“A Tour to Foreign Parts”: Engraving, with etching, signed and titled in the plate, lower left.
London: Bretherton, March 11, 1778.
Price: $500.00
About the item
1 vols. Image Size approximately 16 x 20-1/2 inches. Overall 28 x 24 inches. Framed and glazed. Bryant and Heneage, Dictionary of British Cartoonists, p. 39; Paston, Social Caricature in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 80-84.
Item #266756
Henry William Bunbury (1750-1811), second son of baronet Sir William Bunbury, and younger brother of Sir Charles Bunbury, a notorious figure of the turf, began drawing caricatures at Westminster School, and during his brief stay at Cambridge. Following the Grand Tour he achieved initial fame with his “La Cuisine de la Poste”, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1770. Other popular works followed (he worked mainly in pencil and chalk, his designs being engraved by Darly, Bretherton (as here), Dickinson, and a few by Rowlandson, and Gillray. Horace Walpole called him “the second Hogarth.” He was not handicapped by a degree of social success, becoming a colonel of the West Suffolk Militia and an equerry to the Duke of York (in 1787). He wrote and illustrated the classic Academy for Grown Horsemen (1787) and published another set of humorous prints “Hints to Bad Horsemen” as well. Notes Bryant and Heneage, “[His] great popularity...had something to do with his convivial character, his social standing and his avoidance of coarseness. His contemporaries admired his powers of observation and overlooked his feeble draughtsmanship in the process of enjoying his good humour.”.
