George Cruikshank's Life, Times and Art

In the conclusion to the biography of the caricaturist and illustrator George Cruikshank, Robert Patten narrates the second half of the artist's long career. It is an examination of Cruikshank's cooperations with some of the writers who are known as remakers of British fiction, particularly Harrison Ainsworth, Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray. Patten also examines Cruikshank's illustrated periodicals, especially the Comic Almernack, which preceded Punch, and which contains an invaluable record of three decades of London life in the artist's hundreds of etchings. Beginning in 1847, Cruikshank became a leading advocate of Temperance, producing two dramatic series of prints, a gigantic oil painting, and many other forms of propaganda. Patten provides the fullest account ever of Cruikshank's many friendships and contextualises his art, showing how the subjects, mediums, treatments, publishers and audiences affected the artist's productions. He is especially good at elucidating Dickens' very public quarrel with Cruikshank, a quarrel that severed twenty years of friendship. The artist's friendship with John Ruskin, who became for a time Cruikshank's patron and champion, is also illuminated by Patten. Cruikshank's later years were not successful either artistically or financially. He was bedevilled by economic crisis, inadequate commissions, and the upkeep of two households - one with his second wife and the other with his mistress and ten children. This volume of the biography foregrounds the changing image of the artist, as he refashioned himself and is refashioned by others to suit or to offend Victorian sensibilities. The intertwining of charity and art, Temperance and propaganda, children's imagination and adult's criticism, Scots heritage and English propriety, complicated and confused Cruikshank's declining years. Patten's engaging and energetic narrative sorts out the contradictory impulses within Cruikshank's life, times and art. Named as the 'Best Biography of the '90s' by The Guardian.

Volume II of George Cruikshank's (1792-1878) biography, the political and social artist who became representative of his age.George Cruikshank's (1792-1878) etchings and wood-engravings graced the pages of such classics as Grimms' Fairy Tales and Dickens' Oliver Twist, campaigned in the propaganda war against Napoleon, and satirised his times, becoming representative of the age. His life crossed paths with Britain's primary political, social, and cultural leaders, yet he experienced a long struggle for recognition of his imaginative, versatile and incisive images. In the concluding volume of this comprehensive biography, Patten examines Cruikshank's collaborations with renowned writers such as Harrison Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray. Focussing on his illustrated periodicals, including the long-standing Comic Almanack, as well as his advocacy of Temperance, Patten sketches the context of Cruikshank's art through his subjects, motifs, mediums, treatments, publishers and audiences. Engaging with the contradictory and crisis-filled latter years of Cruikshank's life, Patten reveals the great artist's refashioning in the Victorian Era.