1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Busch, Wilhelm

BUSCH, WILHELM (1832–1908), German caricaturist, was born at Wiedensahl in Hanover. After studying at the academies of Düsseldorf, Antwerp and Munich, he joined in 1859 the staff of Fliegende Blätter, the leading German comic paper, and was, together with Oberländer, the founder of modern German caricature. His humorous drawings and caricatures are remarkable for the extreme simplicity and expressiveness of his pen-and-ink line, which record with a few rapid scrawls the most complicated contortions of the body and the most transitory movement. His humorous illustrated poems, such as Max und Moritz, Der heilige Antonius von Padua, Die Fromme Helene, Hans Huckebein and Die Erlebnisse Knopps des Junggesellen, play, in the German nursery, the same part that Edward Lear’s nonsense verses do in England. The types created by him have become household words in his country. He invented the series of comic sketches illustrating a story in scenes without words, which have inspired Caran d’Ache and other leading caricaturists.