The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 2

NEW YORK AND LONDON: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS. 1902. BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO. LD., PRINTERS, LONDON AND TONBRIDGE. All rights reserved. December, 1901.
HARRY FURNISS'S (EGYPTIAN STYLE). From Punch.

MY STUDIO DURING THE PROGRESS OF AN ARTISTIC JOKE.
The First Idea—How it was Made— Fire! —I am a Somnambulist—My Workshop—My Business Partner —Not by Gainsborough—Lord Leighton—The Private View—The Catalogue—Sold Out—How the R.A.'s Took It—How a Critic Took It—Curious Offers—Mr. Sambourne as a Company Promoter—A One-man Show— Punch's Mistake—A Joke within a Joke—My Offer to the Nation.
In the year 1887 he startled the town and made a Society sensation by means of an exceedingly original enterprise which any man of less audacious and prodigious power of work would have shrunk from in its very inception. For years this Titanic task was in hand. This was his celebrated 'artistic joke,' the name given by the 'Times' to a bold parody on a large scale of an average Royal Academy Exhibition. This great show was held at the Gainsborough Gallery, New Bond Street, and consisted of some eighty-seven pictures of considerable size, executed in monochrome, and presenting to a marvelling public travesties—some excruciatingly humorous and daringly satirical, others really exquisite in their rendering of physical traits and landscape features—of the styles, techniques, and peculiar choice of subjects of a number of the leading artists, R.A.'s and others, who annually exhibit at Burlington House. It was a surprise, even to his intimate friends, who, with one or two exceptions, knew nothing about it until the announcement that Mr. Furniss had his own private Royal Academy appeared in the 'Times.' He worked in secret at intervals, under a heavy strain, to get the Exhibition ready, particularly as he had to manage the whole of the business part; for the show at the Gainsborough Gallery was entirely his own speculation. Granted that the experiment was daring, yet the audacity of the artist fascinated people. Nor did the Academicians, whom some thought would have been annoyed at the fun, as a body resent it. They were not so silly, though a minority muttered. Most of them saw that Mr. Furniss was not animated by any desire to hold them up to contempt, but his parodies were perfectly good-natured, that he had served all alike, and that he had only sought the advancement of English art. During the whole season the gallery was crushed to overflowing, the coldest critics were dazzled, the public charmed, and literally all London laughed. It furnished the journalistic critics of the country with material for reams of descriptive articles and showers of personal paragraphs, and whether relished or disrelished by particular members of the artistic profession, at least proved to them, as to the world at large, the varied powers (in some phases hitherto unsuspected) and exuberant energies of the Harry Furniss whose name was now on the tongue and whose bold signature was familiar to the eyes of that not easily impressed entity, the General Public.