viz.

Image Credit:  A Catalogue of 18th-Century British Mezzotint Satires in North American Collections

I thought I’d step back from the contemporary pop culture discussions today to look into two archives with a more historical emphasis:  the Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection and A Catalogue of 18th-Century British Mezzotint Satires in North American Collections.  Both of these collections offer extensive resources for instructors in eighteenth-century literature, politics, art, and culture.

The Lewis Walpole Library, which contains over 11,000 digital images, focuses on the library’s “world-renowned collection of English caricatures and political satirical prints from the late-seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. Included are works by Bunbury, Woodward, Gillray, Rowlandson, and Newton, among others.”  The Catalogue of 18th-Century British Mezzotint Satires in North American Collections intersects with the Walpole Library’s Digital Collection as the latter is one of the former’s sources, but this websites indexes such satires by name and year.

Image Credit:  Screenshot from The Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection

In terms of usability, both websites lack some help.  The catalogue’s index is useful to the viewer who knows a particular print they’d like to find, or who is looking for something from a specific title, but the site features no searching capacities.  The Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection has a search feature which looks through the call number, the artist, or the image’s title, but their images are not organized by important keywords or popular figures in the images.  A search for “Rowlandson” can turn up a number of prints by this famous illustrator, but a careful search would need to be done to find the particular one where he satirizes the Prince of Wales who, during the 1788 Regency Crisis when King George III was thought to be mad, schemed to take over the throne.

Image Credit:  The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

Since both collections deal with images held by research libraries and museums (like the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art), all of these images are under copyright.  Both websites are open to the public to use, and all of the images are available for personal use and even “study purposes,” so their use in the classroom should be fine.

What these websites might help provide for students in rhetoric classrooms is the opportunity to analyze visual material whose context is less familiar to them, but which was popularly produced and reproduced to do specific cultural work.  Since most of these prints are satires, they can be compared in purpose and function to contemporary political cartoons in terms of their strategies.  For educators focusing on the eighteenth-century, this material opens up and might indeed accompany a study of the popular period literature.  I hope some of my readers here at viz. will find this material useful for their classrooms.