- Museum number
- 1851,0901.592
- Title
- Object: Anti-saccharites, -or- John Bull and his family leaving off the use of sugar
- Description
-
The King, Queen, and six Princesses, three quarter length, are seated round a frugal tea-table. The King, in profile to the right, faces his daughters, holding his cup and saucer to his lips, and saying, with a staring eye, "delicious! delicious". The Queen sits in the centre behind the small tea-pot, holding her cup and saucer in bony fingers, and looking with a wide and cunning smile towards the Princesses, saying, "O my dear Creatures, do but Taste it! You can't think how nice it is without Sugar: - and then consider how much Work you'll save the poor Blackeemoors by leaving off the use of it! - and above all, remember how much expence it will save your poor Papa! - O its charming cooling Drink!" The Princess Royal sits at the end of the row, on the extreme right, with four sisters diminishing in age on her right, a sixth just indicated behind the Queen. They hold, but do not drink, cups of tea, with expressions varying from sulky discontent to defiant surprise. Below the title is etched: 'To the Masters & Mistresses of Families in Great Britain, this Noble Example of Œconomy, is respectfully submitted.' 27 March 1792
Hand-coloured etching
- Production date
- 1792
- Dimensions
-
Height: 313 millimetres
-
Width: 397 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- (Description and comment from M.Dorothy George, 'Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the British Museum', VI, 1938)
For the boycott of sugar as a protest against the slave trade see W. Fox, 'An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and. Rum', 1791. W. L. Mathieson, 'England in Transition', 1920, pp. 68-70. Cf. T. L. Peacock, 'Melincourt' (Halliford ed.), pp. 292 ff. The resolutions of the 'Antisaccharites' were ridiculed on the ground that they covered only one kind of colonial produce. 'Lond. Chronicle', 30 March 1792. For the royal family and sugar see BMSat 8081; for the slave trade see also BMSat 7848. For the supposed miserliness of the King and (especially) the Queen, see BMSat 7836, &c.
Grego, 'Gillray', pp. 140-1 (reproduction, frontispiece). Wright and Evans, No. 78. Reprinted, 'G.W.G.', 1830. Reproduced, 'Social England', ed. Traill, 1904, v. 505.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
2001 Jun-Sep, London, Tate Britain, 'Gillray and the Art of Caricature'
2020-2021 Mar-Mar, Germany, Dresden, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Future Food
- Acquisition date
- 1851
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1851,0901.592
