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A drawing of a person or persons in which certain characteristics are exaggerated with the intention of ridicule or burlesque. This form of satire can be found in Greek vase painting and in the Roman frescoes at Pompeii and Herculaneum; and in the Middle Ages caricature appears in the carving of stalls and capitals, in ornaments and gargoyles and in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. But caricature as an independent art did not come into existence until the time of the Renaissance. A well-known example of that period is the German woodcut by an anonymous artist in the Gotha museum showing a doctor shaped exactly like the urine glass he is holding.
The earliest known portrait caricature dates from 1600; it is the work of Annibale Carracci ( Stockholm/Nat. Mus.) and depicts an Italian singer and his wife. It was Carracci who first used the word caricature to designate this kind of drawing. Bernini was a skilful caricaturist, though his work in this field is little known.
The first caricaturist to make his living entirely from his art was P. L. Ghezzi ( 1673-1755). But the rapid development of caricature in the 18th century was not due to his influence alone. It was Hogarth, above all, who made it a genuine expression of the age. George, Marquess of Townshend ( 1724-1807) was the first to apply caricature to politics. His crude, but witty cartoons were acclaimed by an eager public and caricature became a fashion amounting almost to a craze in the late 18th century. The greatest master of the hundreds of political caricatures published between 1780 and 1820 was James Gillray, to whom the whole art is greatly indebted.
The Hogarthian tradition of social satire was carried on and developed by Rowlandson. The first comic weekly to reproduce caricatures was published in France in 1830 by Charles Philipon under the title La Caricature and this was followed by his daily, Charivari. Philipon employed the great French caricaturists, Daumier, Gavarni, Grandville and Doré. Daumier worked for Philipon all his life, producing 4,000 lithographs. Punch was founded in 1842 and Simplizissimus, whose most brilliant artist was T. Heine, first appeared in 1896. The late 19th-century caricature began more and more to exploit the effects of simplicity, a tendency which reached its climax in the work of Max Beerbohm.
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