Colour aquatint . On 2 June 1780, Lord George Gordon presented a petition of some 44,000 names of Londoners, demanding the repeal of the Catholic Relief Act, to parliament. A crowd of c.60,000 people gathered in Southwark and marched to Westminster, where they assembled at Palace Yard. In the following days the protestors grew violent. King George III called out the troops, who remained in encampments, set up in St James’s Park and Hyde Park until the rioting ceased in August that year. Watercolourist Paul Sandby painted a record of the army's movements and their life within the encampments. He exhibited six of these views at the Royal Academy in 1781 and also published sets of aquatints of his watercolours.
There are at least three original watercolours by Sandby on which this print of St. James’s Park is based. One is at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. Another was sold from a private collection through Christie’s, London, in 2009. A third, showing the two boys and girl with a dog that appear to the right of the print (which may represent the artists’ children Thomas and Nancy, and his nephew Jeffrey) is in the Castle Museum, Nottingham.
