THE REMARKABLE STORY told by Richard Spear in his article in this issue (pp.520–27) illuminates the vicious controversies that explode from time to time in the London art world. Over the centuries, quarrels and disagreements have riddled relations between artists and their patrons; and fallings-out between artists and critics have provided, at the least, some retrospective colour to the social history of more recent art, Whistler versus Ruskin being the most celebrated case. But, as the reader soon discovers, the story of the luckless Antoine Dubost and the importunate Thomas Hope went beyond a one-to-one disagreement and embroiled several leading figures in London’s competitive and tight-knit world of artists, writers and journalists. Dubost’s initial success as a French artist in the English capital eventually worked against him and Hope had no scruples in putting it abroad that Dubost was a French spy. Nor was Dubost helped by rousing the jealous enmity of Benjamin West. The attentions of a press that had little respect for discretion or the rights of privacy, and the rapid distribution of printed caricatures that hit hard, threw such personal quarrels into the public domain.

Such conditions are the meat and drink of a highly entertaining and informative exhibition Satirical London currently on view at the Museum of London (to 3rd September).1 Although restricted to the capital, the depictions, selected from over three centuries, of its horrors and follies, celebrities and characters, are universally recognisable. The moods swing from mildly scornful and affectionately mocking to bitter and vitriolic. No one escapes – royalty, politicians, philanthropists, parvenus, quacks, tarts and drunks. There are prints, drawings, paintings, puppets and souvenirs. Among the represented artists, Hogarth is king, but James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank are princes of the blood. Rowlandson is particularly well served with nearly forty works, all showing an appetite for the human comedy and a delight in physical singularities that is surely only equalled by Dickens. Other well-known figures are more sparingly shown. We find Wenceslaus Hollar begetting, via Leonardo, the grotesque heads of many a later satire; James Tissot working for Vanity Fair; and a teenage Millais sending up the militia. Single drawings by Charles Keene and George Belcher are displayed alongside the published versions, showing how much of their delicate draughtsmanship was lost in the transfer to newsprint. Although the exhibition focuses on the later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, a sampling of recent cartoons and caricatures (Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman are outstanding here) shows that the native tradition of comic outrage has lost none of its bite.

One particularly absorbing section concentrates on the London art world, each work pointing up its pretensions, gullibility and frequent confusion of social and cultural values. The gentlest image is Robert Dighton’s The specious orator (Fig.I), a portrait of Mr Christie on the rostrum exhorting a lady of fashion to spend £50,000 – ‘a mere trifle’. But even here, the relaxed self-confidence of his pose and the set affability of his features suggest the smoothest of operators. Rowlandson and A.C. Pugin give a sharper edge in their Exhibition Room, Somerset House in which the crowd is seen gossiping, reading, yawning – even looking at the pictures on the walls. But it is Gillray who strikes a really rebarbative note in his Titianus redivivus, an attack on the Royal Academy of Arts. He shows several Academicians, including Opie, Westall and Hoppner, who had been duped by one Anna Provis who let it be known she had discovered a manual containing the secrets of Venetian painting techniques, especially those of Titian. Gillray lampoons the Academicians sitting along a bench, while Miss Provis, on a rainbow in the sky, paints a ‘Titian’; the ghost of the late President, Sir Joshua, emerges from a stone in the floor, intoning technical mumbo-jumbo.

The Academy makes one last appearance, as host to Sensation in 1997 when new British art invaded the galleries of Burlington House. Other cartoons vilifying the Turner Prize and Tate Modern offer that combination of ridicule and protest, aesthetes and philistines, that immediately returns us to the world of Dubost and Hope, nearly two centuries before.

1  Catalogue: The Art of Satire. London in Caricature. By Mark Bills. 228 pp. incl. 243 ills. in col. and b. & w. (Museum of London/Philip Wilson Publishers, London, 2006), £30. ISBN 0–85667–613–3.