Matthias (or Matthew) Darly, printseller, engraver, caricaturist and furniture designer, served an apprenticeship to a clockmaker before opening a print shop in London in the 1740s. By 1749 he had published the first of his designs for carved furniture. In 1751 he published A New Book of Chinese, Gothic and Modern Chairs, and in 1753 he shared a premises for several months with designer Thomas Chippendale while working on the plates for Chippendale’s The Gentleman’s and Cabinet-Maker’s Director (1754). Around the same time Darly was also producing and selling wallpapers (decorated with ‘Modern, Gothic or Chinese Designs’), and decorative motifs for porcelain, delftware and printed cotton. In 1757, having moved to a new location on The Strand, Darly began publishing caricatures which are described by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as representing ‘the first occasion on which caricature – exaggeration of facial features – was fused with political satire.’ Darly’s second wife, Mary (active 1760–1781) – also a printseller and a self-styled ‘Fun Merchant’ – increasingly took on responsibility for this side of the business, and in 1762 published Principals of Caricatura, credited as the earliest book on the subject. Matthias meanwhile continued publishing furniture and architectural designs. His A New Book of Ceilings was published in 1760 and he contributed to books such as Household Furniture in Genteel Taste (also 1760) and A Universal System of Household Furniture (1762). The Darly’s shop on the Strand – the subject of a 1772 etching, published by Matthias, called ‘The Macaroni Print Shop’ – also sold ‘materials of every kind used in the Polite Arts of Drawing, Etching, & c. with all Sorts of drawing books for young Ladies and Gentlemen’, as well as ‘Ladies Stencils for painting Silks, Linens, Paper &c.’, portraits and historical prints. By the early 1770s, having occasionally fallen foul of the Establishment with their caricatures, the Darlys had begun focussing on fashion, publishing images such as ‘The Ridiculous Taste, or the Ladies Absurdity’ (c. 1771) and ‘The Extravaganza, or the Mountain Headdress of 1776’, which lampooned the taste for preposterous hairstyles and wigs. The Darlys continued to publish caricatures regularly until Matthias’s death in January 1780. Prints by both Darlys are held in several prestigious print collections including those of the British Museum and the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
