PREFACE
The life of what still passes in London for “Bohemia”—in and about the theatres, the studios and the literary clubs—figures conspicuously in the pictorial humour of our time. It is but natural that the artist in search of inspiration should occasionally turn his attention to his own immediate surroundings, and find subjects for his art in the comic representation of his fellows of the brush and pencil, his friends the authors and the actors, and not infrequently, himself! Some of the most pointed jokes of Keene, Du Maurier and Phil May introduced “the artist,” and in the case of the last mentioned he usually depicted his own form and features, as Cruikshank was fond of doing more than half a century before him.
This tradition has been well maintained among the artists of a later day. We shall find that a very considerable proportion of the humorous art of the moment concerns itself with the sayings and doings of our Bohemians—a term, by the way, that indicates a very mild and inoffensive variety of an almost extinct type of character.
The Bohemian of the twentieth century is a much more wholesome person than his prototype of the middle of the nineteenth. He may be still as irresponsible, as unconventional in his manners, but he is at least clean and less apt to degenerate into the “sponger.” He of the older generation provided picturesque material for the humorist of the pencil; but the stage, the study, and the studio still furnish much matter for mirth, as the admirable work of Mr. W. K. Haselden, Mr. Bert Thomas, Mr. H. M. Bateman, Mr. J. L. C. Booth, Mr. Charles Pears, and other living artists of note, represented in the present collection, bear ample witness.
It is obvious from the [Index] that this volume contains a most representative survey of its subject, and is probably second-to-none in The Fun Library for the high spirits and good humour which it reflects. The collection ranges from the day of Cruikshank onward, and presents many examples of such talented artists of the past as Fred Barnard, Du Maurier, Keene, Leech, Phil May, Doyle, and many others, as well as examples of Mr. Gordon Thomson, the veteran survivor of the merry men who made Fun and Judy serious rivals of Punch fifty years ago.
The sources from which the illustrations have been drawn are much the same as those that have provided the other volumes of The Fun Library. In the present volume there is a particularly fine selection from the work of Mr. Haselden, reprinted here by special permission of the editor of The Daily Mirror, and it also contains an important series by the late Phil May, reprinted by arrangement with The Sketch, while we are indebted to Mr. Gilbert Dalziel for permission to use a considerable number of excellent items from Fun and Judy, with which journals he was so long and honourably associated. To Mr. Punch’s collections of the “’sixties” we owe the numerous examples of Leech, Keene and Du Maurier at their best.
In brief, it may be claimed for “Stage, Study and Studio” that the collection is fully up to the high standard we have sought to maintain in all the volumes of The Fun Library.
J. A. H.
