Sawney in the bog-house

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James Gillray
Sawney in the bog-house
etching
image: 317 x 230 mm; plate mark: 351 x 247 mm; sheet: 370 x 262 mm
Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan, 1900.
Peel 2304
Published: 
London : Publish'd. 4th. June 1779 by Mrs Holt No 111 Oxford Street, [1779].
Provenance: 
Formerly owned by Sir Robert Peel.
Notes: 

Title from item.
Attributed by some sources to James Gillray.
Four lines of verse on the wall behind the figure of "Sawney", at right, read: "Tis a bra' bonny seat, o' my saul, Sawney cries, / I never beheld sic before with me Eyes, / Such a place in aw' Scotland I never could meet, / For the High and the Low ease themselves in the Street.

Summary: 

A satire on the Scots; an imitation but not a copy of the satire with the same title (see BMSat 2678), ca. 1745, and repeated in 1762 (see BMSat 3988), which according to Angelo was by George Bickham. A Scot in Highland dress and wearing a feathered cap is seated in a latrine, his legs thrust down two holes in the board. He grasps in his left hand a rolled document inscribed "Act for [esta]blishing Popery". Behind him a stone wall is indicated on which is etched (left) a thistle growing out of a reversed crown, inscribed "Nemo me impune lacessit". Cf. BM Satires.

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