Matthew Darly

[Samuel Drybutter] Ganymede

According to Act of Parl.t by M. Darly 39 Strand.

March 1st 1771

A portrait of Samuel Drybutter, a ‘toyman’ (a seller of luxury goods such as jewellery, watches and trinkets) and bookseller in Westminster Hall, wearing a looped hat and ruffled shirt, a cane in his right hand, his left inside his waistcoat. Samuel Drybutter was a notorious homosexual, considered to be the leader of the Macaroni Club in the 1770s. He was arrested several times for attempted sodomy, once offering money to a horse grenadier patrolling at the Horse Guards, although the case was dropped when he counter-charged the grenadier with an attempt to extort money. In October 1777, he was proposed as Petty Constable for the parish of St. Margaret, Westminster, as a joke. he asked to be excused, telling the Court of Burgesses that ‘’ I am not a fit person to be put in this office....The world calls me a Sodomite; I am one’’ ( London Evening News, 10 Oct. 1771), a very rare defiant assertion of a homosexual identity for the time. In 1777 Drybutter tried to pick up a man in St James’s Park and got arrested again; released to a mob, he was pelted with mud and severely beaten. he reached home, which several hundred people then attacked, breaking all the windows and smashing up his shop. his injuries were severe and it was reported that he had died; however it is now known that Drybutter had fled to France, where he died c. 1787.

150 by 110mm (6 by 4¼ inches).

From ‘24 Caricatures by several ladies, gentlemen, artists, etc. BM Satires: 4915; Rictor Norton: Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England. [Ref. 55583]

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