Romeyn de Hooghe, Caricature, and Modernity

Abstract

The ‘Golden Age’ of political satire is generally thought to have occurred in the eighteenth century in Britain in the work of artists such as William Hogarth (1697-1764) or James Gillray (1756-1815). However, it has been clear since the work of Sir Ernst Gombrich in 1940 that the Dutch artist Romeyn de Hooghe (1645-1708), in particular his pioneering political satires of 1688-90 on the ‘Glorious Revolution’, made a fundamental contribution to the subsequent development of political satire. This essay examines the relationship between De Hooghe’s works and those of later English satirists with a focus on the key difference between them: the conspicuous absence in De Hooghe’s prints of caricature, or the distortion of individual facial features, a development that has been defined as a watershed moment in the emergence of the ‘modern self’. This chapter considers the treatment of the satirised individual both before and after the advent of caricature and how narratives surrounding caricature’s emergence have shaped the reception and classification of De Hooghe’s satires. The author calls for a more integrated and nuanced history of the political print and an expansion of the canon beyond typology and morphology to include function—for De Hooghe’s satires were critical to the single most important historical event for the emergence of caricature, the development of Parliamentary monarchy brought about in large part by the ‘Glorious Revolution’.