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The term is originally Italian, ‘caricatura’, and caricature appeared in Italian art about 1600 in the work of Annibale Carracci. The word caricature is first recorded in English in 1748, the year, as it happens, that William Hogarth painted his great anti-French satire O the Roast Beef of Old England which includes caricatures of a French monk and French soldiers. Hogarth made extensive use of caricature and it became widespread in Britain thereafter.
A practitioner of genius in the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century was James Gillray, who used it for political cartooning, a form of caricature that continues to appear every day in our newspapers. Equally gifted was his contemporary Thomas Rowlandson who produced brilliant caricatures of the manners and morals of the time. Max Beerbohm was an outstanding caricaturist in the nineteenth century, and Gerald Scarfe is one of the most powerful working today.
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