STEINLEN
REVOLUTION
(Lithographed Poster)
Next we are taken to some dull, superstitious Breton hamlet; a blind and crippled tramp has arrived, hobbling through on crutches. We feel that his infirmities have hardly saved him from a career of violence. We can almost hear his raucous appeal for alms, as it falls on the ears of a group of simple village children, pitying, yet more than half-fearing, the uncanny stranger—just as they did the chained bear that passed through a week before.
Less gruesome is a great healthy farmer’s lass, surrounded by cocks and hens and clattering her wooden shoon across the cobbled farmyard; or the two fresh little laundry girls, swinging along laden with three great baskets of clean linen. “Look out! there’s another of those beastly bicycles,” says one of them; “and on Sunday too,” comments the other.
Then again there are idyllic scenes on the sordid Paris fortifications, or yet further afield. Trompe la Mort shows us a crowd of humble folk scandal-mongering in hushed tones, their tittle-tattle provoked to its utmost by the climax indicated in the background by a sombre hearse. Another drawing transports us to the midst of a crowd in quite a different frame of mind. A hue and cry has been raised, and an infuriated mob is tearing down the street at the heels of its hapless prey. Next we see one of the many drawings dealing with a side of life which in less safe hands might be offensive. An unctuous old harpy waylays two fresh little workgirls, and insidiously lays the seeds which, to her profit, shall lead to their downfall. Steinlen occasionally, if rarely, makes drawings of which humour is the motive power. Among these I recall a café-concert study of his. Yvette Guilbert, at that time as thin as a lath, holds the stage, and among the audience is a great, porpoise-like woman who says, threateningly to her poor, inoffensive little wisp of a husband—“Perhaps that’s your style.... Satyr.”
One of his most charming drawings reproduced in colour in Le Rire is called “le bon Gîte.” The hapless Krüger, all war stained, is seated in some peaceful Dutch cottage, where Queen Wilhelmina, as an awe-struck peasant lassie, fills for him the pipe of peace, the while her martial German husband eagerly engages the old man in fighting his battles over again.
Nor can we forget the splendid double-page drawing that appeared in L’Assiette au Beurre for May 23, 1901. Here we see a big boy’s seminary, representing the French army of the future, the hope of the country, going out for its daily walk in charge of a number of priests—every one of them a monument of craftiness, superstition or bigoted intolerance, thus representing the power that poisoned a great nation’s sense of justice during the hateful period of the Dreyfus trials.
Then again in the same paper for June 27, 1901, appears among others one of his most notable drawing, a veritable tour de force, representing the harrowing scene of the identification of corpses after the dynamite explosion at Issy.