John Collet (ca. 1725-1780): A Commercial Comic Artist

This thesis focuses on the comic work of the English painter John Collet (ca. 1725-1780), who flourished between 1760 and 1780, producing mostly mild social satires and humorous genre subjects. In his own lifetime, Collet was a celebrated painter, who was frequently described as the ‘second Hogarth.’ His works were known to a wide audience; he regularly participated in London’s public exhibitions, and more than eighty comic prints were made after his oil paintings and watercolour designs. Despite his popularity and prolific output, however, Collet has been largely neglected by modern scholars. When he is acknowledged, it is generally in the context of broader studies on graphic satire, consequently confusing his true profession as a painter and eliding his contribution to London’s nascent exhibition culture. This study aims to rescue Collet from obscurity through in-depth analysis of his mostly unfamiliar works, while also offering some explanation for his exclusion from the British art historical canon. His work will be located within both the arena of public exhibitions and the print market, and thus, for the first time, equal attention will be paid to the extant paintings, as well as the reproductive prints. The thesis will be organised into a succession of close readings of Collet’s work, with each chapter focusing on a few representative examples of a significant strand of imagery. These images will be examined from art-historical and socio-historical perspectives, thereby demonstrating the artist’s engagement with both established pictorial traditions, and ephemeral and topical social preoccupations.