The Westminster Magazine; or, The Pantheon of Taste

[1775]

Shoults Collection Eb 1773 W

London: Printed for Richardson and Urquhart and T. Wright

This anonymous etching seems to be the first use of ‘cartoon’, in the sense of a preliminary sketch for a painting, for a pictorial satire. It predates the caricature frequently said to have coined the term: ‘Cartoon, No. 1’, which appeared in Punch, 15 July 1843. This cartoon incorporates many stock characters of later eighteenth-century satires: Frenchified Macaronis, smug clergymen, scheming Jews, and Scotsmen on the make. It foresees that the American crisis will worsen in 1775; the Lord Chief Justice, the Earl of Mansfield, is about to drive the king into the abyss, drawn by Obstinacy and Pride and trampling on the constitution and Magna Carta in the process; and Lord North (with a sash) looks on ineffectually with the equally plump bishops, who are kept quiet with jobs and honours. Even the devil is included, making off with the national credit.