Robert Dighton, Vil you give us a glass of Gin. 4 January 1793. Courtesy the Cartoon Museum
Exhibition Preview - Robert Dighton, Georgian Caricaturist, Actor and Thief at the Cartoon Museum London until April 20 2008.
The work of one of the most colourful characters of Georgian England is celebrated in a new exhibition at the Cartoon Museum in London.
Robert Dighton, Georgian Caricaturist, Actor and Thief features 80 original caricatures of celebrities and nonentities, the rich and the poor, to provide a colourful insight into the life of Georgian London.
Dighton was a lively character himself, and for a time he combined a career as an actor in the West End with that of artist, drawing master and printseller producing caricatures of the ‘types’ of the day.
Robert Dighton, A Puppy's dress in the Dog Days, c. 1792. Courtesy the Cartoon Museum
In the 1770s he began acting and singing plays at the Haymarket and Sadler’s Wells, whilst at the same time training and exhibiting at the Royal Academy. By the 1790s his caricatures of celebrities together with his humorous prints or drolls, became increasingly well known.
The exhibition of this sharp-witted talent is also a kind of homecoming for Dighton, who was born in Holborn – only a stone’s throw from the Cartoon Museum itself.
Visitors will find subjects that range from royalty and sportsmen to murderers and madams. Among them were Bill Richmond the famous black boxer, innkeeper and promoter. Born in New York in 1763, he came to England in the service of a British officer, Earl Percy.
Richmond taught himself to fight and rose through the ranks to become one of the most feted boxers of his day. In 1810 he retired from the ring and opened boxing rooms, which attracted the likes of Lord Byron and William Hazlitt, and ran the fashionable Horse and Dolphin public house near Leicester Square.
Robert Dighton, A Striking View of Richmond, March 1810. Courtesy the Cartoon Museum
Other characters include James Christie, founder of the famous auction house, James Bellingham who assassinated a Prime Minister and Martha Gunn who supplied bathing machines and prostitutes to the upper classes on their visits to fashionable Brighton.
Dighton also drew tailors, actors, academics and the down-at-heel types who thronged the street corners of Georgian London.
From 1801 he published and sold the prints of these and other characters from his own shop in Charing Cross. In 1806 he achieved notoriety when it was discovered he had been quietly stealing prints from the British Museum and selling them over a period of several years. Dighton confessed and escaped prosecution by co-operating fully with the museum’s investigation but was forced to lie low in Oxford for a while until the scandal die down.
Robert Dighton, Quarralsome Taylors, or Two of a Trade Seldom Agree, 2 January 1795. Courtesy the Cartoon Museum
The exhibition offers a fascinating insight into life this colourful Georgian character and is a welcome reminder of the talents of one of the most talented social caricaturists of the late eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.
A series of talks about Dighton and his work takes place at the museum starting with London through Dighton's Eyes on March 18; Robert Dighton: Georgian caricaturist, actor and thief on March 26 and Actors, assassins, boxers, and blue-stockings on April 2. All events 6.30 – 7.30pm. Adults £6, Concessions, £5, Friends of the Cartoon Museum £4.
This is an exhibition preview - if you have been to see the show, why not let us know what you think?
