Artists and Pirates: Satirical Prints in Georgian London and Dublin

A cura di Silvia Beltrametti e William Laffan ISBN: 978-88-7038-593-9 pp. 184, ill. col. 192 year 2025 price: € 30
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Single sheet satire – caricature – emerged in the louche milieu where politics and high society of late Georgian London intersected. Artists such as James Gillray (1756-1815) and Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827) combined devastating wit with graphic brilliance to lampoon the great and the good, the vain and the vacuous, and create timeless images inspired by moments of fleeting controversy or scandal.

Availing of a legal loophole, under which copyright law protecting images did not apply to Ireland, a business of pirating caricatures by London satirists also flourished in Regency Dublin. The work of these Dublin plagiarists – which though derivative is paradoxically inventive and vibrant – as well as prints of Irish subject matter by English caricaturists such as Gillray – is the subject of a new book Artists and Pirates: Satirical Prints in Georgian London and Dublin.

Caricature dealt both with the great political issues of the day, religious toleration and contested concepts of liberty, but was also a vehicle to explore less elevated often risqué, sometimes scatological or pornographic, subject matter. Single-sheet satire, Georgian England's greatest artistic innovation and its smaller but still dynamic offshoot in early nineteenth-century Dublin offer a compelling, ever fascinating – and very funny – chronicle of the human comedy.

This publication coincides with an exhibition of the same title at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin, running from 13 November 2025 until 8 January 2026 and at the Driehaus Museum, Chicago, opening May 2026.