Isaac Cruikshank
Isaac Cruikshank (born October 5, 1764 in Edinburgh , † April 1811 in London ) was a Scottish watercolor painter and caricaturist . He was the father of the well-known artists Robert and George Cruikshank .
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Isaac Cruikshank's parents were Elizabeth Davidson (* approx. 1725) and Andrew Crookshanks (approx. 1725– approx. 1783), a former customs inspector who had been dismissed in 1745 for participating in the Second Jacobite Rising . Isaac Cruikshank studied with a local artist, presumably John Kay (1742-1826), and in 1783 traveled to London with his teacher. There he married Mary MacNaughton (1769-1853) in 1788; the couple had five children, two of whom died early. A daughter, Margaret Eliza, was also a promising young artist but died at the age of 18.
Cruikshank's first known publications were in 1784 engravings by Edinburgh "types". He made the printing plates himself from his pencil drawings, his wife colored them. He illustrated books on the theater, made the cover of the book Witticisms and Jests of Dr Johnson (1791) and illustrated George Shaw's extensive General Zoology (1800-1826). His watercolors were exhibited at the Royal Academy , but prints and caricatures were more lucrative. He reacted to the zeitgeist, but was constant in his aversion to Napoleon Bonaparte and political radicals. Together with James Gillray he developed a character of John Bull , the national personification of Great Britain.
Isaac Cruikshank was a contemporary of James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson and thus belonged to the Golden Age of British caricature . Some critics describe his work as "inconsistent," but it offers a vivid display of cultural and political issues in Britain at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Cruikshank died at the age of 46. Are given various reasons for his death: the consequences of betting drunkenness , tuberculosis or influenza.
His works are now mainly in the British Museum in London, the Huntington Library in California and the Houghton Library at Harvard University .
Individual evidence
- ^ Robert L. Patten: Cruikshank, Isaac (1764-1811). In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Web links
- Henry Austin Dobson: Cruikshank, Isaac. In: Dictionary of National Biography. Volume 13, 1888.
- Isaac Cruikshank on spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk
- Works by the Cruikshank family in the British Museum
literature
- Mary Dorothy George: Hogarth to Cruikshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire . 1967.
- J. Edward (Ed.): Isaac Cruikshank and the Politics of Parody: Watercolors in the Huntington Collection . University of California Press, 2005, ISBN 0-87328-147-0 .
- Robert L. Patten: Cruikshank, Isaac (1764-1811). In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Cruikshank, Isaac |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Scottish caricaturist and watercolor painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 5, 1764 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Edinburgh |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 1811 |
| Place of death | London |