French Lemonade Merchant

Date1771

Publisher Matthew Darly (ca. 1720 - 1780)

Publisher Mary Darly (1760 - 1781)

Engraver M. Darly

OriginEngland, London

MediumHand-colored etching with line engraving

DimensionsOverall: 8 1/2 × 5 1/2in. (21.6 × 14cm) Overall (Plate): 6 × 4in. (15.2 × 10.2cm)

Credit LineMuseum Purchase

Object number1955-62,10

DescriptionUpper right corner reads: "9"
Lower margin reads: "FRENCH. LEMONADE. MERCHANT./ Pub...d accord.g to Act or Parll...t June 8.th by T. Scratchley 1771"
Label TextThe print is plate 9 from volume I of six volumes of Mary and Matthew Darly's "24 Caricatures by Several Ladies Gentleman Artists &c." The Darly's appear to have used a pseudonym for this print "T. Scratchley." This character was also pulled from one of Henry Bunbury's other prints entitled "View on the Pont Neuf" which featured other grotesque caricatures of the French. The lemonade merchant who carries on his back a vessel that contains the beverage. He is dressed in a most ludicrous manner. One's attention is caught by a huge fur hat on his head, but on top of this hat is a cloth cap tilting towards the back. He is comically dressed in a large bearskin cap, an unfashionable green coat, and large sabot shoe (wooden shoe) stuffed with grass to make them fit. He has a long que extending from straggly hair, almost straight up and out

The Darly's were a husband-and-wife team capitalized on the craze for caricatures, the practice of making a likeness with exaggerated mannerisms or features to create a comic effect, a form that was brought back by aristocratic Britons who visited Italy on the Grand Tour. The Darly’s catered to this audience by publishing a prolific assortment of caricature prints during the 1770s. Many of the Darly's satirized the manners and fashions of the macaroni, a term used to describe a sub-culture of fashionably dressed men during the period, and subsequently, regardless of subject, the Darly's prints were known as "macaroni prints."

Their most famous work was their encyclopedic "Caricatures" which included prints of macaroni’s as well as other interesting characters, such as macaronis, all based on their own drawings and those submitted to them by amateur artists lambasting their friends, artists, and other figures in London life. The front page of Volume I describes them as “…a Series of Drol[l] Prints consisting of Heads, Figures, Conversations and Satires upon the follies of the Age…” These prints were published in groups of 24, in six volumes that were published between 1771 and 1773. Colonial Williamsburg owns volumes 1-3.