Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum  

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The twelve volume Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum is the primary reference work for the study of British satirical prints of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Most of the content of the catalogue is now available through the British Museum's on-line database.

History

The BM Satires comprises twelve volumes compiled between 1870 and 1954 and provides a catalogue raisonné of the 17,000 odd satirical prints assembled in the 19th century by Edward Hawkins, Keeper of Antiquities in the British Museum from his own and other collections.

It includes works by all the leading artists and makers of satirical prints of the period, as well as lesser known and anonymous designers. Artists represented include: John Kay, James Sayers, Matthew Darly, William Austin, John Collet, Edward Topham, Robert Dighton, John Dighton, Thomas Colley, John Raphael Smith, William Dickinson, F.Samsom, Isaac Cruikshank, Samuel Alken James Gillray, Henry William Bunbury, Thomas Rowlandson,George Moutard Woodward, Henry Wigstead, P.Roberts, C.Starck, James Bretherton, Charles Bretherton, Richard Newton, George Cruikshank, Robert Cruikshank, William Elmes, Charles Williams, Lewis Marks, Samuel de Wilde, William Heath, Henry Alken and John Doyle. Some works by foreign printmakers are also included.

The catalogue allocates a unique identifier to each print which is widely used as a bibliographic reference to specific caricatures in books about prints and in sales catalogues. The identifiers are one to five digit numbers, allocated in sequential order of listing within the whole sequence of volumes, each volume covering a monotonically increasing range of numbers. For example; BM Satires 101010 refers to a print listed in Volume VIII (which covers the range 9693 to 11703) that was published in September 1803 called My Ass in a Band Box. For each print, the catalogue provides a title, publisher, designer and creator if known, image description, lettering and inscriptions, dimensions, bibliographic references, and explanatory notes about the historical context and personages and printmaking technique (e.g. etching, aquatint, stipple, hand coloured, etc). The prints are for the most part in historical order of date of publication though some appear out of chronological order in addenda that appear in later volumes. Within each year, Political and Social satire is arranged separately and sequentially.

There is a prefatory essay to each volume by the editor giving a historical synopsis of printmaking, artists, publishers and events through the period covered by the volume.

History

The first five volume of the Catalogue were compiled under Frederick George Stephens between 1870 and 1883, with the assistance of Edward Hawkins, Keeper of Antiquities for the British Museum. The last seven volumes were the magnum opus of Mary Dorothy George the distinguished historian of British satire.

Limitations

The BM Satires does not include prints acquired since the publication of the printed version of the catalogue. The online version includes entries for more recent acquisitions. There are only a few images, mostly in the introductory essays.

Volumes