Razor's levée, or, Ye heads of a new wig ad----n on a broadbottom / JS f.

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James Sayers
1748-1823
Razor's levée, or, Ye heads of a new wig ad----n on a broadbottom / JS f.
etching
plate mark: 278 x 405 mm; sheet: 310 x 423 mm
Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan, 1900.
Peel 3235
Published: 
[London] : Published 21st April 1783 by Thomas Cornell Bruton Street, [1783]
Provenance: 
Formerly owned by Sir Robert Peel.
Inscription: 

The names of the individual represented in Sayers's caricature written in pencil in the lower margin of sheet.

Summary: 

Heads of the members of the new ministry stand on wig blocks in a barber's shop. The barber washes his hands in a bowl attached to a double stand with the bewildered looking head of Lord North and the happily smiling one of Charles Fox on it. Behind them stand blocks with the heads of the Duke of Portland, Lords Cavendish, Stormont (David Murray), Carlisle, and Admiral Keppel. Samuel House, a well known Fox supporter, and a plebeian politician, is seated, with his tankard in his hand, in a chair placed next to Keppel's head. The head of Burke behind him wears an unhappy expression, perhaps at the distance between him and the other cabinet members. Behind the barber on the floor lie the discarded heads of former ministers, the Duke of Grafton, Lord Shelburne, and Dundas. Above on the wall are mirror images of Charles I and Cromwell, ready to embrace each other. "A new Map of Great Britain and Ireland" above the fireplace is torn between Ireland and the British Isle on which the name "England" is conspicously absent below Scotland and Wales.

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