His eccentricity—perhaps I ought to say in this case his absent-mindedness—is illustrated by an incident which happened on the morning of the funeral of a great friend of his. As Cecil (his real name was Blount) was having his bath, he was suddenly inspired with some idea for a song; so, pulling his sponge-bath into the adjoining sitting-room closer to the piano, he placed a chair in it, and sat down to try it over. A friend, rushing in to fetch him to the funeral, found him so seated, singing and playing, balancing the dripping sponge on the top of his head.
THE CARICATURING OF PICTURES.
THE PICTURE SHOWS.
Design from "Punch."
To feed upon one's own kind is a custom which, like so many other vestiges of a previous civilisation, seems in the present day to have a fair chance of revival. We have long had with us the City Cannibal, the Fleet Street Cannibal, the Dramatic, Literary and Musical Cannibals. Latterly the Society Cannibal has come more distinctly to the front. Then why, I long ago asked myself, should there not be the Cannibal of the etching pen and the brush? Especially as the writhing victims of those mighty instruments appear to be so enamoured of their fate as to besiege that comic slaughter-house, the studio of the caricaturist, and with persistent cries of "Eat us! eat us! Our turn next!" solicit the "favour of not being forgotten" in his next batch of "subjects."
It may be a revelation to many of my readers, but I can assure them it is a fact, that it is only in very exceptional cases that artists object to having their pictures caricatured. Indeed, many of the leading painters have given me to understand that the omission of their work from my sketches would be anything but agreeable to them, although, when the desired travesties of their pictures appear, they may pretend to be highly indignant. There is one Royal Academician of my acquaintance who has so keen an appreciation of humour that he never loses an opportunity of giving me a hint when his magnifying glass has detected the slightest element of the grotesque in a fellow artist's work. And that most amiable of men, the late Frank Holl, could never refrain, when occasion offered, from directing my attention to the humorous points of his sitters, although I need hardly add that no trace of his having perceived them was ever apparent in any of his works. Do artists object? Well, in Punch, May, 1889, du Maurier touches this point:
"What our artist (the awfully funny one) has to put up with: Brown: 'I say, look here! What the deuce do you mean by caricaturing my pictures—hay?' Jones: 'Yes, confound you! and not caricaturing mine!'"
I have even known artists so anxious to be parodied that, if they happened to have a vein of humour in their pencils, they would actually send me caricatures of their own pictures. Even poor Fred Barnard once sent me an admirable sketch, caricaturing an excellent portrait of his three children which he had painted for the Royal Academy, where it duly appeared. Others less humorously imaginative perhaps have written to me assuring me of the great pleasure which would have been theirs had they themselves conceived the idea which my caricature of their work supplied.