Playing with the Invisible in Visible Victorian Pictures:
Erskine Nicol’s Caricatures of the Irish (1840-1870s)
p. 31-43
Dédicace
In memory of my dear friend Cécile Maudet
Texte intégral
1If we are to believe American academic W. J. T. Mitchell, our society has entered a “pictorial turn”. He explains, in his book entitled What Do Pictures Want, that images have gradually replaced words in our system of communication, so that they circulate, expand and change meanings1. In other words, our imagination is constantly fuelled with images that persist in different geographical spaces, or across generations. This is particularly true regarding caricature. In the 20th century, many of us still remember caricatures that were published centuries ago, in particular of our rulers, the most famous one being that of French King Louis-Philippe, reduced to a pear in 1831 by Charles Philippon. It was circulated in the context of a trial, in which the freedom of the press was at stake, and it expressed the artists’ resistance to royal censorship. The image was so powerful that it was used again during the social revolutions in Paris in 1848 and 1871, after what the satirical pear even became known in Great Britain. There are some debates questioning if it is this specific caricature that stimulated the use of a French expression, “être la bonne poire2”designating a fathead as a pear.
2Graphic and verbal languages are intertwined and in fact, the origin of the word “caricature” comes from the Italian term caricatura, referring to a satirical picture or an exaggeration, the previous root of the word being a Latin verb, carricare, meaning “to load a wagon or cart” (from the other Latin word carrus for a two-wheeled wagon). So, the origin of the word is literally about overloading an object such as a cart, and it has become today an image overloaded with meaning, and marked by exaggerated traits. Thus, caricatures play with the visible and distortion: they tend to transform what you can see or conventional forms of the human face and body, to suggest the invisible, or rather what you should understand. Indeed, caricatures convey political messages that need to be decoded, depending on the culture of the viewer.
3In the Victorian era, it is easy to see that anti-Irish caricatures occupied more pages in the British press as Ireland was struggling for more political autonomy. Thus, Victorians could easily understand the meaning of these pictures which echoed the growing importance of political movements such as the Catholic Association (1766-1829) or Repeal Association of Daniel O’Connell in the 1830s and 1840s, a leader depicted as an ogre in the pages of Punch, on 8 July 1843 (Fig. 1). O’Connell had obtained Catholic Emancipation a decade earlier, in 1829, so that he was called “The Liberator” in Ireland, because his campaigns had improved the political representation of the Irish in the British Parliament: Catholics could then be elected just like Protestants. After this first victory, he struggled for “Repeal”, the word inscribed on the bludgeon in this caricature, and which meant ‘Repeal of the Union’ between Ireland and Great Britain, a union set up in 1800 that had implied the closure of the Irish Parliament in Dublin and the loss of legislative power for this country.
Figure 1 : Shallabala, “The Irish Ogre Fattening on the Finest Pisantry”, Punch, 8 July 1843. Public Domain.

4The fact that O’Connell continued to fight for Ireland’s cause after Catholic emancipation inspired the caricaturist nicknamed Shallabala to represent him as an ogre, always wanting more, and preparing to wreak havoc in the Union with his cudgel. His devouring appetite is further suggested by his big stomach and the soup that he is about to drink. He helps himself with a giant ladle, in which are seen a dozen peasants, including a supplicating woman, here to add drama. These miserable peasants, who used to be “the finest pisantry in the world” (an expression ironically imitating the Irish accent and a common saying of the time), are here sacrificed by a monster, which was a complete distortion of reality, as O’Connell was actually defending their rights by denouncing the extravagant rents imposed to them and which were the direct cause of their poverty. But the cartoon accuses him to withhold such “rints”, collected in bags on which he is sitting, and to have gathered this money through “agitation”, as indicated on the soup tureen. This plate turned to ridicule the power and influence of this politician who was largely supported in Ireland, as was visible during his “monster meetings” promoting the repeal of the Union, and that could gather more than 100,000 people3. But what is visible here is that O’Connell, the “uncrowned king of Ireland” as he was called by the Irish, was an illegitimate king, as conveyed by his absence of crown, replaced with a felt hat holding a clay pipe in its band (a model often seen in Ireland). In addition, the hat is placed on the head and skin of a dead lion, creating parallels with the African kings that the British Empire was trying to subdue.
5In the mid-19th century, O’Connell’s failure to repeal the Union between Ireland and Great Britain gave rise to other movements such as Young Ireland, Fenianism (1858-1880s) or the Irish Nationalist Party, whose leader was Charles Parnell, depicted in the British Press as another Dr Frankenstein lacking control over the monster of land agitation that he had created, a reference to Mary Shelley’s novel from 1818 (Fig. 2).
Figure 2 : Anon., “The Irish Frankenstein”, Punch, 20 May 1882, Wikimedia Commons.

The monster is dangerous, as it holds a bloody knife, and it is simian-like, a reference to the so-called backwardness of the Irish peasantry that was often depicted by caricaturists, as studied by two American Irish historians, L. Perry Curtis and Michael De Nie, who have both demonstrated that the more radical these movements grew, the more violent caricatures became, depicting the Irish as even more monkey-like. From the 1830s and 1840s, such caricatures became particularly popular because magazines like Punch made them affordable to the greatest number, whereas they had been reserved to an elite that could buy unique plates in the previous century, as analysed by Ian Haywood in his recent book, The Rise of Victorian Caricature4.
6Yet, it was less customary to see such caricatures in the fine arts, so that the caricatured images created by a Scottish artist such as Erskine Nicol (1825-1904), were likely to surprise visitors of art galleries. How could such caricatures fuel the Victorian discourse on Irish identity? By focusing on the ways in which this painter caricatured the Irish during the Victorian era (1837-1901), this article will explore how visual signs could be turned into political messages.
Figure 3: Erskine Nicol, Two Figures Outside a Tavern, oil on board, 34,5 × 27 cm, 1851, private collection. Reproduced with the kind authorization of Adam’s. © Adam’s Auctioneers, 2022.

Conveying a Political Message
7The caricatures showing the Irish as drunk and superstitious contributed to legitimise colonisation in Ireland. In the oil by Nicol (Fig. 3), a peasant has lost control of his body and has fallen asleep after what must have been several glasses of whiskey, so that this sleeping character reinforced the stereotype of the Irish as heavy drinkers. And if the Irish were drunk, they were unable of “self-control” and by extension, of self-government. The idea that the Irish were actually not capable of governing their own country was an argument often claimed by opponents to Home Rule in the British Parliament5, where they also declared that British power was a necessity, for the sake of Ireland itself.
8Even the Great Famine of 1845-1852 was used as another proof that the country was backwards and too reliant on potato culture. The fact that the event caused one million deaths in the country, related to starvation and famine fever, was claimed to be a natural consequence for a nation that was too populated; there was indeed a “prevailing laissez-faire economic orthodoxy that the poor would exploit every opportunity to subsist on the government’s munificence”, to use the words of Seamus O’Brien6. In the context of the Famine, Irish nationalists denounced the mismanagement of resources by the British, which had led to the impoverishment of the country, giving the example of the sadly famous exportation of cereals and cattle that left Dublin by boat to reach Great Britain on the brink of the Famine.
9James S. Donnelly’s research has shown that these exports decreased significantly during the Famine, but they still marked the collective imaginary7. On the other side of the Irish sea, governmental help to relieve the distress of Irish peasants was discussed in tough negotiations, because many Victorians tended to perceive poverty as the result of idleness, and this is reflected in the picture by Nicol: both characters are visibly poor, given their worn-out clothes, and the protagonist is caught in a moment of idleness, since he has come to a tavern. The setting, including a table with stools and the placard on the wall reading “Spirits”, clearly indicate to the viewer that this is not a home. So, the place is associated with a lack of morality which, in Victorian minds, would have justified the English political rule.
10As a consequence, these images also legitimised the cultural domination of the British over the Irish, as they gave the impression that the Irish, like children, needed to be educated and behave in more moral ways. For instance, a British author like Samuel Carter Hall demanded the Irish to abandon any form of alcohol drinking and join the Temperance Movement, in his writings such as An Old Story, A Temperance Tale in Verse. Interestingly, a picture by Nicol, called Both Whiskey Mad, was included in this volume, to illustrate the extreme degrees of violence that anyone can reach while drunk, as is the case here, in which a man is about to give the last blow on the head of another, already lying on the floor and defenceless, given his upturned shillelagh (Fig. 4).
Figure 4: J. C. Griffiths, Both Whiskey Mad, engraving after Erskine Nicol painting, in Samuel Carter Hall, An Old Story: A Temperance Tale in Verse, London, Virtue, Spalding & Co, 1875, plate xiv.

Here, the shillelagh is a direct reference to the Irishness of both characters, as it is a typically Irish weapon, so that viewers would directly associate the ideas of Irish identity, violence and drunkenness as they watched it. To a certain extent, these visual exaggerations would scare and entertain Victorians, and can be compared with horror or ghost stories that were eagerly read in periodicals at that time8.
Entertaining the Public
11This entertaining dimension was double-edged: it justified colonisation and it also hid away the reality of historical tragedies. In a painting like A Peasant Uncorking a Bottle, there is a form of caricature as the artist exaggerated the facial features of the protagonist, who has a wrinkled face, dishevelled hair and grimacing mouth. The association of peasant identity with alcohol persists, as indicated in the title mentioning both the words “peasant” and “bottle”. This is added to the reddish complexion of the man, enhanced by the red fabric of his waistcoat, and so his skin colour indicates that it is not the first bottle of whiskey that he is opening, despite his obvious difficulties (Fig. 5).
Figure 5: Erskine Nicol, A Peasant Uncorking a Bottle, oil on panel, 24 × 19 cm, c. 1850. © The Hunterian, University of Glasgow.

The ragged clothes and untidy interior with cracks on the background wall confirm the poverty of this character, who is yet spending his money on alcohol. To many Victorians, there was a sense of cause-and-effect relationship between drunkenness and poverty. However, observers of the picture might have forgotten about the poverty of the Irish rural classes in the 1850s to concentrate on the character’s expression, and they would have remembered the detailed grimace and extreme effort of the protagonist, engaged in a real struggle with this bottle: in other words, it is the humorous dimension which prevails here. This calls to mind the “stage Irishman” that, from the 17th century onwards, was a figure of ridicule used to create comedy and better entertain spectators, as in Shakespeare’s Henry V (c. 1599), in which a captain in the king’s army called Macmorris is a figure of fun characterised with “eloquence”, “excitability”, “pugnacity” and “strong national pride”, to quote the words of Declan Kiberd, who demonstrated that such theatrical characters were associated with references to Irish bogs, bogtrotters, bogmen, wilderness and who, by the 1640s, “wore trousers, drank endlessly, swore wildly, and spoke a broken but colourful brand of English, salted with Gaelic exclamations”, a portrait further developed in the 18th century with the addition of “potatoes”, “shillelagh” and frequent proximity of a “pig9”. It is true that Nicol’s peasant can easily be imagined swearing wildly with Gaelic words, as dialects learned in childhood frequently come to our mind when we are under pressure or very angry.
12Nevertheless, this theatrical dimension should not obliterate that Nicol’s image was painted in the context of the Great Famine, when potato blight had ruined the subsistence crops of Irish peasants, a reality that the painter must have witnessed, given that he lived in Ireland from 1846 to 1850. He was also present in the country when Young Ireland attempted their desperate uprising in 1848 in County Tipperary. The movement was led by William Smith O’Brien, Thomas Francis Meagher and John Dillon, who were inspired by the social revolutions taking place on the Continent at that time, and some had actually gone to Paris to celebrate the new French Republic, Meagher coming back from the French capital with the new tricolour Irish flag, with green standing for Catholics, orange for Protestants and white for the reconciliated peace between them10. Although a military failure, this uprising was also largely supported by Irish tenants and the rural working class, like the man represented by Nicol in this caricatured portrait. However, the political tensions that were felt in the Irish countryside are absent from the scene here. This is not true for the whole iconography of Nicol, in which the predicaments of Irish peasants are sometimes exposed, but generally speaking, caricatures can transform reality and turn severe political struggles into amusing episodes. In that case they will provide biased information for the political debate.
13Yet, the humorous and aesthetic dimensions prevailed for artists who wanted to sell their works on the British market, and this may explain why many of them have distorted historical facts in their representations. And there is evidence that such humorous pictures were successful, as Nicol actually produced another version of this canvas, entitled A Spirited Struggle (oil on board, 20 × 18 cm, 1856), an artwork which was sold in the USA on 15th October 2016 in New Orleans Galleries (lot 196). As an artist coming from the lower middle classes, Nicol was preoccupied with money for most of his life, as witnessed in his letters, so that it comes as no surprise that commercial and aesthetic considerations were very much in his mind when he created his pictures.
Aesthetic Considerations
14In the 1850s, Nicol was still a young artist who needed to build a reputation, and this explains why most of his pictures conformed to the Irish stereotypes of his time. Two Figures outside a Tavern is an interesting example of this, because I believe that it could be one of the first two paintings that he sent to the Royal Academy in 1851, as their catalogue indicates that on that year, Nicol had a picture entitled Done Up Entirely and another one called Spirits and Tibbaky (respectively numbers 358 and 36011), while the words indicated on the sign in the background of Two Figures Outside a Tavern are precisely “Widow Cayne/Spirits and Tibaky”. Given Nicol’s ambitions to become a member of the prestigious London Institution, these works had to demonstrate his skills, his style, but also his knowledge of “the old Masters”, or works from the Dutch 17th century, which were a basis for comparison to assess artists’ worth in the Victorian era.
15Thus, humorous pictures such as Gerrit van Honthorst’s Tooth Puller, that can be seen in the Louvre today12, might have been in the back of Nicol’s mind when he chose to place his characters in the context of a tavern, and to illustrate how some thieves may take advantage of the distraction of others: in the oil by van Honthorst, the surgery allows a young man to steal a duck from the basket of a lady, absorbed in her compassion for the patient who is about to suffer an extraction, while in the oil by Nicol, another young man sneaks a bottle of whiskey away from the sleepy protagonist. Through humour, a form of morality emerges in these caricatures: in the public sphere, one should never be inattentive to the surroundings. Nicol’s peasant is here punished for his idleness, while the thief confirmed a Victorian tendency to associate the poor with criminal practices, as witnessed in the writings of Dickens, for instance.
Figure 6: Erskine Nicol, The Approach of the Enemy, oil on board, 24 × 34 cm, 1859. Reproduced with the kind authorisation of Amber Tree.

The reference to the aesthetics of the old Masters who were so dear to Victorian artists is also felt in another picture that Nicol painted in 1859: The Approach of the Enemy (Fig. 6). This time, it is the situation which is caricatured, rather than the characters themselves. The painting illustrates the moment when a lover wooing his beloved is going to be caught red-handed by the mother of the girl, standing behind a wooden wall that was used at that time to protect inhabitants from the cold that could get in whenever the door was opened13. The old lady has not seen them yet but her steady pace as she enters her cottage tells a lot about the loud argument which is about to take place next to the fireside. The scene is likely to make the observer smile and to remind him of the Stolen Kiss, by David Teniers the Younger, because it shows a comparable interior, in which a lover kisses a young woman on the mouth, while her old father is getting down the stairs on the right and is only separated from the two young lovers by a wooden panel wall14. In addition to the subject, both pictures are painted in shades of brown, suggesting a dusty floor, a fireside, an opening with a door on the left, a wooden dividing wall, and an interior plunged into a relative obscurity. The colours, perspective, composition and theme all hint at the Dutch heritage of Nicol’s pictures, thus giving more aesthetic legitimacy to his humour and the caricatured relationships between parents and children regarding love affairs, be they in the 17th or in the 19th centuries.
16Therefore, Nicol’s caricatures from the mid-19th century discussed in this paper all have a moral dimension, which can be understood as a will to deliberately ridicule some very serious matters tht were threatening Victorian society. They played with satire, another form of exaggeration, to underline people’s foolishness15. Although caricatures in the British fine arts were rare, those which were produced by British artists like Nicol seemed to imply the foolishness of Home Rule or Irish demands for more political independence, since they reinforced the stereotypes of this nation as backwards or even criminal. Consequently, these caricatures fuelled the Victorian discourse on Irish identity as they responded to the fears and anxieties regarding rural labourers, who were hardly hit by the Famine and would soon organise into the Land League in the 1880s. Such organisations helped them to get protection against exorbitant rents or evictions, ordered by their landlords.
17Caricatures in the fine arts reveal divisions that tore the British nation in the mid-19th century: even an artist like Nicol had ambivalent views on Irishness, as several of his later pictures were much more sympathetic towards the Irish, especially An Ejected Family, painted in 1853 to highlight the predicament of a family who has just been evicted from their home and then had to face the pouring rain, homeless and jobless16. Such pictures prove that a Victorian artist who was capable of producing caricatures for commercial, aesthetic or political reasons, could also have some compassion for the plight of rural workers, represented in rarer artworks, that were harder to sell on the Victorian market. Yet, two centuries later, it is precisely these poignant pictures alluding to the Irish past that gets the favour of Irish art collectors, especially of the diaspora in the United States, thus showing how important painting can be in the commemoration of the past.
Notes de bas de page
1William J. T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2005, p. 5.
2Nicola Cotton, “The Pun, the Pear and the Pursuit of Power in Paris: Caricatures of Louis-Philippe (1830-1835)”, Nottingham French Studies, vol. 42, Iss. 2, 2003, p. 12-25.
3Thomas E. Hachey and Lawrence J. McCaffrey (dir.), The Irish Experience since 1800: A Concise History, New York, M. E. Sharpe, 2010 (1st ed. : 1996), p. 53.
4Ian Haywood, The Rise of Victorian Caricature, London, Palgrave, 2020.
5R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr. Punch: Connections in Irish and English History, London, The Penguin Press, 1993, p. 294.
6Seamus O’Brien, “Famine in the County Town – Mullingar, 1845–49”, Westmeath: History and Society, ed. Seamus O’Brien, Dublin, Geography Publications, 2022, p. 453.
7James S. Donnelly, “The Great Irish Famine and Its Interpreters, Old and New”, History Ireland, vol. 1, Iss. 3, Autumn 1993, www.historyireland.com/the-great-famine-and-its-interpreters-old-and-new/.
8Montague Summers, introduction to The Supernatural Omnibus, London, Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1931, p. 28-31.
9William J. T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want?, op. cit., p. 21-41.
10Brendan Ó Cathaoir, “The Rising of 1848”, History Ireland, vol. 6, Iss. 3, 1998, www.historyireland.com/the-rising-of-1848/.
11Algernon Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts, A Complete Dictionary of Contributors and their Work from its Foundation in 1769 to 1904, London, H. Graves & Co., 1905, p. 367-368.
12Gerrit van Honthorst, Tooth Puller, oil on canvas, 137 × 200 cm, 1627, Louvre, Paris: https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010064284.
13Claudia Kinmonth, private conversation, 2020.
14David Teniers the Younger, Interior of a Farmhouse with Figures (The Stolen Kiss), oil on canvas, 72 × 87 cm, c. 1660, London, Buckingham Palace, www.rct.uk/collection/405342/interior-of-a-farmhouse-with-figures-the-stolen-kiss.
15See definition, Collins, HarperCollins Publishers, www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/satire.
16Erskine Nicol, An Ejected Family, oil on canvas, 50 × 82 cm, 1853, Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, http://onlinecollection.nationalgallery.ie/objects/8749/an-ejected-family.
Auteur
Université Toulouse 2 Jean-Jaurès, CAS
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