Tight Lacing
Tight Lacing is one of two prints (the other being The Captain's So Kind) in a very similiar style that both foreshadow later Gillray efforts, and that, I would argue, are both likely to have been created by Gillray himself.
Published by William Humphrey in March 1777 while Gillray was creating other prints for him, Tight Lacing shows an ugly woman,holding on to the bedpost as her maid plants her left foot on the lady's bottom the better to pull the laces tighter. The print, of course, foreshadows Gillray's 1793 print Fashion Before Ease. . . where Thomas Paine puts his foot on Britannia's rump in much the same way, tightening her laces and hoping to give a much more French form to her constitution.
Tight Lacing [1777]
© Trustees of the British Museum
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© Trustees of the British Museum
Tight Lacing contains the monogram of RS which Dorothy George elsewhere attributes to Richard Sneer, a pseudonym for Richard Brinsley Sheridan. But if you look at other RS monogram prints such as The Back-Side of a Front Row, there are several obvious differences. One, the figures in Back-Side. . .are much flatter and more wooden than those in Tight Lacing. Second, the background lines in Back-Side. . .are very regular and appear to have been created with a roller. Those in Tight Lacing were obviously created by hand. And finally, most of the RS monogrammed prints were published by Matthew Darly rather than William Humphrey.
The Back-Side of a Front Row [1777]
© Trustees of the British Museum
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Unlike Rowlandson, Gillray seems to have prided himself on never borrowing figures from other artists. He seem to have felt that he had to make any image, even one that alluded to another image, very much his own. But if he were borrowing from himself, that would be different. In Fashion Before Ease, then, I would argue that Gillray is borrowing from himself, for Tight Lacing is an early Gillray made to resemble an RS print and using the RS monogram (as he does later with the James Sayers monogram) to disguise his effort.
Sources and Reading
- Commentary on Tight Lacing from the British Museum
- Commentary on The Back Side of a Front Row from the British Museum
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