Central Park Caricature

Looks like me....only moreso!

     This is a detail from a joint caricature of my daughter and me, done at Central Park in New York City in 2014.  My daughter badly wanted to have one of us done together.  The artist really did not want to make my pretty daughter into a caricature; he wanted to do a straight portrait of her. When he completed it, she had fewer comic effects applied to her and looked somewhat like a cross between a young Tatum O'Neal and a young Angelina Jolie (with different hair).

     I think this is pretty funny, though I've never thought my chin was a particularly prominent feature of mine.  It's a bit Jay Leno-like here.  I would have thought even more over-sized eyes would have been to the point.  My daughter's eyes were emphasized somewhat:  we both inherited that trait from my maternal grandmother via my mother, though we have different eye colors.  I guess the artist saw something else, though.

     The word derives from the Italian caricatura, the act of loading, from the previous Latin caricarre, to load.  The idea of "loading the obvious" is behind the idea of exaggerating parts or characteristics by distortion. 

     Some of the earliest caricatures are found in Leonardo da Vinci's works.  He sometimes sought out deformed models.  In creating caricatures, sometimes the exaggerated portrait was "more to the point" than the realistic one.  The artform gradually grew in Italian aristocratic circles.

     Eighteenth century England, with its relative freedom of speech, saw the growth of political caricature.  (And the American colonists still revolted!  We see why this has remained an important American privilege.)  Out of this grew political cartoons.