subtle conceits of Mr Linley Sambourne, the whimsicalities of Mr
E. T. Reed, the exuberant burlesques of Mr J. F. Sullivan, the
frank buffooneries of W.G. Baxter, Of these diverse forms of graphic
humour, some have no other object than to amuse, and therefore do
not call for serious notice. The work of Mr Max Beerbohm (“Max”)
has the note of originality and extravagance too; while that of
“Spy” (Mr Leslie Ward) in Vanity Fair, if it does not rival the
occasional brilliancy of his predecessor “Ape” (Carlo Pellegrini,
1839–1889), maintains a higher average of merit. The pupil, too, is
much more genial than the master, and he is content if his pencil
evokes the comment, “How ridiculously like!” Caricature of this
kind is merely an entertainment. Here we are concerned rather
with those branches of caricature which, merrily or mordantly,
reflect and comment upon the actual life we live. In treating of
recent caricature of this kind, we must give the first place to Punch.
Mr Punch’s outlook upon life has not changed much since the
’seventies of the last century. His influence upon the tone of
caricature made itself felt most appreciably in the days of John
Leech and Richard Doyle. Their successors but follow in their steps.
In their work, says a clever German critic, is to be found no vestige
of the “sour bilious temper of John Bull” that pervaded the
pictures of Hogarth and Rowlandson. Charles Keene (1823–1891)
and Du Maurier (1834–1896), he declares, are not caricaturists or
satirists, but amiable and tenderly grave observers of life, friendly
optimists. The characterization is truer of Keene, perhaps, than of
Du Maurier. Charles Keene’s sketches are almost always cheerful;
almost without exception they make you smile or laugh. In many
of Du Maurier’s, on the other hand, there is an underlying seriousness.
While Keene looks on at life with easy tolerance, an amused
spectator, Du Maurier shows himself sensitive, emotional, sympathetic,
taking infinite delight in what is pretty and gay and
charming, but hurt and offended by the sordid and the ugly. Thus
while Keene takes things dispassionately as they come, seeing only
the humorous side of them, we find Du Maurier ever and anon
attacking some new phase of snobbishness or philistinism or cant.
For all his kindliness in depicting congenial scenes, he is at times as
unrelenting a satirist as Rowlandson. The other Punch artists,
whose work is in the same field, resemble Keene in this respect rather
than Du Maurier. Mr Leonard Raven-Hill recalls Charles Keene
not merely in temperament but in technique; like Keene, too, he
finds his subjects principally in bourgeois life. Mr J. Bernard
Partridge, though, like Du Maurier, he has an eye for physical
beauty, is a spectator rather than a critic of life, yet he has made
his mark as a “cartoonist.” Phil May (d. 1903), a modern Touchstone,
is less easily classified. Though he wears the cap and bells,
he is alive to the pity of things; he sees the pathos no less than the
humour of his street-boys and “gutter-snipes.” He is, however, a
jester primarily: an artist, too, of high achievement. Two others
stand out as masters of the art of social caricature—Frederick
Barnard and Mr J. F. Sullivan. Barnard’s illustrations to Dickens,
like his original sketches, have a lively humour—the humour of
irrepressible high spirits—and endless invention. High spirits and
invention are characteristics also of Mr Sullivan. It is at the British
artisan and petty tradesman—at the grocer given to adulteration
and the plumber who outstays his welcome—that he aims his most
boisterous fun. He rebels, too, delightfully, against red tape and all
the petty tyrannies of officialdom. In political caricature Sir John Tenniel
(q.v.) remained the leading artist of his day. The death of
Abraham Lincoln, Bismarck’s fall from power, the tragedy of
Khartum—to subjects such as these, worthy of a great painter,
Tenniel has brought a classic simplicity and a sense of dignity
unknown previously to caricature. It is hard to say in which field
Tenniel most excels—whether in those ingenious parables in which
the British Lion and the Russian Bear, John Chinaman, Jacques
Bonhomme and Uncle Sam play their part—or in the ever-changing
scenes of the great parliamentary Comedy—or in sombre dramas
of Anarchy, Famine or Crime—or in those London extravaganzas
in which the symbolic personalities of Gog and Magog, Father Thames
and the Fog Fiend, the duke of Mudford and Mr Punch himself,
have become familiar. Subjects similar to these have been treated
also for many years by Mr Linley Sambourne in his fanciful and often
beautiful designs. In the field of humorous portraiture also, as in
cartoon-designing, Mr Sambourne has made his mark, and he may
be said almost to have originated, in a small way, that practice of
illustrating the doings of parliament with comic sketches in which
Mr Furniss, Mr E. T. Reed and Sir F. C. Gould were his most
notable successors. Mr Furniss satirized the Royal Academy as
effectively as the Houses of Parliament, but he has been above all
the illustrator of parliament—the creator of Mr Gladstone’s collars,
the thief of Lord Randolph Churchill’s inches, the immortalizer of so
many otherwise obscure politicians who has worked the House of
Commons and its doings into so many hundreds of eccentric designs.
But Mr Furniss was never, like Sir F. C. Gould (of the Westminster
Gazette), a politician first and a caricaturist afterwards. Gould is
an avowed partisan, and his caricatures became the most formidable
weapons of the Radical party. Caustic, witty and telling, not
specially well drawn, but drawn well enough—the likenesses unfailingly
caught and recognizable at a glance—his “Picture Politics”
won him a place unique in the ranks of caricaturists. There is no
evidence of such strenuousness in the work of Mr E. T. Read (of
Punch). In his parliamentary sketches, as in his “Animal Land”
and “Prehistoric Peeps,” Mr Reed is a wholly irresponsible humorist
and parodist. One finds keen satire, however, in those “Ready-made
Coats of Arms,” in which he turned at once his heraldic lore
and his insight into character to excellent account. In his more
serious picture in which he has drawn a parallel between the tricoteuses
awaiting with grim enjoyment the fall of the guillotine and those
modern English gentlewomen who flock to the Old Bailey as to the
play, we have the true Hogarthian touch. Mr Gunning King,
Mr F. H. Townshend, Mr C. E. Brock, Mr Tom Browne, are among the
younger humorists who have advanced to the front rank. Though
there have been some notable competitors with Punch, there has
never been a really “good second.” In Matt Morgan the Tomahawk
(1865–1867) could boast an original cartoonist after Tenniel’s style,
but without Tenniel’s power and humour. Morgan’s Tomahawk
cartoons gained in effect from an ingenious method of printing in
two colours. In Fred Barnard, W. G. Baxter, and Mr J. F. Sullivan,
Judy (founded in 1867) possessed a trio of pictorial humorists of the
first rank, and in W. Bowcher a political cartoonist thoroughly to
the taste of those hot and strong Conservatives to whom Punch’s
faint Whiggery was but Radicalism in disguise. His successor, Mr
William Parkinson, was not less loyal to Tory ideas, though more
urbane in his methods. Fun has had cartoonists of high merit in
Mr Gordon Thomson and in Mr John Proctor, who worked also for
Moonshine (founded in 1879, now extinct). Moonshine afterwards
enlisted the services of Alfred Bryan, to whose clever pencil the
Christmas number of the World was indebted for many years. Ally
Sloper, founded in 1884, is notable only as the widely circulated
medium for W. G. Baxter’s wild humours, kept up in the same spirit
by Mr W. F. Thomas, his successor. Pick-me-up could once count a
staff which rivalled at least the social side of Punch; Mr Raven-Hill,
Phil May, Mr Maurice Greiffenhagen and Mr Dudley Hardy all
contributed in their time to its sprightly pages, while Mr S. H. Sime
made it the vehicle for his “squint-brained” imaginings. The Will
o’ the Wisp, the Butterfly and the Unicorn, kindred ventures, though
on different lines, all met with an early death. Lika Joko, founded
in 1894 by Mr Harry Furniss, who in that year abandoned Punch,
and afterwards Fair Game, were also short-lived. To this brief list
of purely comic or satirical journals should be added the names of
several daily and weekly publications—and among monthlies the
Idler, with its caricatures by Mr Scott Rankin, Mr Sime and Mr
Beerbohm—which have made a special feature of humorous art.
Among these are the Graphic, whose Christmas numbers were first
brightened by Randolph Caldecott; the Daily Graphic, enlivened
sometimes by Phil May and Mr A. S. Boyd; Vanity Fair, with its
grotesque portraits; Truth, to whose Christmas numbers Sir F. C.
Gould contributed some of his best and most ambitious work,
printed in colours; the Sketch, with Phil May and others; Black
and White, with Mr Henry Meyer; the Pall Mall Gazette, first with
Sir F. C. Gould, and later with Mr G. R. Halkett. The St Stephen’s
Review, whose crudely powerful cartoons, the work of Tom Merry,
were so popular, ceased publication in 1892. A tribute should be
paid in conclusion to the coloured cartoons of the Weekly Freeman
and other Irish papers, often remarkable for their humour and talent.
(See also Cartoon and Illustration.)
France.—In that peculiar branch of art which is based on irony, fun, oddity and wit, and in which Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), next to “Gavarni” (1804–1866), remains the undisputed master, France—as has already been shown—can produce an unbroken series of draughtsmen of strong individuality. Though “Cham” died in 1879, Eugène Giraud in 1881, “Randon” in 1884, “André Gill” in 1885, “Marcelin” in 1887, Edouard de Beaumont in 1888, Lami in 1891, Alfred Grévin in 1892, and “Stop” in 1899, a new group arose under the leadership of “Nadar” (b. 1820) and Etienne Carjat (b. 1828). Mirthful or satirical, and less philosophical than of yore, neglecting history for incident, and humanity for the puppets of the day, their drawings, which illustrate daily events, will perpetuate the manner and anecdotes of the time, though the illustrations to newspapers, or prints which need a paragraph of explanation, show nothing to compare with the Propos de Thomas Virelocque by “Gavarni.” Quantity perhaps makes up for quality, and some of these artists deserve special mention. “Draner” (b. 1833) and “Henriot” (b. 1857) are journalists, carrying on the method first introduced by “Cham” in the Univers Illustré: realistic sketches, with no purpose beyond the droll illustration of facts, amusing at the time, but of no value to the print-collector. M. J. L. Forain, born at Reims in 1852, studied at the École des Beaux Arts under Jean Léon Gérôme and J. B. Carpeaux. He first worked for the Courrier Français in 1887, and afterwards for Figaro; he was then drawn into the polemical work of politics. Though he has created some great types of flunkeydom, the explanatory story is more to him than the picture, which is often too sketchy, though masterly. Reduced reproductions of his work have been issued in volumes, a common form of popularity never attempted with Daumier’s fine lithographs. M. A. L. Willette, born at Châlons-sur-Marne in 1857, a son of Colonel Willette, the aide-de-camp to Marshal Bazaine, worked for four years in Alexandre Cabanel’s studio, and so gained an artistic training which alone would have distinguished him from his fellows, even without the delightful poetical fancy and Watteau-like grace which are somewhat unexpected amid the ugliness of
