'Margate Drawn'

Sponsored by Southern Water

Caricature Exhibition

Friday 20 August to Monday 30 August from 11am to 5pm
Harbour Arm Gallery

Margate Harbour Arm, Margate, Kent

As part of the ‘Dippers & Dunkers Festival’ for 2010, we will show a selection of infamous, famous and fairly unknown illustrations, celebrating Margate’s seaside heritage.  

The exhibition focuses on the people that were 'drawn' to Margate to take the waters and the artists that have 'drawn' Margate in caricature, from the 1700s onwards.  Thanet's beaches were as highly prized then, as they are now.

The ‘Margate Hoy’ was one of the most popular methods of getting from London to Margate.  In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, English hoys sailed frequently between London and the North Kent coast and these enabled middle class Londoners to escape the city for the clean and refreshing air of Margate and its wonderful bays and beaches.

The use of the tides and the winds from the Thames Estuary into the North Sea, obviously gave a lot of the passengers a terrible time and this seems an element that the Regency artists focused on!  It’s therefore, of no surprise, upon arriving, the visitors took to the ‘Restorative’ waters of Margate.  They needed too!

Rowlandson, Paul Pry and Jessop’s illustrations are brilliant records of Margate's social history and really capture the many locals and visitors that inhabited the local area.

Caricature Competition

Alongside the historical prints we will hang, three newly created caricatures for Margate today.  For further information, terms and conditions of the competition, please contact: Heather.sawney@thanet.gov.uk or Telephone: 01843 577428.

Images are reproduced with kind permission from Thanet District Council, National Maritime Museum (Greenwich) and The Wellcome Trust (Euston).  Please note these images remain the copyright of these organisations and may not be copied without prior consent or licence.