About This Project
The primary purpose of this project is to create an intelligent online window onto the work of the famous comic caricaturist and illustrator George Cruikshank (1792-1878). Between William Hogarth in the eighteenth century and Walt Disney (as a cartoonist) in the twentieth, George Cruikshank helped chart his age in images in Britain, much as his contemporary Honoré Daumier did in France. The UCLA Hammer museum has an extraordinary, virtually unknown and untouched archive, collected long ago by UCLA English professor Richard Vogler, that contains every artwork ever printed by Cruikshank. These images are often accompanied by Vogler’s expert commentary. Digital photographs are being made of this artwork. How, this project asks, can we create a web platform to bring an eye onto Cruikshank for scholars and people the world over, and, vice versa, how can we empower them to look—with their many different lenses—through Cruikshank’s eye?