THE FANTASTIC VISIONS OF JAMES GILLRAY

PART OF THE 2019 YORK FESTIVAL OF IDEAS: WORLD OF WONDER

The son of a disabled soldier, James Gillray achieved worldwide fame as the greatest of caricaturists, a new art form that he made his own. Tim Clayton presents the satirist’s colourfully distorted take on turbulent times in which enlightenment and revolution shook the foundations of society and belief.

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Tim Clayton, Senior Fellow of the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, is currently working on a new study of Gillray and the business of satire. He is a leading authority on printmaking and the print trade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, author of The English Print 1688-1802 and was co-curator of the British Museum exhibition Bonaparte and the British. He has written a number of critically acclaimed military and cultural histories.

His talk accompanies Fairfax House’s exhibition ‘Savage Satire: From the Pen of James Gillray’.

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