Dr David Taylor: Spectators at the Print Shop Window: Caricature and the Rhetoric of the Gaze

This paper offers a close reading of the grammar of the gaze offered in eighteenth-century prints that depict crowds of people looking at the window displays of London’s many print shops. It asks how far we can read them as accurate records of spectatorial practice, and what we can learn from the ways in which they advertise and project both their own public and their own position within the visual economy of the street in the Georgian city.

The images discussed can be viewed using the links below:

John Raphael Smith, "Miss Macaroni and her Gallant" (1773)
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=1172511&objectId=3423048&partId=1

Piercy Roberts, "Caricature Shop" (1801)
http://images.library.yale.edu/walpoleweb/oneitem.asp?imageId=lwlpr10184

James Gillray, "Very Slippy-Weather" (1808)
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=38375&objectId=1480045&partId=1