"Count Roupee -- Vide Hyde Park" was first published on June 5, 1797, by Hannah Humphrey. It serves as a sharp political and social commentary on the massive fortunes brought back to Britain from colonial India.
The subject of the image was Paul Benfield, a notoriously wealthy English financier who went to India as a civil servant and military engineer for the East India Company. He amassed an astronomical private fortune through lucrative contracts, banking, and highly controversial, high-interest loans to local rulers like the Nabob of Arcot.
The nickname "Count Roupee" was a direct mockery of his sudden, enormous wealth, derived from the Indian currency (the rupee).
Gillray depicts Benfield as a small, short-sighted man with a dark complexion wearing spectacles.
He is riding a horse at a reckless, impetuous gallop through London's Hyde Park. This wild pace symbolizes his reckless financial speculation.
In the distance, you can see the distinctive pediment of the newly built Knightsbridge Barracks.
Like many "Nabobs" (the contemporary term for Englishmen who made fast fortunes in India), Benfield returned to England to buy his way into Parliament and high society. However, Gillray’s caricature proved prophetic. True to the reckless nature captured in the print, Benfield eventually lost his entire fortune through bad financial speculation and died in poverty.
Gillray was one of five children, and the only one to survive to maturity. In 1770 he was apprenticed to Harry Ashby, a London writing in engraver, and five years later W. Humphrey published a few of Gillray's illustrations including satirical works. By the time Gillray commenced his career satire was old, but personal caricature was in its infancy. Other exponents in this form of art were soon overshadowed by Gillray's superior craftsmanship.
His figures were full of vitality, titillating and reflective of some political crisis or private scandal. As his popularity increased so did demand by the public to see more of his work. In the rapidly changing politics of the late18th century he would produce a plate in twenty-four hours. Although sometimes overlooked his speech bubbles were elaborate and Gillray would spend considerable time composing and redrafting the text.
Between 1791 to 1807 his career continued successfully in association with William and Hannah Humphrey. There after Gillray's health began to suffer. He eventually slipped into madness and died shortly before the Battle of Waterloo on June 1st 1815. Hannah, who had a close relationship with him nursed Gillray through out his final years and following his death the copper plates then formed part of Hannah's estate when she died in 1818.
The executors of Hannah's estate sold Gillray's painstakingly worked plates for there second hand copper weight. Hearing of this, the then publisher, Bohn who had previously expressed an interest in buying the plates set about purchasing them from a variety of different sources, eventually acquiring over 500. In 1851 Bohn republished the engravings in a large folio volume, "The Works of James Gillray".
