This room highlights three of Gillray's greatest prints: Shakespeare Sacrificed, 1789, Lieutenant Governor Gall-Stone, 1790, and Titianus Redivivus, 1797. They are some of his largest and most elaborate satires, teeming with grotesque figures that repay prolonged examination.

Shakespeare Sacrificed ridicules the print publisher, John Boydell, who in May 1789 had opened a 'Shakespeare Gallery', ostensibly to provide patronage for struggling British history painters, but, Gillray claims, in fact simply to make large amounts of money from the sale of reproductive prints after their work.

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Titianus Redivivus (literally 'Titian Born Again') deals with a woman named Anna Provis, who claimed to have 'rediscovered' the lost secret of Titian's painting technique. The President of the Royal Academy, and several other leading members of the art establishment, were taken in by the woman's impostures, although her career did not last long after the publication of Gillray's print.

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Lieut. Governor Gall-Stone is a sustained, complex and savage attack on one man: Philip Thicknesse, the former Governor of Landguard Fort in Surrey, who claimed to have discovered the painter Thomas Gainsborough, but who was also variously accused of extortion, blackmail, and libel, as well as being notorious as a lecher and sadist.

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These three prints were not planned as a group, but must have been a declaration of intent by Gillray, demonstrating his status as an exponent of the comic sublime, and his power as an unlicensed scourge of the complacency of the art establishment that had rejected him.

List of works