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An ocean of motion about Spanish commotions

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Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 9 May 2014 at 14:41:32 (UTC)

Original – An ocean of motion about Spanish commotions, a political cartoon published during the Anglo-Spanish war (1796–1808) by William Pyne. Click on the image to view in full resolution
Reason
See jpeg version if you prefer to use the ZoomViewer.
As a scan, this is of a high technical or research quality at 36 megapixels (11,800 pixels wide), being difficult to digitize due to size (45 inches or 1.14 metres wide), and this is part of the reason for nominating it as an exemplar of the excellent work of the archivists at the Library of Congress in releasing the British Cartoon Prints Collection. Pyne was notable for establishing the Royal Watercolour Society. The cartoon is historically significant as it was made at the time of the Anglo-Spanish War (1796–1808) showing stereotypes of the Spanish as expressed by different classes of the British population. It is a rare example of William Pyne's humorous cartoons (the only political cartoon of his that I can find on Commons), the majority of his published work being palace illustrations and British costumes. The digitization shows detail of costumes and characters, sufficient for each to be taken as a separate detailed illustration, see detailed crop. The full size image shows natural foxing due to age, and creases from being folded up, which it was designed to do, but these do not detract from the encyclopaedic value or quality of the etchings. The main humour of the text is to poke fun at the Spanish, with the cobbler calling them "fish-eating rascals" and the journalists for the Spanish Gazette having nothing to report (on the left) while the British cryers (on the right) are exhausted from having ten years worth of incidents to report in one day.
I would hope that a consequence of bringing attention to this cartoon would be to help improve Wikipedia articles by using more of the several hundred unused high quality scans we have available of historic political cartoons and especially Pyne, at the moment the article about his life exists only in English and is a stub. Note that the image was nominated on Commons and had only supporting votes, however encyclopaedic value tends to have less weight in that process.
Articles in which this image appears
William Henry Pyne
FP category for this image
Wikipedia:Featured pictures/Artwork/Others
Creator
William Henry Pyne / archive scan by the Library of Congress
  • Looking at the feedback so far, perhaps I was putting too much weight on the technical accomplishment of the scan by the LoC (which is wonderful work). I'll have a think about the other examples of political cartoons from the 18th/19th century that I have been uploading. In the next few weeks I am planning on uploading many of the 100MB+ files that were previously skipped, and it may well be that one of those will be able to be converted from tiff to a high resolution jpeg, be aesthetically pleasing at thumbnail size and not suffer from any damage such as foxing. --Fæ (talk) 19:41, 30 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is not meant to belittle your work, or the LOC's. It's just that the vast majority of FPs from the LOC's collection (and there are quite a few) undergo some restoration beforehand, so that reusers can use them easily and the presentation is better online. Even if it's just minor flyspecking for dust, like our FP of Muhammad Ali. This image would require... a fair bit of restoration. But it's doable. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 00:29, 1 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Not Promoted --Armbrust The Homunculus 15:48, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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