38. Joseph Lisle
(fl. 1828-1830)

“I’d be a butterfly born in a bower…”

(click on image to print)
Lisle, I’d be a butterfly

“I’d be a butterfly born in a bower…”

Aquatint with hand coloring, 1830, 264 x 214 mm., British Museum Satires N.D.; British Museum 1993.1107.43; Walpole Library 828.0.16. Fine impression with effective coloring on wove paper, trimmed on the second borderline and lacking the text below; a few spots of foxing and a flattened central crease. Quite the polar opposite to Wheatley’s idealized Cries of London (No. 20 above) Lisle’s image is a satire on misery, as this poor, crippled peddler sings his idiotically sentimental song in an urban rainstorm. Little seems to be known of Joe (as he often signed himself) Lisle, except that he may be the same “eccentric young man,” an artist, who founded, in 1822, a social order known as “The Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes,” a drinking club that developed into a secret society with rituals, responsibilities and good works. The peculiar senses of humor in the two endeavors seem not unlike.