LES CHANTEURS DE MONTMARTRE
(Tourney Poster for Yvette Guilbert)
Other illustrations by Léandre appear in Le Grand Guignol, and in the comic paper La Vie en Rose. To a little collection of caricatures of (then) reigning sovereigns, entitled “Le Musée des Souverains,” Léandre contributed some remarkably clever work. President Faure, Queen Victoria, the Emperor of Austria, the King of the Belgians and King Menelik, all come in for a more or less trying pictorial analysis by Léandre. The drawing of Menelik is a most wonderful piece of work, but unfortunately intended to be humiliating to Italy; and here we may mention that Léandre has always been attracted by general political cartooning, as well as his more frequent local cartoon work, but however much his estimate of the nations, as seen from the Gallic point of view, may tickle outsiders, we feel he is a good Frenchman, and the artistic quality of his work never fails. His double-page drawing in Le Rire of the “Senators going to War against the Chamber” is crowded with caricature portraits of politicians hurrying out to do vigorous battle, each showing by the introduction of some subtle little device his own marked peculiarity or fad.
LÉANDRE
(By himself)
Léandre has frequently introduced a self-portrait into his sketches, and he is evidently as critical of himself as of others. He always shows us a serio-comic little man with chubby cheeks, bulging, spectacled eyes, and a big inquisitive nose dominating a small turned-up moustache and starveling beard. Some of his own military service adventures he has depicted for us in mock heroic style in “Les Treize Jours de Léandre.” Among notable caricature portraits is that of Drumont, the arch Jew-baiter. In a coloured drawing entitled “The Ogre’s Repast,” we see this noisome person with a chain of Semite “portions” round his neck poising a gory Jewish head on his fork previous to making a meal of it. In fine irony a cross hangs on his breast.
His drawings of concerts and musical conductors throb and thrill with sound, the very paper on which they are printed seems to vibrate with the volume of it.
The Comédie Française supplied him with subjects for a splendid set of caricatures; and the rustic inhabitants of his native village of Champsecret form the foundation of yet another delightful series entitled “Ma Normandie.”
That the tragic side of life touches Léandre deeply is evident, if only from a couple of drawings which appeared in L’Assiette au Beurre. The first is entitled “Saison des eaux—chacun va aux eaux suivant ses moyens”; and we see a starving, distracted mother, plunging to eternity in the foul depths of a canal, while her tiny children, all unconscious of their fate, clutch her skirts and are being hurled to death with her. The other drawing bears the legend, “What have they been doing, sir? Sleeping without paying for it!”—which is given as the conversation passing between a little milliner’s girl and an old gentleman, who are watching a long procession of dejected outcasts being led to the lock-up by ferocious-looking policemen, while behind them is a wall inscribed with the mocking legend, “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.” The poor prisoners are evidently not criminals, but merely the crowded-out failures of a great city, who have perforce been obliged to sleep in the streets.