George Cruikshank’s A Tailor in a High Wind

George Cruikshank, A Tailor in a High Wind or L’embarras de Richesses, ca. 1819, hand-colored etching on paper, 11 9/16 x 9 1/4 in., Mead Art Museum.

Object Description

This drawing depicts the left-side profile of a pale, bald man holding a young girl in his arms. He is standing on a green grassy cliff before a skinny wooden railing. The cliff overlooks the English Channel in Brighton, a city in southern England. The man’s face depicts desperate surprise, his eyes wide, forehead wrinkled, and mouth agape. The girl he holds sports a similar expression, mouth and eyes wide in surprise and fear. The man’s figure is exceptionally disproportionate, with a large stomach and sizable bottom contrasting his skinny legs and knobby knees. He wears bourgeois clothing, with button-up pantaloons, a white shirt, a light jacket, and a long dark overcoat. The young girl wears pink slippers, white tights, a white dress, and a light blue overcoat. 

They face left towards a rainstorm, represented by thin, black, slanted lines. Large cumulonimbus clouds in the background mark the storm, gray and dark on the left side from which the rain is coming and lighter on the right. The man is also holding a closed, greenish-blue umbrella pointed diagonally towards the rain, and they face a strong wind from the same direction—their coats flap behind them like capes. He has a white roll of cloth tucked under his right armpit and a knapsack of purple cloth tied to the end of a cane held between his legs. Newspapers fly from the knapsack, while the man’s powdered white wig, short black top hat, and a scroll of white paper tied with pink ribbon are airborne. The items sail behind them, tumbling in the gale. In the bottom left foreground, a small black dog crouches low away from the wind, its head turned to gaze at the storm, eyes wide in apprehension. Over the railing lies the sea, light blue and white, but with many small black lines and churning waves. Among the clouds, a few seagulls attempt to weather the storm—one twists above the man’s head as it tries to fly into the wind, looking down towards the man and girl.

Below the drawing is the work’s title, accompanied by a poem from Lord Byron, all written in cursive. The title reads: A Tailor in a High Wind or L’embarras des Richesses. Underneath the title is written: “Drawn from the Life on the Cliff Brighton.”

Publication and Provenance

A Tailor in a High Wind was published in 1819 in London and given to the Mead Art Museum in 2006 in memory of Douglas R. Borlen (Class of 1948). The Mead possesses thirteen prints published by the artist, all gifted in memory of this alum.

George Cruikshank and Nineteenth-Century British Satire

This piece was made by George Cruikshank, an English illustrator and caricaturist well-known for the satirical prints that he produced. He was a freelance artist, selling his works to London publishers for mass distribution through printing publications. As a print, it was crafted by etching on a metal plate, then pressed against paper and hand-colored. He published this work around the time etching became a more common method of cartoon illustration instead of the traditional practice of engraving. Cartoon etching became wildly popular in the 1820s, so this print was produced just before the boom.¹

Unknown artist, George Cruikshank, ca. 1836, oil on canvas, 13 in x 10 3/4 in., National Portrait Gallery, London.

These innovations in production coincided with the public’s insatiable desire for world information and the degradation of high society. Satire dominated the British press and publications from the late eighteenth century into the post-Napoleonic age. In this time of political uncertainty, creatives turned to this clever humor to comment on political issues like the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the state of Ireland, as well as the social framework of Britain, such as fashion, feminism, and cultural trends. The rise of the political cartoon democratized humor and activism, allowing the masses to access these publications through daily newspapers and pamphlets. Satirists often mixed graphic and literary works to collaborate on publications, as seen in the partnership of Cruikshank’s drawing with Lord Byron’s poem.²

Henry Hetherington, The Poor Man’s Guardian: A Weekly Newspaper, ca. 1831, newspaper print, British Library.

Cruikshank’s works relied on humor and exaggeration to criticize English politicians and the upper classes in promoting political and social change, frequently targeting Napoleon I and members of the British Parliament.³ Consistent with his mission to comically degrade those with status, this piece pokes fun at the upwardly mobile in society at the time, as demonstrated by the tailor’s fine clothing, wig, and exaggerated stomach. His choice to set the work in Brighton further emphasizes this message. This coastal town was a popular place to summer for the upper classes in the nineteenth century, “attracting both those who, with money and time to spare, were in search of glamour, adventure, and excitement.”⁴ Not only would the subjects of the print desire to join the crowd spending time there, but as a place synonymous with pursuit, it perfectly complements Cruikshank’s satirical mission.

Significance

The wind in the piece is thought to represent what is out of one’s control in life—nature cannot be governed. The tailor personifies all those in British society who were futilely grasping for socioeconomic power, which the print communicates is largely uncontrollable and makes them look quite silly in trying to fight it.⁵ Within visual media, an artist’s choice of depicting wind often signifies change, whether it be cultural, environmental, or personal.⁶ What unites pieces involving wind is their difficulty to visually represent or capture the weather phenomenon, consistent with the interpretation that wind itself is largely unmanageable.

Beyond the piece’s visual element, Cruikshank’s second title for the work signals his message to viewers. “L’embarras des Richesses” is a French idiom that translates to “embarrassment of riches.” It describes a circumstance in which one possesses “so many good things or people that it is impossible to decide which of them you want.”⁷ Beyond its clever application to degrade the status-obsessed social climbers of Britain, the title is a nod to 18th-century French playwright abbé d’Allainval, known for producing the comedy L’Embarras des richesses.⁸ This tribute to the French Enlightenment’s satire movement, and well-known satirist Lord Byron’s poem are consistent with the mixed-media trends of 19th-century British satire. This blend of voices solidifies this work as more than a mass-distributed cartoon, laughed at and thrown away by everyday Londoners—it is a clever social commentary that drove creative culture.

Footnotes

1. Ted Stanley, “Cruikshank on Paper,” The Book and Paper Group Annual 19 (2000): 74. ↩︎
2. Nicholas Mason, ed., British Satire, 1785–1840, Collected Satires I: Shorter Satires (Pickering & Chatto, 2003). ↩︎
3.  Stanley, “Cruikshank on Paper,” 74. ↩︎
4. Rob Shields, “Ritual Pleasures of a Seaside Resort: Liminality, Carnivalesque, and Dirty Weekends,” in Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (Routledge, 1991), 73. ↩︎
5. “A Tailor in a High Wind,” Artera, accessed March 25, 2025, https://artera.ae/artworks/520ad417-cae4-4919-814d-7397c8cb8d7b. ↩︎
6. Giovanni Ferrario, “The Necessity of Being Elsewhere: An Aesthetics Between Perdition and Salvation,” in Materiali Di Estetica 3 (2021): 130. ↩︎
7. “an embarrassment of riches,” Cambridge Dictionary, accessed April 28, 2025, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/embarrassment-of-riches. ↩︎
8. “Abbé d’Allainval,” in Oxford Essential Quotations 5, ed. Susan Ratcliffe (Oxford University Press, 2017). ↩︎