De l’Hôpital, who is a French count, son of the sixth Duke de Vitry, has had the honour of painting Prince Arthur of Connaught and Pope Leo XIII, and was a Gold Staff officer at the coronation of King George V. He married a daughter of John Francis Bentley, the great architect who built the Westminster Cathedral. Mrs. de l’Hôpital has written a book entitled The Westminster Cathedral and its Architect, and collaborated with me in one of my books in which she would not allow her name to appear.
Two painters who used to come to Addison Mansions arise in my mind with East. Both were portrait-painters, recognised as among the soundest executants of their craft—J. H. Lorimer and Hugh de Trafford Glazebrook—for both were interested in literature as well as art—a not common trait among artists—and both of them paint portraits with enduring and outstanding merit. Lorimer, as I have said, was the son of the late Prof. Lorimer of Edinburgh University, the eminent international jurist who made the restoration of Kellie Castle his hobby, and brother of Sir Robert Lorimer, who restored St. Giles’ Cathedral at Edinburgh, and a cousin of Norma Lorimer, the novelist. Glazebrook was a brother of Canon Glazebrook, late head master of Clifton, an Oxford friend of mine who never won the high jump, though he could clear five feet eleven, because he happened to have for a contemporary the only man who ever cleared six feet in the ’Varsity sports.
A new school of black-and-white artists was coming rapidly to the fore. Pictorial journalism on an unprecedented scale had invaded England from America, and a number of new illustrated papers and magazines had started, and they relied for their pictorial side on ideas which must have seemed revolutionary to those who had been brought up on the old standard productions of the Illustrated London News. The foundation of The Graphic a decade or two earlier had been a sign of the times.
The most extraordinary artist of the movement could hardly be called a journalist proper, because most of his work was done for books published by John Lane, and for the Yellow Book. Beardsley, who was a mere boy, with his boyishness accentuated by his fair hair and consumptive’s pink-and-white complexion, came nearly every week with a very pretty sister who made her name rapidly on the stage. Beardsley, who had a workmanship of spiderish delicacy and an imagination like Edgar Allan Poe, which resulted in the creation of female types of appalling wickedness and snake-like fascination, did not talk much “shop”; he was more occupied with the studies on which these extraordinary creations were founded. He was a very interesting man to talk to, very modest. He always impressed me as a man with a wonderful future if he were not cut off, as he was, by an early death.
Phil May, another genius of the movement, was one of our most constant visitors. He lived, as I have said, in a studio improvised from a stable, almost opposite Shannon, in those days. He did more than most men to revolutionise black and white, because he was one of the first who grasped the value of Japanese effects and introduced them into his work. But his method of producing these Japanese effects was not Japanese. A Japanese artist fills the brush, which he uses as pen and pencil, with Indian ink, and secures his effects with a few dexterous sweeps. Phil May drew his picture in the English way with comparatively few lines, then studied his own work to see what was superfluous, and rubbed out every superfluity. He was not the rapid worker which one imagined from his style. After he left the Australian paper with which he was connected, he remained a free lance for years, drawing whatever came into his head as irresistible, and selling it to one or other journal, and bringing out collections of his drawings of the year in his famous annual. It was, perhaps, not the best way of making money, but it came very naturally to him, for he was as brilliant a wit as he was an artist. He was a man of inspirations; he could be irresistibly funny with such simple materials as the henpecked husband. He was the reverse of henpecked himself. He had a devoted and very pretty wife, who was forgiving to all the faults he committed in his bland and childlike way, and I often used to think that his jokes about henpecked husbands formed his way of crying “peccavi.” Who that had ever seen it could forget his picture of the husband coming home at three o’clock in the morning and being asked, “What do you mean by coming home at this time of night?” and pleading that there was nowhere else open? Or his picture of the drunken lion-tamer, who had taken refuge from his wife in the lion’s cage, with his wife outside the cage crying “You coward!”
I do not think he ever made his speech in the rooms of the Piscatorial Society the subject of a picture, but it was worth it. He was the guest of the evening and had dined a little too well—at any rate, as far as drink was concerned. When he rose to respond to the toast of his health, he looked round the room and saw dozens of glass cases stuffed with salmon and pike of monstrous size, the pride of the Society. He took them all in with a wave of his hand, and said, “I suppose you will tell me that there is only one ——y kipper on that wall!”
On another occasion I was with Phil and Corbould at the Savage Club. We stayed there very late, and when Phil finally made up his mind to go home, he could not remember where he lived. Of course, we knew his own studio quite well, because it was close to our homes, and we had been there scores of times, but he was not residing there; he was staying in lodgings, for he had just come back from the Japan fiasco. He had received a commission from the Graphic to go to Japan for a year or more, and do sketches for them. They offered him very liberal terms, and he accepted them. He let his studio for a year, and started off full of good intentions. But he never got to Japan. He stopped somewhere on the way—a very long way from England—and abandoned himself to a lotus life of mild dissipation—we might, perhaps, have called him a lotus-drinker—and the Graphic had to bring him home again. It was soon after he got home that this event at the Savage happened.
“Where to?” asked the cabby.
“I don’t know,” said Phil. “I have forgotten where I live; it is not my own house.”
“Well, how am I to get you there?” asked the cabby.