Twenty Years of My Life

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

I must have met Sambourne, who succeeded Sir John Tenniel as chief artist of Punch, when I was a boy, for he married a Miss Herapath, and when we were children she and her brothers were generally having tea at our house in Upper Phillimore Gardens if we were not having tea at theirs a few yards away. I never lost sight of him, and in the last years of his life saw more rather than less of Sambourne, whose thoroughness was always a marvel to me. No pains were too great for him to be accurate in the details of his cartoons and whimsicalities. I forget how many thousand photographs he told me he had, which he could use like a dictionary. But I remember that his idea of the best day’s holiday one could take was to go to Boulogne in the morning on a day when there was a good sea on, lunch there, and come back in the afternoon.

His successor on Punch, Bernard Partridge, was very often at Addison Mansions in the old Idler and Vagabond days. He had already achieved fame in two directions—as a black-and-white artist whose handiwork was unexcelled for delicate beauty and romantic charm, and as an actor. But he did not act under his own name; he was Bernard Gould behind the footlights. Partridge’s father, the late Prof. Richard Partridge, was a Fellow of the Royal Society and one of the greatest surgeons of his day. Mrs. Partridge, then Miss Harvey, was also often at our at-homes.

Another Punch and Graphic artist often with us was Alexander Stuart Boyd, whose wife, Mary Stuart Boyd, is a favourite novelist of the great house of Blackwood. Boyd has the dry wit of his race, so it is not surprising that such a fine artist should have found his way to Punch. He now gives his time to painting and spends much of his time at a house he has in the Balearic Islands. He was a very old Vagabond. I met him there or at the Idler teas.

There, too, I met Hal Hurst, my neighbour and constant associate for years, though we do not often meet now. I have various pictures of his in my present house. Hurst, who was a very clever artist, and his friend Alyn Williams, the president of one of the two Miniature Painters’ Societies, not only shared a studio in Mayfair, but married beautiful young wives about the same time, who were constantly together, one very dark and the other very fair. Mrs. Williams was the picture of health, but suddenly she was struck down by a mysterious malady, and almost wasted to death, a terrible shock to all who had seen much of them. Then, for no apparently sufficient reason, she suddenly picked up again, threw off her malady completely, and was restored to her old radiant health; it was like coming back from the grave. The Royal Family have been great patrons of Williams’ miniatures.

Oddly enough, I knew the president of the other society of miniature painters equally well—Alfred Praga, an Italian by extraction, a well-known and popular member of the Savage Club. Praga lives in a picturesque grey house off Hornton Street. His wife is a well-known writer.

With them it is natural to mention the brilliant Robert Sauber, a German by extraction, who for years was one of the most popular artists in journalism; whatever paper or magazine you took up, it was almost sure to have a cover with a charming female figure designed by Sauber. I have a delightful specimen painted for the menu of the Vagabond Club on some important occasion. But Sauber was not only a journalistic artist; he has been painting large decorative panels and ceilings and portraits for the last thirteen years, and has done no illustrations for the last twelve years. He is an exhibitor at the principal Salons in London, Paris and Munich.

While mentioning Punch artists, I forgot two who were constant visitors at Addison Mansions—John Hassall and Chantrey Corbould.

The man who helped to keep our at-homes going more than any one else was Chantrey Corbould, the artist, a godson of the great Sir Francis Chantrey, whose bequest is almost as famous as his sculpture; he was a nephew also of Charles Keene, the immortal Punch artist and etcher, on the mother’s side. Edward H. Corbould, his father’s eldest brother, taught the Royal Family.

Corbould was a huge man, with a very jovial, high-coloured, handsome face, and a very horsey appearance, as becomes one of the best hunting-picture artists who ever drew for Punch. He had a very loud and hearty laugh, which could be heard all over the house, and told good stories, and always had a court of the ladies of Bohemia round him in the inner room. He had one golden quality; whenever he saw a woman sitting neglected, he went over and fetched her to join his circle, and the older and uglier she was, the more particular he was to do it.

I was wrong in saying that we never had an entertainment at our at-homes—Corbould’s stories were an entertainment, but people had not to keep silent with them; the more noise they made, the better he liked it. He was very funny sometimes.