From the endearing oddness of its cover, which presents an image of Thomas Jefferson’s recognizable head on the body of a strutting rooster, Alison M. Stagg’s Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in the United States, 1789-1828 draws the reader into an often-unfamiliar world of early American political caricature filled with human-animal hybrids, petty personal grievances, and dizzying literary and historical references. Discussing prints made and distributed in the United States during the early republic, Stagg uses exhaustive research into archival and published sources to uncover new details about the creation and dissemination of early American political prints. This study effectively chronicles how caricaturists adapted source material, targeted audiences, and addressed contemporary political issues amid an expanding culture of visually engaging printed matter.

Stagg opens her examination with a question prompted by her education in eighteenth-century British political prints, a field dominated by named artists, like James Gillray and George Cruikshank. The works of these two artists alone can fill volumes, attesting to the popularity and prodigious spread of humorous print culture in eighteenth-century Britain. By contrast, Stagg wonders: “Where were the hundreds of caricatures depicting American politicians and commenting on the problems of the day in the 1790s?” (2). Driven by this question, Stagg uncovered numerous previously unknown political prints, many of which are illustrated and discussed in this volume. Arguing that American print culture derived from British precedents in many ways, Stagg also examines aspects of the field that departed from British examples: a greater degree of anonymity for printmakers, a lack of established infrastructure for publishing and distributing prints, and a more idiosyncratic iconography that was often particular and localized. The specific focus of the book is stand-alone prints, mostly copper plate engravings, which were referred to at the time as “caricatures.” Unlike today’s political cartoon, a caricature need not denote an exaggerated mockery of a public figure’s distinguishing physical characteristics. Instead, caricature referred to any print that used humor to satirize contemporary political figures or events. Displayed publicly in coffeehouses, barbershops, and taverns, and exchanged among friends as a part of erudite correspondences, these caricatures used multiple visual and textual strategies to inform, amuse, and outrage early American audiences.

The book’s first chapter provides a useful orientation to political caricature in a transatlantic perspective. While most of the comparative material is British, fitting given the former colonial relationship between the two powers, some French material is also provided for reference. In this chapter, Stagg succinctly and clearly outlines the distribution and display of both imported and locally published caricatures and discusses the audience for the works. Display and sale of imported British prints probably helped create a market for American works and, as Stagg notes, creators in the United States often took compositional elements directly from British precedents. With British prints costing, on average, two to four times as much as locally made prints though, American publishers could court a larger and more economically diverse domestic audience by producing their own images. While purchasers of prints were still disproportionately from educated, monied classes, the public display of caricatures in barbershops and print store windows, not to mention the surprising amount of newspaper coverage and discussion that certain prints received, combined to expose a larger audience to these works, too. Stagg finds evidence for both men and women as viewers, and possibly purchasers, of prints, though her evidence comes from women connected to political leaders (including First Lady Abigail Adams and Mary Jefferson Eppes, daughter of Thomas Jefferson), who would have more cause than civilian women to be interested in viewing such images.

Stagg also argues in this chapter that a public culture of caricature began to emerge in the 1790s as artists found themselves no longer responding to externally imposed imperial overreaches of power but to internal political disagreements of the newly formed nation. A good example of this is the movement of the US capital from New York to Philadelphia in 1790, an event that outraged New Yorkers. Stagg uses three prints protesting the move to demonstrate how caricature was a culturally iterative process in which one artist might create a motif that was adapted and expanded by others, beginning to form a shared language of references and themes legible to their imagined audience.

The next two chapters focus on James Akin, whom Stagg refers to as “America’s first caricaturist” (69). Discussing Akin’s early life in Charleston, South Carolina, his training in London with Benjamin West, and his careers in engraving and, briefly, in quack medicine, Stagg shows how Akin’s wide-ranging classical and artistic knowledge provided him with the necessary store of references to become a successful caricaturist. While his early humor prints focused on episodes of local scandal in Newburyport, Massachusetts, including frequent, repeated references to a physical assault on the illustrator by his then-employer, Akin’s mature works, like the book’s cover image, “A Philosophic Cock,” produce complex arguments of national importance. Showing Jefferson as a strutting rooster showing off for a brown hen with the face of a pretty, dark-complected woman in a headscarf, Akin waded into deeper waters by highlighting the recently revealed scandal of Jefferson’s relationship with a woman he enslaved, Sally Hemings. His title punningly suggests that the president’s reputation as a philosopher masked, but did not fully hide, his carnal appetites.

Chapter four suggests that in the 1810s much political printmaking transitioned from the occasional production of images by engravers who often worked on other jobs concurrently, to a specialist model organized around business principles. It focuses primarily on the Scottish caricaturist William Charles, who immigrated to New York in 1806 and opened his “Repository of the Arts,” which sold prints from London, art supplies, paper goods, original artworks, and Charles’s own caricatures. It was while living in Philadelphia during the War of 1812, however, that Charles’s innovations in the “business of caricature” (99) were most lucrative. Through strategies of advertising, monthly subscription fees, and subcontracting, Charles and his business partner Samuel Kennedy modernized the ad-hoc print distribution strategies of the previous twenty years. In the final chapter, Stagg discusses how caricature print production transitioned from primarily copper plate engraving at the turn of the century to lithography by the late 1820s. This technological shift enabled artists to produce different kinds of images that were not possible, or were much more time-consuming, with engraved plates. The print runs possible with lithography were also larger, which ensured that more copies of later prints survived. With analysis of early cartoons of Andrew Jackson’s presidential campaign and of several images by the rising caricaturist David Claypoole Johnston, Stagg closes the volume with the ascendance of lithography as the primary medium for political prints.

A list of caricatures published between 1789 and 1828 appears in an extensive appendix at the back of the volume, in which Stagg lists both the repositories where known impressions of prints are held and any previous record of publication. Stagg’s most crucial contribution is her extensive archival research, which enabled her to uncover the existence of around forty caricatures from this period that were not included in the foundational catalogs of early American caricature compiled by William Murrell (Whitney Museum, 1933) and Frank Weitenkampf (New York Public Library, 1953). Of these, around twenty are still unlocated, but wherever possible Stagg’s appendix contains descriptive captions or lengthy titles, which are derived from discussions of the images published in contemporary newspapers. The other twenty previously unpublished caricatures are listed with their current repositories, and eleven of these are illustrated in the volume. With its high-quality images and impressive number of color plates, along with this exhaustively researched checklist, Prints of a New Kind provides an outstanding gallery for the scholar of early republic print culture.

The method of this volume is biographical and antiquarian, reflecting much scholarship on early print culture, which is often concerned with fabrication, attribution, copying, and distribution. While the excellent illustrations are welcome and give an opportunity for scrutiny across images, sometimes the book sacrifices in-depth visual, iconographic, and textual analysis of individual prints in favor of providing specifics about their making and distribution. This is understandable given the book’s focus on discovering formerly unlocated caricatures, attributing (or re-attributing) prints to their authors, and revising our understanding of just how widely seen and influential these works were. For some readers, a greater balance between explaining the origin and circulation of a print and parsing its formal elements and political messages might have broadened the volume’s utility. However, this book will surely be of interest to those concerned with the origins of political caricature and cartooning in the United States, as it fills important gaps in our history of early American printmaking.