CHAPTER XVIII.
CONTEMPORARIES OF JOHN LEECH: RICHARD DOYLE AND JOHN TENNIEL.
We gather from the article in "The Month" which followed his death, and to which we have to acknowledge materials of which we have availed ourselves in the revision of the present chapter,[1] that Richard Doyle's first work was The Eglinton Tournament, or the Days of Chivalry Revived, which was published when he was only fifteen years old. Three years later he produced A Grand Historical, Allegorical, and Classical Procession, a humorous pageant which the same authority tells us combined "a curious medley of men and women who played a prominent part on the world's stage, bringing out into good-humoured relief the characteristic peculiarities of each." Apart from his talent, it was no doubt the fact of his being his father's son—the son of John Doyle, the once famous and eminent HB—which first attracted the attention of the promoters of Punch, and he was only nineteen when, in 1843, he was taken on the regular pictorial staff of that periodical. It was to the cheery, delightful pencil of Richard Doyle that the paper owed much of the popularity which it subsequently achieved.
"It was from his father that he not only inherited his artistic talent, but received, and that almost exclusively, his artistic training." The writer in "The Month" goes on to tell us that John Doyle would not allow his son "to draw from models; his plan was to teach the
- ↑ The present chapter was written before the artist's death; but I have to acknowledge the great assistance I have derived in its revision from the authority indicated.
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