The Captain's So Kind...
Although the woman at the keyboard in this print is not identified except as "Old Lady Cuckoo" in the verse subtitle, it is likely that she is Gillray's first, somewhat crude caricature of Lady Cecilia Johnston who received more detailed (if not kinder) treatment in his later 1782 print, St. Cecilia.
© Trustees of the British Museum
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© National Portrait Gallery, London
Both prints were probably inspired by the portrait of Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan as St. Cecilia by Joshua Reynolds which had been completed in 1775. But The Captain's So Kind is a more generalized satire, closer in spirit to Hogarth's Chorus of Singers or The Enraged Musician. It does not depend as St. Cecilia does, upon the recognition of the parody of Reynold's original.
In both, however, the critique is of the performer(s). In The Captain's So Kind, the critique is supplied a la Hogarth by the surroundings: by the paintings on the wall, which implicitly compare the performance in the foreground to the street musicians in the pictures; by the squawking parrot and curious dog. Like other Gillray prints about music, there may be a sexual reference in the rather odd posture of the captain and his determination to "thrust in a Note.".
Gillray seems to have had at least two slightly different versions of Lady Cecilia that he used: the silly and the sour. The silly Lady Cecilia appears here in Lady Cuckoo and in the 1791 print At the Opera.
© Trustees of the British Museum
The sour Lady Cecilia appears in a caricature portrait of her in 1780, in the 1782 print Saint Cecilia, and in La Belle Assemblee [1787]. A third version of poor Mrs. Johnston may be behind the termagant in Billingsgate Eloquence.
As I have argued in my commentary on Tight Lacing, I suspect that The Captain's So Kind and Tight Lacing are by Gillray, imitating the manner of Richard Sneer.
Sources and Reading
- Commentary on The Captain's So Kind from the British Museum
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