market for 18th and 19th century prints, there is a strong following for political caricatures on both English-speaking sides of the Atlantic.

Prices have risen consistently since the 1980s when Georgian cartoons, still stuck in the limbo between political history and art history, might cost £30-50 each or £200 for a popular image. Nowadays the best and rarest examples can easily fetch over £1000.

A subtle change in the way they were sold at auction – introduced shortly after the influential Gillray exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 2001 – certainly impacted prices. The move from job lots and albums to properly catalogued single items allowed collectors, connoisseurs and institutions to compete in a forum previously dominated by bulk-buying dealers.

Previously there were few easily available price levels with which toWilliam Heath, Henry William Bunbury and Richard Newton – then some subjects and some impressions are more popular than others.

Prints depicting Royalty and Napoleon are always popular.

Bloomsbury Auctions’ specialist Robert Hall observes that collectors favour the Fox-Pitt and the Napoleonic eras above all – enjoying the depth, symbolism and range of references that the best satirical cartoons have to offer.

Social satires, the mainstay for many publishers of the time, are less popular and Hall observes a noticeable drop in prices for prints post-dating 1815. It seems Napoleon still exerts a powerful hold on the British psyche.

A copy of James Gillray’s ‘The Grand Coronation Procession of Napoleone the 1st, Emperor of France...’ of 1805 which sold for £2600 at Bloomsbury Auctions in July 2017. Second from left is the