Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 13.djvu/265

  of the Gillray and Rowlandson type. Two examples of his water-colours, ‘The Lost Child’ and ‘The Child Found,’ are included in the William Smith gift to the South Kensington Museum, and he appears to have exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1789–90 and 1792. In 1791 his signature as designer is affixed to ‘Mrs. Thrale's Breakfast Table,’ the frontispiece to a book entitled ‘Witticisms and Jests of Dr. Samuel Johnson.’ One of the earliest of his political squibs, according to Wright (History of Caricature and Grotesque, 1865, p. 488), is entitled ‘A Republican Belle,’ and dated 10 March 1794. Many of his subsequent plates, e.g. ‘The Royal Extinguisher’ (Pitt putting out the flames of sedition), 1795; ‘Billy's Raree Show,’ 1797; ‘The Watchman of the State,’ 1797; ‘The British Menagerie,’ 1798; ‘John Bull troubled with the Blue Devils’ (taxes), 1799; and ‘A Flight across the Herring Pond’ (Irish fugitive patriots descending upon England), 1800, had a vogue hardly inferior to that of Gillray. Others of his designs, such as the well-known ‘The Rage; or, Shepherds, I have lost my Waist,’ 1794, were purely social, or dealt with the enormities of fashion. His latest political effort is dated 19 April 1810, and is entitled ‘The Last Grand Ministerial Expedition.’ It relates to the riot on the arrest of Sir Francis Burdett for a libellous letter in Cobbett's ‘Register,’ and ‘shows,’ says Mr. Wright, ‘that Cruikshank was at this time caricaturing on the radical side in politics.’ He also did numerous illustrations and humorous designs for Laurie & Whittle of 53 Fleet Street, and etched many lottery tickets. Soon after he settled in London he married a Miss Mary Macnaughten, who came of a Perth family. Beyond the fact that he was a volunteer, and the father of and  [q. v.], little more is known of him. His death, which was accelerated by habits of intemperance, is supposed to have taken place in 1810 or 1811.



CRUIKSHANK, ISAAC ROBERT, or ROBERT (1789–1856), caricaturist and miniature-painter, eldest son of [q. v.], was born in Duke Street, Bloomsbury, on 27 Sept. 1789. After some elementary education, followed by a brief practice of art under his father, he went to sea as a midshipman in the East India Company's ship Perseverance. Returning from his first voyage, he was left behind at St. Helena by an accident, and made his way home in a whaler, to the astonishment of his relatives, who had believed him dead. He found that his younger brother George had made considerable progress as an artist during his absence, and he seems to have relinquished seafaring to follow in his steps. When his father died he kept on the house in Dorset Street, Salisbury Square, to which the family had moved from Duke Street, and occupied himself, not unsuccessfully, in miniature and portrait painting. In his earlier days he made, among other theatrical studies, many sketches of Edmund Kean, with whom he and his brother had formed an intimacy which continued long after the actor had ceased to be obscure. At his marriage the Cruikshank family migrated to King Street, Holborn, where he had the good fortune to succeed in obtaining (through the keyhole) a sitting, or sittings, from old Mrs. Garrick, then in her ninetieth year, and visiting one of his mother's lodgers. From King Street he passed to more fashionable quarters in St. James's Place, St. James's Street, still chiefly occupying himself as a miniature-painter, but occasionally varying his work with the caricatures and comic sketches affected by his junior. By-and-by he devoted himself almost exclusively to humorous art. One of the earliest known of his efforts in this way is an etching, after the design of an amateur, of the Princess Charlotte in a fit of rebellion at the paternal tyranny which sought to interrupt her intercourse with her unhappy mother. It is dated April 1816, when he was six-and-twenty, and is entitled ‘The Mother's Girl Plucking a Crow, or German Flesh and English Spirit.’ His most fertile field, however, seems to have lain in endless graphic satire of the fantastic exquisites of his day, the laced and padded and trussed and top-booted monstrosities that English eccentricity had elaborated from French post-revolutionary extravagance. Dandies en chemisette, dandies tight-lacing, dandies at tea, dandies on the hobby-horses which anticipated the modern bicycle; these alternated under his pencil with sketches of the regent and the injured Caroline, records of popular scandals, such as the liaison of Colonel Berkeley with Maria Foote the actress, and portraits of characters as diverse as Madame Catalani, the singer, and Seurat, the ‘living skeleton.’ One of the best of his purely political efforts was prompted by the French intervention in Spain of 1823. It represents John Bull flourishing in an attitude of strict neutrality—a neutrality enforced by his confinement in the stocks and fetters of a national debt and overwhelming war taxes.

By 1820 Robert Cruikshank had an ac-