Treasures From the Archives

"Du Maurier pokes fun at London society's fascination with the exotic by showing fashionable young women fawning over a burly Australian street performer as their perplexed male companions look on. The celebrity sprawls in a throne-like chair and is fanned by ladies who offer him tea. Text below reveals details of "Kangaroo Jim's" rough early life in Fiji. The image was published in "Punch" on July 2, 1887 and responds to current issues such as Darwinism. The artist had a significant impact on British culture from the 1860s through the 1890s as a talented illustrator, popular cartoonist, and author of the novel "Trilby" (1894)."

"At a celebratory dinner, the "Genius of Caricature" sits at the head wearing a harlequin suit and offering a toast, with "Lilliputians" around the table. An arch at the back is lettered: "Mirth Admit Me of Thy Crew" (a quote from Milton's L'Allegro) and the walls are hung with images from the magazine, each titled below. A toast master holds a lettered banner that reads: "Mr Tegg, M' Tegg,! You're at home to a peg, Volume two is now fairly completed Then to Cheapside repair, Ye who spurn at dull care, And with, Wit, Fun, & Frolic be treated With Woodward we'll laugh, And with Rowlandson quaff, And drown every Folly absurd, Here's a toast to the brim My gay children of Whim, Success to their Volume the Third""

"On January 18, 1779, the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania passed a resolution commissioning a portrait of George Washington for the Council Chamber and selected Charles Willson Peale as the artist. In preparation, Peale traveled to the Princeton and Trenton battlefields in February of 1779 to make sketches for the background. The original portrait, the full-length version now in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, was a tremendous success and Peale completed numerous copies for royal palaces abroad, each time updating the general's military dress. This figure of George Washington was probably painted between June and August of 1780. In every other version, Washington is shown after the Battle of Princeton, but here he is depicted after the Battle of Trenton, the turning point of the war. It has been suggested that this portrait was commissioned upon the order of Mrs. Washington, because it is the only portrait in which Washington wears his state sword and because the painting descended in the Washington family."

"Van der Meulen was born in Brussels and entered the service of French king Louis XIV in 1664. Under the direction of painter Charles Le Brun, who managed teams of artists and craftsmen on projects for the crown, he supplied designs glorifying French military battles to be woven into tapestries at the Gobelins manufactory. This quick study shows the French camp southeast of Douai, in the north of France. The major landmarks of the city can be identified in the background; the grouping of figures on horseback, however, appears to have been adapted for use in the foreground of a painting depicting the arrival of the king at the siege of Lille."

"An accomplished painter of history and drama, Maclise came close to the Pre-Raphaelites late in his career, when he painted Madeline after Prayer (1868; Guildhall Art Gallery, London), inspired by John Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes. Madeline is preparing for bed, hoping to dream of a future husband. Blanchard’s etching contrasts the maiden’s moonlit beauty with the deeply shadowed room. The poem tells us that she is watched by a hidden suitor: Porphyro grew faint: She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint. Anon, his heart revives: her vespers done, Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees; Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one; Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees. . . . The detailed setting and our proximity to the main figure distinguish the conception from John Everett Millais’s 1863 version of the subject."

"This image of a Parisian worker comes from a set of twenty-four caricatures that Matthew and Mary Darly published in 1771. A husband-and-wife team, the Darlys developed a new British print genre--small etched caricatures of single figures against plain backgrounds, their identities indicated through dress, pose and a few props. Many of these works mocked the fashionable manners of contemporary London dandies called "macaronis," and the Darly's wares soon became known as macaroni prints no matter what their subjects. The implied Italian connection was in fact appropriate, since the basic form was inspired by Ghezzi's caricature drawings brought back from Rome by Grand Tourists. The form and subjects adapted by the Darlys tickled British tastes and broadened the scope of Ghezzi's works to include a range of social classes, known figures, and types. Bunbury was a skilled amateur artist who toured Europe in 1769."