Life & Times

George Cruikshank’s career began during a moment of evolution in the media. Printed things such as newspapers, pamphlets and illustrated serials were cheaper and more readily available. Literacy was expanding along with the population. This was a new era of technology and Cruikshank’s talents as a caricaturist and illustrator thrived in the new popular media landscape. 

“Between the late eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, more prints, illustrated books, magazines, and newspapers were produced in the Western world than in previous centuries combined, an efflorescence comparable only to the period following Gutenberg’s invention of movable type when printed material first circulated widely in Europe.”

Patricia Mainardi, from Another World: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print Culture (2017).

The Art of Intaglio

Intaglio printing refers to a technique in which an image is engraved into a surface, such as steel or copper, and the print is created by filling that engraved surface with ink, placing it on dampened paper and applying enormous pressure to the transfer the image. Cruikshank mastered various printmaking techniques including wood engraving, mezzotint and lithography, but was most famous for his engravings and etchings. Though he sometimes collaborated with other engravers from his era–the Brothers Dalziel, for instance–Cruikshank preferred to control the process from initial sketch to final print. 

Cruikshank could select from a variety of etching needles, homemade and manufactured, to cut through the wax... These points he sharpened by whetting on an oilstone or dulled by dragging them across glass or cardboard so they would not dig into the metal. Resting his hand on a wooden bridge or on cloth, he would furrow the ground at the chalked marks, exposing once again the raw metal. This was an exacting and often a frustrating task; Cruikshank once exclaimed to Harrison Ainsworth that he “would give anything for an Etching point that would go at the rate of a flash of lightning.”

Robert Patten, George Cruikshank’s Life, Times and Art, 1991.

The process of engraving the plates took much time, focus, and most of all, skill.  It was physically grueling and used many tools: needles, burins, drypoint tools, scrapers, roulette wheels. The multi-step process began with the illustrator tracing sketches onto translucent paper; the sketches guide the engraver to etch the details in the steel or copper plate, which had been pre-treated and polished for a perfectly reflective surface. A greasy ground was applied to the plate so that a tracing could be made with a stylus as a guide to the engraving. In the case of etchings, the plate was treated with chemicals after the initial tracing in order to “bite” into the surface of the plate. Ink was then applied to the finished plate with a dauber and then rubbed off so that the ink only filled the etched surface. For prints, the plate is then placed face down on a damped piece of paper and rolled through the press.

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In this section, you will find three collections. The first, “Biography & Portraits” highlights the major turns in Cruikshank’s life and career and features not only self-portraits (which he was fond of sketching), but also works done in tribute to him by contemporary artists. In the “Manuscripts” collection, you can browse selected letters and sketches held in the Merkle collection. The letters capture everyday personal and professional life and, in some cases, incidental doodles. Two studies for future engravings–one in watercolor and the other in pencil–are particularly noteworthy in this collection. Finally, in the “Contemporaries” collection, you will learn a little about the artists who inspired, worked alongside and followed Cruikshank in the tradition of graphic satire and book illustration.

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