What is Cartoon Museum ?

Victor Weisz, 'Vicky', one of Britain's best post-war political cartoonists, was forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1935. When he started at the News Chronicle in 1939 his editor advised a crash course in British culture

he soon had a witty command of a British cartoonist's stock references and motifs, including Shakespeare and Tenniel's Alice drawings.

Ronald Searle has been described as 'arguably the foremost graphic artist of [the twentieth] century', and is unquestionably one of the most influential.

The malevolent schoolgirls of Searle's 'St Trinian's' appealed to a new public taste for black, cynical humour cultivated in wartime.

In his later work a baroque extravagance of detail is painstakingly built up with his extraordinary line - stuttering, fidgety, barbed.

Britain was finally coming out of a post-war period dominated by deference and social conformity. A younger generation of comedians was appearing on stage, radio and television

In 1961 a new satirical magazine Private Eye was founded. It was a magazine of political gossip and disclosure that ripped aside the curtains of gentility and decorum that Punch had upheld for over a century.

For cartoonists it was a breath of fresh air, publishing cartoons that no other newspaper would print.

For the first time in many decades caricature took centre stage.  Two revolutionary artists pushed British satire to the extreme, both visually and politically: Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe.

Wally Fawkes, 'Trog', brought intense focus to caricature and political cartooning through his ability to condense a complex situation into a single memorable image.

Peter Fluck and Roger Law had worked together since the 1960s. In the 1970s they began producing three-dimensional caricatures for the [Sunday] Times and other publications.

Out of this work grew the satirical show Spitting Image, first screened in Britain in 1983, featuring Fluck and Law's latex puppets.

From the 1770s it was the gentleman amateur and semi-amateur, such as Townshend, Bunbury, Woodward and Nixon, who transformed the artform, introducing a more playful style and a strong element of personal caricature. Social satire blossomed, offering humorous observations on current fashions and social pretensions.

In the 1780s political satire ripened.  Print-shops flourished in the City, Westminster and St. James's, many holding caricature exhibitions.  The hand-coloured copper-plate etching, freer in style that the engraving, became fashionable: often priced at 2 shillings (10p) or more it was a luxury item, and beyond the means of most.

The French Revolution in 1789 ignited a fusillade of satirical propaganda in France and Britain.  Both 'Loyalist' members of the Pitt coalition and the opposition 'Reform' Whigs around Fox sponsored partisan political prints.  At first, the Foxites took the upper hand, creating a new type of sophisticated visual and verbal satire.  But news from France of the excesses of the Terror damaged the reform cause.  By 1795 the Foxites were in decline, and a blast of repressive measures, culminating in the Treason and Sedition Acts, subdued not only the press and opposition, but also the print publishers.

In August 1819, the local Yeoman Cavalry attacked a crowd of peaceful protestors in St Peter's Fields, Manchester.  The government response was the repressive Six Acts, including an increase in stamp duty that tripled the price of many papers. The publisher William Hone and George Cruikshank, the foremost caricaturist of the Regency, answered these attacks on Reform with a little 24-page shilling (5p) pamphlet, The Political House That Jack Built.  It would go through 50 editions and sell 100,000 copies.  Hone had revived the technique of wood-engraving.  The hardwood relief block was more durable that the copper-plate, and could be set with the metal type and printed together, thereby cutting costs.  Image and text could now support each other, and reach a wider audience.

The Reform Bill crisis of 1830-2 stirred up a flurry of satirical prints, but topical satire was finding a new home. Following an example in Paris, a number of humorous magazine were launched in Britain. In 1841 the journalist Henry Mayhew and the printer-engraver, Ebenezer Landells founded the most famous of them all: Punch. It was to be a weekly comic paper 'without grossness, partisanship, profanity, indelicacy, or malice'. In its long life it cultivated the talents of more comic artists than any other British magazine.

Vanity Fair was founded in 1868 and revived the tradition of the single-figure caricature in genial colour portraits of celebrities and professional men, a style perfected in this country by Carlo Pellegrini ('Ape').

In the 1880s printers began to use the new photochemical process.  A truer facsimile of the artist's work, its tone, texture and detail, was now possible.  The greater fidelity benefited two great innovators, Max Beerbohm and Phil May.

In the First World War, cartoonists rallied to the patriotic cause portraying an encounter between the national symbols and personifications.  The morale-boosting works of Bert Thomas and Bruce Bairnsfather proved popular with British troops at the front.

The first half of the twentieth century saw the heydey of the popular magazine, and cartoons helped to determine its graphic style and character.  William Heath Robinson joined The Sketch in 1906 and entertained its readers through two world wars.  H.M. Bateman perfected the wordless strip cartoon, and his 'The Man Who...' series of colour cartoons filled the centre-spread of The Tatler in the 1920s and 1930s.

Victor Weisz, 'Vicky', one of Britain's best post-war political cartoonists, was forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1935. When he started at the News Chronicle in 1939 his editor advised a crash course in British culture: he soon had a witty command of a British cartoonist's stock references and motifs, including Shakespeare and Tenniel's Alice drawings.

Ronald Searle has been described as 'arguably the foremost graphic artist of [the twentieth] century', and is unquestionably one of the most influential.  The malevolent schoolgirls of Searle's 'St Trinian's' appealed to a new public taste for black, cynical humour cultivated in wartime.  In his later work a baroque extravagance of detail is painstakingly built up with his extraordinary line - stuttering, fidgety, barbed.

Britain was finally coming out of a post-war period dominated by deference and social conformity.  A younger generation of comedians was appearing on stage, radio and television.  In 1961 a new satirical magazine Private Eye was founded.  It was a magazine of political gossip and disclosure that ripped aside the curtains of gentility and decorum that Punch had upheld for over a century. For cartoonists it was a breath of fresh air, publishing cartoons that no other newspaper would print.

For the first time in many decades caricature took centre stage.  Two revolutionary artists pushed British satire to the extreme, both visually and politically: Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe.  Wally Fawkes, 'Trog', brought intense focus to caricature and political cartooning through his ability to condense a complex situation into a single memorable image.