Elements of Skateing:
The Consequence of Going Before the Wind

This is the second of a four-print series, Elements of Skateing, strategically scheduled for sale in late November as winter arrived in Britain, reviving the interest in (and possibility of) ice skating on lakes, ponds, and streams. If you haven't already done so, you may want to look at my Introduction to the series which provides some general background about ice skating and its portrayal in paintings, prints, and drawings before Gillray.

Though I have not seen any examples of prints or drawings of umbrellas becoming unwanted sails on the ice before this one of Gillray's, it is hard to believe that in a country where carrying umbrellas is virtually a national pasttime, it wasn't a phenomenon that (in a less disconcerting fashion) Gillray might not have observed.

In the previous plate, Attitude! Attitude is Every Thing! the two skaters interact solely through their mutual awareness and competition with one another. They never touch. In The Consequence of Going Before the Wind the stiff wind blowing across the frozen lake causes them to collide with one another.

But this is no ordinary collision such as we see in Rowlandson's drawings or the Harrison print Skaiting Scene in HydePark where people fall over one another routinely but without a specific focal point. If the background tree and the falling figure losing his hat and umbrella did not suggest the wind direction, it would almost appear that the central figure is purposely jamming his umbrella into the face (and open mouth) of the other terrified skater. It is the singularity and specificity of the impact that gives the print a wholly different feel from the pratfalls that can be found everywhere in comic caricature. It is darker and more cruel. And that cruelty continues in the remaining prints of the series.

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Sources and Reading

• Commentary from the British Museum on Elements of Skateing: The Consequence of Going Before the Wind.
• Rachel Knowles, "Ice Skating in Regency London," Regency History
• "Ice skating," Wikipedia
• "Ice Skating," Encyclopedia Britannica
• Robert Jones, A Treatise on Skating
• "Robert Jones (artilleryman)," Wikipedia
• Thomas Wright and R.H. Evans, Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray #541.
• Thomas Wright and Joseph Grego, The Works of James Gillray, the Caricaturist; With the History of His Life and Times, p. 326.