Caricature and Other Comic Art in All Times and Many Lands.

Much as the ancients differed from ourselves in other particulars, they certainly laughed at one another just as we do, for precisely the same reasons, and employed every art, d...

Greece was the native home of all that we now call art. Upon looking over the two hundred pages of art gossip in the writings of the elder Pliny, most of which relates to Greece...

Egyptian art was old when Grecian art was young, and it remained crude when the art of Greece had reached its highest development. But not the less did it delight in caricature...

If we go farther back into antiquity, it is India which first arrests and longest absorbs our attention--India, fecund mother of tradition, the source of almost all the rites, b...

Mr. Robert Tomes, American consul, a few years ago, at the French city of Rheims, describes very agreeably the impression made upon his mind by the grand historic cathedral of t...

If we turn from the sacred to the secular, we find the ornamentation not less barbarous. Many readers have seen the two giants that stand in the Guildhall of London, where they,...

We have in this strange, rude picture[8] a device of contemporary caricature to cast ridicule upon the movement of which Martin Luther was the conspicuous figure. It is reduced...

When Luther began the immortal part of his public career in 1517 by nailing to the church door his ninety-five theses against the sale of indulgences, wood-engraving was an art...

The annexed picture,[15] a favorite with the Protestants of England, Holland, and Germany for more than a century, is composed of twenty-two articles and objects, most of which...

What a change came over the spirit of English art and literature at the Restoration in 1660! Forty years before, when James I. was king, who loathed a Puritan, there was occasio...

It was the bubble mania of 1719 and 1720, brought upon Europe by John Law, which completed the "secularization" of caricature. Art, as well as literature, learning, and science,...

These Dutch-English pictures William Hogarth, we may be sure, often inspected as they successively courted public notice in the shops of London, as we see in his early works a c...

It is part of the office of caricature to assist in destroying illusions that have served their turn and become obstructive. As in Luther's time it gave important aid to the ref...

In France, more conspicuously than in England, kingship broke down in that century. Louis XV., born in a private station, might have risen to the ownership of a small livery-sta...

Observe this picture of man's scorn of woman, drawn by Gavarni, the most noted of French caricaturists. I place it first, because it expresses the feeling toward "the subject se...

We are apt to think of the Chinese as a grave people, unskilled in the lighter arts of satire and caricature; but, according to that amusing traveler, M. Huc, they are the _Fren...

The bright, good-tempered people of Japan are familiar with humor in many forms, and know how to sport with pencil as well as with pen. Their very sermons are not devoid of the...

It is inevitable that bad rulers should dread the satiric pencil. Caricature, powerless against an administration that is honest and competent, powerless against a public man wh...

During the twenty years of Louis Napoleon, political caricature being extinguished, France was inundated with diluted Gavarni. Any wretch who drew or wrote for the penny almanac...

Upon the news-stands in St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, New York, and other cities, we find the comic periodicals of Germany, particularly the _Fliegend...

As it is "Don Quixote" that has given most of us whatever insight into Spanish life and character we possess, we should naturally expect to find in the Spain of to-day abundant...

As soon as comic art in Italy is mentioned, we think of Pasquino, the merry Roman tailor, whose name has enriched all the languages of Europe with an effective word. Many men wh...

James Gillray, though the favorite caricaturist of London before the beginning of our century, did not reach the full development of his talent until the later extravagancies of...

One happy consequence of the new taste was the publication of _Punch_, which has been ever since the chief vehicle of caricature in England. As long as caricature was a thing of...

Benjamin Franklin was the first American caricaturist. That propensity of his to use pictures whenever he desired to affect strongly the public mind was an inheritance from the...

The era of good feeling which followed the war of 1812, and which exhausted the high, benign spirit infused into public affairs by Mr. Jefferson, could not be expected to call f...