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“The Runaway Knock” is, as the reader will perceive, simply such a bit of Cruikshankian humour as he had been wont to treat with his etching-needle. It is full of life and excitement. The entire household, to the pug puppy-dog, has been aroused; nor could the painter refrain from throwing life into the carved stone head over the street-door. Again, “Disturbing the Congregation” is an etching subject, elaborated. A little boy, in church, has dropped his pegtop, and the awful eye of the beadle (Cruikshank created the British beadle as a humorous figure) is upon him. The Prince Consort, whom a genuine bit of humour delighted, was glad to add this most characteristic Cruikshank to his collection.
Cruikshank’s old friend, Clarkson Stanfield, first persuaded him to trust himself to oils. In his tinted designs, he showed that sense of colour which was everywhere manifest in the etchings of his best time—in his designs to Ainsworth, for instance. The watercolour drawings for his Walter Scott plates, again, are admirable. * But in oil, it must be repeated, he failed utterly.
* They were for a long time the property of Mr. Lumley, of
Her Majesty’s Theatre, and on the sale of his effects
passed, fortunately, into the hands of Mr. Ellison, who
bequeathed his collection to the South Kensington Museum.
The touch of the etcher remained. He was hard and crude. The first painting he exhibited was “Bruce attacked by Assassins”—the Bruce upon a burlesque horse smothered in drapery! It was exhibited at the Royal Academy. His next picture was “Moses dressing for the Fair”—a subject more within his power; but it was coarse, inharmonious, and sketchy. The wonder was that Cruikshank could not perceive that he was on the wrong road. So far, however, was he from suspecting this, that he was constantly meditating great historical subjects; and actually “got in” upon a spacious canvas the Battle of Agincourt. He even began a scriptural subject, “Christ riding into Jerusalem.” But the genius that could realize a street or fairy mob * upon a surface no broader than the palm of the hand, could not paint a battle-piece. Without his outline he was all abroad. The sacred subject remained in the studio, with many other canvases, to the end. It was his “Battle of a Gin Court,” in his “Sunday in London” that showed the master. He admitted, when it was suggested to him, that the “etching-point feeling” was always in his fingers, giving a “living” sensation to the brush, and that he never could get rid of it. His Falstaff tormented by the Fairies, was, on the whole, the painting he completed with most thorough satisfaction to himself.
* “Cruikshank’s crowds give one exactly the impression of
reality. They show a certain monotony, from the common
impulse of the mob, yet they are full of characteristic
figures, no two exactly alike. There is also all the due
sense of air, and motion, and fluctuation about them. They
are penetrable crowds, especially the Irish, which he
delights to draw,—true mobiles,—ready to break out into
new mischief, or disperse before the onslaught of the
Saxon.”—Francis Turner Palgrave.
Mr. Wedmore, dwelling on the shortcomings of biographers, complains that where an artist is the subject they tell “not much of the work he had planned but never executed; work, nevertheless, on which perhaps he had set great store, and looked forward to completing, and ‘purposes unsure.’ ‘That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount.’