Politics

Political printmaking is among the oldest and most continuous traditions in the history of printed imagery. From the Reformation broadsheets of the sixteenth century to the sophisticated political caricature of the Georgian era, from the illustrated political press of the Victorian period to the propagandist imagery of the early twentieth century, prints have served the purposes of political communication, persuasion and satire with a consistency that reflects both the power of the printed image and the persistent human need to represent, criticise and celebrate the exercise of political power. The antique prints in this collection document that long tradition across its full chronological and thematic range.

British political caricature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries represents the high point of the tradition, and the prints produced by Gillray, Rowlandson, Cruikshank and their contemporaries are among the most celebrated in the entire history of printmaking. Working in an era of extraordinary political drama — the American Revolution, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the long struggle for parliamentary reform — these artists produced images of savage wit, technical brilliance and genuine political insight that have never been surpassed as vehicles of satirical commentary. The political figures of the period — Pitt, Fox, Burke, Napoleon, George III and the Prince of Wales — were depicted with a freedom and ferocity that would have been inconceivable in most of contemporary Europe, and the resulting prints are primary documents of British political culture at one of its most creative and contentious moments.

Colonial Australian politics generated its own tradition of political illustration, centred on the illustrated press of the colonies and the satirical magazines — the Melbourne Punch, the Sydney Punch and their successors — that provided commentary on the political life of the self-governing colonies from the 1850s onwards. The great political questions of colonial politics — land reform, labour rights, federation, the tariff question — were addressed in illustrations of considerable graphic quality, and the politicians who dominated colonial public life were depicted with a wit and irreverence that reflected the democratic character of colonial society. These Australian political prints are of particular interest to collectors of Australian history and to those concerned with the development of political culture in the British settler colonies.

Commemorative political prints — celebrating military victories, marking the deaths of great statesmen, recording the ceremonial occasions of political life — form a distinct category within political printmaking. The death of Nelson, the funeral of Wellington, the coronations of successive British monarchs, the inauguration of American presidents — all generated printed imagery that combined documentary record with the emotional and symbolic functions of commemorative art. These prints document both the events they record and the political emotions they were designed to evoke.

Electoral imagery — the cartoons, broadsides and illustrated addresses produced in connection with specific elections and political campaigns — is of particular interest to historians of democratic politics. These ephemeral objects, produced in the heat of specific political contests, preserve evidence of the arguments, images and emotional appeals that shaped political competition in the pre-broadcast era with a specificity that no other source can match.

For collectors of political history, social history or the history of graphic art, antique political prints offer material of exceptional historical richness and consistent visual interest. They connect the world of printmaking to the history of democratic politics in a way that illuminates both, and significant original examples from the major traditions of political illustration are increasingly scarce on the open market.