It must not be imagined from the foregoing that portrait caricature alone occupies the pencil of our artist. His book of subtle wash drawings entitled “Nocturnes,” and the lively pages of Le Rire, L’Album, L’Assiette au Beurre, and other journals are embellished with his cartoons and comic drawings, covering a fairly wide range of subjects. He is moreover a serious portrait-painter of great feeling and delicacy. We may look on him almost as an animalier, or natural history artist making a speciality of that droll, brainy, beast—man, recording all his different varieties, and watching his every gesture and movement.
In his cartoons he occasionally approaches the somewhat nervous style of Willette, whom we incline to think time may prove to have been an overrated artist. The stronger method of Léandre, however, is particularly noticed in such drawings as Le Ministère en Vacances and Le Retour du Général Duchesne in Le Rire; and here we may mention how much many of the most excellent of the younger artists—such as Steinlen, Léandre, Malteste, Redon, Sabattier, Tilly, and Huard in France, Lockhart-Bogle, Hartrick, Almond and Gunning King in England, evidently owe to that giant among draughtsmen—Paul Renouard.
Léandre was born at Champsecret, Orne. It is easy to trace the influence that a course of modelling in plaster under the decorator Bin, which he attended after leaving college and arriving in Paris, impressed on his work, for all his heads have a strong sculpturesque feeling about them. Later he became a pupil of Cabanel at the Beaux Arts School; and we, who know the ways of Paris art students, can well imagine the uproarious series of “charges” or caricatures, he must have painted of his fellow students, and possibly of his professor. For it is certain that later on he handled the gens sérieux, with whom he was brought into contact at the reunions given by his uncle—the Deputy Christofle, with but scant regard for their dignity.
Settling in Montmartre, he rapidly captured the quartier with his marvellous caricatures of the “types” of the neighbourhood, and of the Bohemians of the greater Paris who flocked to its cabarets artistiques. Thenceforward his fame has rapidly spread far and wide: of course he was a patron of the Chat Noir, and later of the Quat’z’Arts, to whose papers he contributed.
We have only to examine his drawings to realise that—given the opportunity to publish his work—success was inevitable. Before me is one of his drawings in Le Rire—“The effect of Latin and table salt on a youth of Normandy.” It represents a christening scene in the church of a Normandy village. The irreverent babe in granny’s arms is howling the roof off its mouth, while the ancient cleric with port-wine nose, his service interrupted, essays to quiet the little darling; and we can see he is only debarred by professional etiquette from using language unfitting the Church. Grandpa beams good-naturedly at the wickedness of his latest descendant, while the fond mamma joyfully simpers her complete approval of the hopeful’s lung power. A priggish chorister holds a long guttering church candle, which his hot hands are melting in the middle; outside in the porch the bell-ringer with a jug of cider and a glass is pulling his hardest at the joy bells, and a background of fidgeting, yawning children completes the picture.
Then look at the gaily-coloured page which transports us to the middle of a village fête. All among the garlands and Japanese lanterns the firemen are making merry with their lady admirers. The drummer of the squad, a lusty fellow, is stealing a kiss from a protesting, yet willing, kitchen-maid.
An astounding drawing of a bacchanalian orgy entitled Ribote de Noël appeared in No. 112 of Le Rire, and the whole reeling scene of drunken revelry is marvellously rendered. In the largeness of the forms and the rollicking abandon of the whole scene we are reminded of our own Rowlandson, an artist whose work is thoroughly appreciated across the Channel. The quintessence of quaintness is reached in another drawing, which again reminds us somewhat of Rowlandson. It is a drawing contained in L’Album, entitled “La Folie des Grandeurs—Les Yeux plus grands que le Ventre”; and shows us a queer little Tom Thumb of a man smoking a cigar, and speaking in the language of the eye volumes of admiration for the mountainous woman against whose knee he lolls.
LÉANDRE
