An average Parisian, if asked to name the dessinateurs most in the public view, will cite for you Forain, Caran d’Ache, Léandre, Guillaume, Cappiello, Sem, Abel Faivre, Steinlen, Willette, and Hermann-Paul.
Sem portrays relentlessly the rottenness of society, but draws no conclusions therefrom; Cappiello has no social significance, whatever his artistic significance may be; and Guillaume, who produces captivating demi-mondaines by the yard, has little more social significance, although as illustrator he has cleverly seconded Courtéline in poking good-natured fun at the army.
Caran d’Ache gives himself by preference to gleeful satire of the follies, frailties, and foibles of the time; but he can be tragic and redoubtable, when he chooses, in the denunciation of its injustices and crimes.
Abel Faivre, who is very much the sort of a caricaturist one fancies Rubens might have been, had Rubens taken to caricature, is slowly, but surely, justifying his seemingly gratuitous grossness by evidences of an uncommon insight into human nature and of a far-reaching philosophical purpose.
Léandre, charming, canny, and critical, easily first of living portrait-caricaturists, amuses himself and his constituency hugely with the imbecilities, vanities, and idiosyncrasies of public men, particularly of parliamentarians. He was one of the illustrators of the Feuilles de Zo d’Axa, and contributes irregularly to the anti-bourgeois sheets, but does not appear to be an unequivocal social revolutionist.
Forain, a consummate synthesiser, who can express more with a minimum of strokes than any Frenchman living, at the beginning of his career was a fierce exposer of the emptiness and crookedness of politicians, financiers, and swells, and a convincing pleader for justice to the oppressed. His sympathies have gone out to the people more rarely since. With prosperity he has become something of a swell himself, but he still electrifies Paris now and then with a drawing whose poignancy shows plainly that his heart has not shifted its position. Crueler than Léandre,—cruelest, in fact, of all the men of his profession,—he is more dreaded by the politicians than any other artist in Paris. As a partisan of anti-Semitism, Forain has latterly directed most of his political caricatures against those whom he considers, rightly or wrongly, to be the tools of the Jews.
Hermann-Paul, Steinlen, and Willette[135] are out-and-out social revolutionists.
Hermann-Paul provides all the illustrations for L’Officiel, which “does not pretend,” says its editor Franc-Nohain, “to be funnier than the Journal Officiel of the French Republic.” He was an illustrator of the Feuilles de Zo d’Axa, and has participated in the pictorial propaganda of Les Temps Nouveaux. He was one of the fiercest attackers of the army during the Dreyfus affair, and his specialty—if a man of such a wide range of antipathies as he may be said to have a specialty—is the exposure of the horrors of war. The military atrocities which have been perpetrated during the last few years, and which are still being perpetrated in various quarters of the globe, have in him an ungullible and indefatigable antagonist.
Willette’s grace is proverbial. In his lighter moods he is, with a large allowance of course, a sort of modern Boucher or Watteau. He is prodigal to the last degree of dainty nymphs and goddesses and all manner of delicate nudities, of playful elves, sprites, and cupids, of swans and doves, of naïve porcelaine-de-Saxe shepherdesses, irresponsible fauns and wily satyrs, of lamb-like gambols, young loves, and spring-time settings; while his pale Pierrots and Pierrettes, disporting by the light of the moon or pensively rhyming and serenading, are strangely insinuating and enticing. His Parisian types—at once real and unreal—are equally captivating. Willette takes a mischievous delight in surrounding them with piquant, pagan genii, by way of symbols; and, even when he leaves them quite alone, they belong less to the Paris of the day and the hour, with all their saucy modernity, than to the realm of fantasy. Nevertheless, he can be bitter, vindictive, terrible. No one of his contemporaries, except Forain, can be so awful; and no one, not even Forain, has so often frightened the bourgeois out of their bourgeois wits. A few of his fiercer cartoons deserve notice here:—