The Festival of the Golden Rump

The Festival of the Golden Rump

The Festival of the Golden Rump is a visual satire, circulated in the popular political paper Common Sense or The Englishman's Journal. Its main purpose was to critique governmental overreach and manipulation during King George II's rule. At the time, Robert Walpole was the first Prime Minister who was also depicted in the satire. This piece was subtly and artfully deployed to combat resistance against authoritarian control. This is an aged piece of paper with the work etched onto it. There are several figures crowded around a devilish human figure standing on a pedestal that reads “Eurusque Notusque Ruunt Creberque Africus” which translates from Latin to read, “and both the East wind and the South wind rush, and the frequent Africus.

Debated authorship, The 4th Earl of Chesterfield

The British Museum

The Craftsman

7 May, 1737

Kennesaw State University, Magdaline Marks

© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Sketch Print on Paper

English, Latin

Physical Object

Asset Number 355497001

Europe 18th Century

Height: Height: 208 millimetres
Width: Width: 268 millimetres

Paper

Sketch Print on Paper