To quote the words of a critic of discernment, as he passed from drawing to drawing, "Frank Reynolds is right, right—right every time." This is praise to which one can hardly add.
THE DARE-DEVILS.
From "Social Pests."
FRANK REYNOLDS. II.
Frank Reynolds is yet another in the long list of artists who have arrived at their true vocation by devious routes. There are certain tendencies of mind which, when a man has them, refuse to be suppressed. The journalistic instinct is one of them. Do what you will with the man in whom it is planted, he can never keep his fingers from the pen. Make him a doctor and you will find him scribbling columns for the press on hygiene in the house and the benefits of breathing through the nose. Send him into the army and he will fill his leisure by writing tales of tiger-shoots and essays on the art of pig-sticking. So with the artist. The man born with the gift to draw finds as irresistible a fascination in pencil or brush as the man with the power of narrative discovers in ink and paper. Whether he serves before the mast as an A.B., or cattle-ranches out west, sooner or later he is certain to drift into his proper sphere of activity. It may take long to get there, but eventually he is bound to arrive.
In the case of Frank Reynolds the period of bondage was comparatively brief. Entering at first upon a business career, he had originally no prospect, nor intention, of developing his artistic impulses. He had scarcely, indeed, a suspicion of his own powers—certainly no proper knowledge of their latent
possibilities. But commerce had little interest for him, and circumstances which offered an opportunity of escape combining with a happy chance which suggested a higher artistic (and monetary) value for that faculty for drawing which previously he had regarded in the light of a mere hobby, caused him to throw up his earlier plans and devote himself entirely to black-and-white illustration.
There had been preparation for this, however. The son of an artist, Frank Reynolds inherited his native talent, and this was developed in no small measure during boyhood under his father's guidance. It was the chief delight of Reynolds junior to "mess about" (as he himself succinctly puts it) with the palette and tools of Reynolds