The Kit-Cat Club, Done from the Original Paintings of Sir Godfrey Kneller by Mr. Faber

This volume contains a title page, dedication and forty-five portraits of the members of the Kit-Cat (or Kit-Kat or Kitcat) Club, whose membership included leading British Whig politicians and several gifted writers. John Faber's mezzotints reproduce a famous series or portraits that Sir Godfrey Kneller painted in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, with the related prints published 1731–35 by club member and secretary Jacob Tonson.
The group's name may derive from the mutton pies, known as "Kit-cats," served at the club's first meeting place, a tavern in Shire Lane near the Law Courts run by Christopher Catt (Kit being a nickname for Christopher). The group later moved to the Fountain Tavern on The Strand, and then into a specially built room at Tonson's estate of Barn Elms, where Kneller's set of identically sized portraits were hung. In the summer the group met at the Upper Flask, Hamstead Heath.
The club's gatherings allowed them to strategize the furtherance of Whig objectives associated with the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. The latter had been engineered by Protestant nobles who invited William of Orange and his wife Mary Stuart to take the throne, forcing the ouster of the Catholic James II. Queen Anne succeeded in 1702, and was followed in 1714 by the Hanoverian George I. Throughout these decades, the Whigs and Kitcat members, promoted Parliament's authority and encouraged military resistance to French expansionism. Sir Robert Walpole, one of the club's leaders, became George I's chief minister in 1721 and remained in power for over two decades.