a Paris, three figures of a girl, a fat boy, and a military popinjay which still contain nearly all the French have to say about the English character.

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