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Guide to the Richard Vogler Cruikshank Collection
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Table of contents What's This?
  • Descriptive Summary
  • Administrative Information
  • Biography
  • Scope and Content

  • Descriptive Summary

    Title: Richard Vogler Cruikshank Collection
    Creator: Various
    Repository: Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, UCLA Hammer Museum
    Los Angeles, CA 90024
    Language: English.

    Administrative Information

    Access

    Collection is open for research.

    Publication Rights

    For publication information, please contact Susan Shin, Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, schin@hammer.ucla.edu

    Preferred Citation

    [Identification of item], Collection of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, UCLA. [Item credit line, if given]

    Biography

    George Cruikshank (1792-1878) was a popular nineteenth-century British artist, widely recognized for his work as a caricaturist and book illustrator. George and his elder brother Robert Cruikshank (1789-1856) learned the craft of design, collaboration, and printmaking from their father, the noted caricaturist Isaac Cruikshank (1748-1811). George Cruikshank was also greatly influenced by predecessor William Hogarth (1697-1764) and early contemporaries Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) and James Gillray (1757-1815).
    George Cruikshank's lengthy career spanned the Regency period (1811-1820) and Victorian era (1837-1901). From age nine to eighty-five, Cruikshank produced thousands of designs in formats ranging from caricatural prints, book illustrations, lottery puffs, and song sheets. Cruikshank's early caricatures provided sharp commentary on British politics and culture. Favorite targets were Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), King George IV (1762-1830), and dandies and trendsetters of the early nineteenth century. When interest in caricatural prints waned in England in the 1820s, Cruikshank shifted to designing and publishing humorous serials, such as "My Sketch Book," and illustrating serialized novels by authors such as Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882). In the last decades of his life, Cruikshank became deeply involved in the Temperance movement, producing images and text directly attributing difficult contemporary social issues--violence, poverty, crime--to the pernicious effects of alcohol.

    Scope and Content

    In 1989 UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young acquired the Richard Vogler Cruikshank Collection on behalf of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts. Comprising 3,500 works on paper--drawings, prints, illustrated books, serials, and pamphlets, as well as letters and autographs--the Vogler Cruikshank collection is the most comprehensive holding of works by George, Isaac, and Robert Cruikshank in the western United States. Richard Vogler, a distinguished collector and university professor, built his collection of works by and about the Cruikshanks carefully, studiously, and with great dedication over many years.
    The Vogler Cruikshank collection offers valuable commentary on nineteenth-century British history, culture, and arts and is a natural companion to other works by British, French, and American caricaturists in the University of California's museum and library holdings. In particular, the Vogler Cruikshank collection complements the extensive collection of caricatures in the Armand Hammer Honore Daumier and Contemporaries Collection at the UCLA Hammer Museum. Significant collections of related nineteenth-century works are also housed at the UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and Young Research Library. Together with San Marino's Huntington Library collection of books and prints by Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray, the Vogler Cruikshank collection makes Los Angeles a major center for the study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and French caricature.
    Since the following online collection guide is intended as a general introduction to the Vogler Cruikshank collection, it includes only a representative selection of works. For the purposes of this guide, the selected works are arranged by series or groups related to production type: Drawings and Paintings, Caricatures, Serials, and Illustrated Books. Descriptions of drawings related to prints in the Vogler Cruikshank collection precede entries for the prints.
    The guide incorporates research and descriptions by Richard S. Rand and Anne Helmreich for exhibitions drawn from the Vogler Cruikshank collection in 1990 and 1992. Several notes in the guide are informed by Robert L. Patten's detailed, two volume examination of George Cruikshank, as well as the Santa Barbara Museum of Art's 1978 catalogue for the traveling exhibition of Vogler's collection. The following bibliography identifies sources most frequently consulted in preparing the guide.
    Selected Bibliography
    Cohn, Albert M. George Cruikshank: A Catalogue Raisonne of the Work Executed During the Years 1806-1877. Annotated by Richard Vogler. 3 vols. London: Office of "The Bookman's Journal," 1924.
    Helmreich, Anne. Life in London: Prints and Book Illustrations from the Richard Vogler Cruikshank Collection. Exhibition brochure. Los Angeles: Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, 1992.
    Patten, Robert L. George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art. Volume 1: 1792-1835. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992.
    Patten, Robert L. George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art. Volume 2: 1835-1878. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996.
    Rand Jr., Richard S. Snuffing Out Boney! Napoleonic Caricatures from the Richard Vogler George Cruikshank Collection. Exhibition brochure. Los Angeles: Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, 1990.
    Santa Barbara Museum of Art. George Cruikshank: Printmaker (1792-1878); Selections from the Richard Vogler Collection. Exhibition catalogue. Catalogue entries compiled by Joy Mulvaney and catalogue notes by Richard Vogler. Santa Barbara, Ca.: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1978.
    University of California, Los Angeles. Picturing Childhood: Illustrated Children's Books from the University of California Collections, 1550-1990. Exhibition catalogue. Los Angeles: Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts and the Department of Special Collections at the University Research Library, 1997.