The Cameleopard, or a new hobby

William Heath ('Paul Pry')

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Heath's design for a printed caricature shows George IV seated astride a high-stepping giraffe accompanied by his mistress Lady Conyngham. The king wears a straw hat with wide curving brim and the lady a large bonnet--in the related print she wears a tiara and feathers--with two Nubians bowing at right. The satire responds to a giraffe, then called a cameleopard, that the Pasha of Egypt presented to the king in 1827. The animal arrived at Windsor on August 13, and Lord Marlborough wrote to The Times the following day, "everybody was so much engrossed by talking of the cameleopard who has just arrived, that nothing else seemed to be thought of." Until its death two years later, the giraffe was a popular subject for satirical printmakers.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art