Caricature

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Caricature is a form of art that walks a razor's edge between flattery and insult. The word itself comes from the Italian caricare, meaning to charge or to load. A caricature is, in essence, a loaded portrait. That phrase alone tells you everything about what makes the form so enduring and so dangerous.

  The earliest known definition in English appeared in Thomas Browne's Christian Morals, published after his death in 1716. Browne warned readers against letting themselves be drawn "in Caricatura," a state he associated with having one's face rendered with a resemblance to some animal. His footnote explains: the Italians called it being drawn in Caricatura. That warning suggests caricature already carried a sting.

  Why would artists seek out people with deformities as models, as Leonardo da Vinci did in the earliest examples we can trace? Why would a brigadier general spend time during a battle sketching his commanding officer as "deformed and crass and hideous"? And how did a form rooted in aristocratic amusement become one of the most powerful political weapons in the modern press? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. Loaded Portraits

  ›

  Leonardo da Vinci actively sought out people with deformities to use as models for his early caricatures. His goal was not mockery for its own sake. He wanted to create an impression more striking than a conventional portrait, something that would lodge itself in the viewer's memory.

  That impulse found a more systematic form in the work of Pier Leone Ghezzi, born in 1674, who is widely considered the father of modern caricature. Ghezzi was a Rococo artist and theater designer working in 18th-century Italy. He popularized caricatura as a recognized art form, and his single-figure portrait distortions became the template against which the word would later be defined.

  Caricature portraits circulated among the European aristocracy as objects of shared amusement. British visitors returning from the Grand Tour brought the fashion home, and England's comparatively free press gave it room to breathe and sharpen. The much greater freedom of the press in England allowed caricature to be used in biting political satire, turning an aristocratic diversion into something with actual consequence.

  The distinction between caricature and cartoon hardened over time. In 18th-century Britain, the word caricature covered any image using exaggerated or distorted features, whether a portrait of a specific person or a broad social satire. The British Caricature Magazine, published from 1807 to 1819, operated under that wider definition. By the 19th century, the term cartoon was popularized through its use in Punch magazine and came to cover general comic imagery, leaving caricature to mean primarily a portrait of a recognizable individual.

• 3. London and the Political Edge

  ›

  William Hogarth, born in 1697 and dying in 1764, elevated satirical art into an accepted art form in England. A generation of artists followed him who took caricature into explicitly political territory. James Gillray, born in 1757, and Thomas Rowlandson, born in 1756, both established their reputations as hired caricaturists during the 1784 Westminster election.

  The timing mattered. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars created turbulent conditions in which caricature became an increasingly important medium for public communication. Gillray became the leading political caricaturist of his era, famous across Europe. Rowlandson's vast output ranged across political subjects, social observation, and comic book illustration.

  Isaac Cruikshank, born in 1757, worked alongside them. His son George Cruikshank, born in 1792 and dying in 1878, carried the tradition into the next century, attacking the royal family and leading politicians through printed caricatures. George Cruikshank's New Union Club of 1819 is noted for its commentary on slavery. He later earned a second reputation as a book illustrator, including work alongside Charles Dickens.

  Ted Harrison, described by the source as a British caricaturist, gave a lecture titled The History and Art of Caricature in which he laid out the artist's toolkit. A caricaturist draws on three categories: the natural characteristics of a subject, such as large ears or a long nose; the acquired characteristics, like a stoop or facial lines; and the vanities, including the subject's choice of hairstyle, spectacles, clothes, and mannerisms. The choice between gentle mockery and a wound, Harrison argued, depends on the purpose.

• 4. Vanity Fair and Notable Practitioners

  ›

  From 1868 to 1914, the London weekly magazine Vanity Fair built its identity around a single recurring feature: full-page caricature portraits of famous people in society, published every week. Politicians, athletes, writers, and other notables all appeared in its pages. Carlo Pellegrini, who worked under the pseudonym Ape, was one of its leading contributors.

  Sir Max Beerbohm, born in 1872 and dying in 1956, developed a distinctive style of single-figure caricatures arranged in formalized groupings. That style was established by 1896 and continued to flourish until around 1930. His published collections include Caricatures of Twenty-five Gentlemen from 1896, The Poets' Corner from 1904, and Rossetti and His Circle from 1922. His work was exhibited at the Carfax Gallery in London between 1901 and 1918, and at the Leicester Galleries between 1911 and 1957.

  Honoré Daumier, born in 1808 and dying in 1879, took caricature into a different register entirely. Working in France, he produced more than 4,000 lithographs, most of them caricatures on political, social, and everyday themes. They were published in daily French newspapers including Le Charivari and La Caricature.

  Al Hirschfeld, born in 1903 and dying in 2003, became known for black and white drawings of celebrities and Broadway stars rendered in flowing contour lines over heavy rendering. The United States Postal Service commissioned him to provide art for American stamps. Permanent collections of his work are held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and he has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

  Mort Drucker, born in 1929 and dying in 2020, joined Mad magazine in 1957, where he combined comic strip style with caricature likenesses of film actors. He won the National Cartoonists Society's Special Features Award in 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1988, and their Reuben Award in 1987.

• 5. Formalizing the Exaggeration

  ›

  Susan Brennan's master's thesis in 1982 marked a milestone in formally defining what caricature actually does. Her core idea was that caricature is the process of exaggerating differences from an average face. If a person's ears are more prominent than the average person's, the caricature makes those ears much larger than they would appear in a straight portrait. Brennan built a partially automated system around this idea. An operator input a frontal drawing of a face using a standardized topology, then the system subtracted the corresponding point on a mean face, scaled that difference by a factor greater than one, and added the scaled result back onto the mean face.

  The elegance of that definition held up into subsequent decades. Researchers Mo et al. refined it by arguing that population variance should factor into the calculation. Eye spacing varies less than other features across the general population, so even a small deviation from the average deserves exaggeration; a comparable deviation in nose size would be too unremarkable to merit the same treatment.

  Liang et al. pushed in a different direction, arguing that caricature cannot be captured in a single universal definition because it varies from artist to artist. Their system used machine learning to learn and mimic the style of a specific caricaturist from training data consisting of face photographs and the corresponding caricatures that artist had produced.

  Computer-generated caricatures have faced a persistent limitation: most systems work only with exactly frontal poses. Manually produced caricatures, and face portraits generally, tend to favor an off-center three-quarters view. Brennan's own system produced frontal-pose line drawings. More recent systems have expanded the range of styles to include direct geometric distortion of photographs, but the gap between human and machine output remains a live research question.

• 6. Recognition and the Street

  ›

  Rhodes, Brennan, and Carey demonstrated that caricatures were recognized more accurately than the original images, using line drawings as their test material. Benson and Perrett found similar recognition advantages using photographic-quality images. The theoretical explanations divide between norm-based theories of face recognition and exemplar-based theories, both of which find support in the experimental results.

  Away from laboratories and galleries, most caricatures today are drawn for strangers at street fairs, carnivals, and weddings. For a small fee, a caricaturist will produce a likeness in a few minutes. Oceanfront boardwalks have become particularly associated with this trade, where tourists stop for a humorous sketch. Caricature artists can also be hired for private parties.

  That street-level practice coexists with a network of dedicated institutions. The Museo de la Caricatura in Mexico City, the Muzeum Karykatury in Warsaw, the Caricatura Museum Frankfurt, the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover, and the Cartoonmuseum in Basel all hold permanent collections. In March 2009, the first museum of caricature in the Arab world opened in Fayoum, Egypt. Alex Gard, born in 1900 and dying in 1948, created more than 700 caricatures of show business celebrities and other notables for the walls of Sardi's Restaurant in New York City's theater district, making him the first artist to do so; those images are now part of the Billy Rose Theater Collection at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.