CAPTAIN H. R. HOWARD.
(From a Photograph by Lambert Weston and Son.)
An amateur who signed with cross-pipes, and who appeared five times in the following year, was the one other contributor of 1850; and then 1851 was distinguished by the enlistment of the prolific draughtsman who at first used three running legs—quaintly accepted as the Manx arms—as his sign-manual. This was Captain Henry R. Howard, the son of a country gentleman, born at Watford, where he lived in the same house for over fifty years. He was always sketching from a child; and being persuaded by his friends to "do some of those for Punch," he sent a few samples to the Editor, but without much hope of success. They brought an immediate invitation to call upon Mark Lemon, who told him, after seeing his pencil sketches, that he might draw for them, but not on paper, on wood; and learning that he had had no such experience, referred him for instruction to the courtesy of Leech and Tenniel, whose senior he was by six years. He was not entirely without artistic education, having studied in Hanover under a pupil of Benjamin West's. "You must draw skeletons," said Herr Ramburg. "But I only want to draw landscapes," pleaded the youth. "Then you must draw skeletons first," replied the artist; "it is the only way to draw landscapes."
After securing Lemon's favour Captain Howard drew scores of comic humanised beasts and birds in the form of initials and decorations. At last, after some years, Lemon proposed a change, when Howard quietly remarked, "I've been wondering how long you'd go on taking those things; I should have thought you were sick of them. I am." Meanwhile he had changed his signature of the Manx legs—he had just been sojourning in the island when he adopted them—as Lemon represented it as Leech's opinion that it was sometimes unnecessarily like his own wriggling signature; and he had adopted in substitution the little trident that figured in the paper for fifteen years. When Leech died, Captain Howard aspired to be—in part, at least—his successor; but although he was now drawing figure-subjects, and had an inexhaustible stock of jokes and fun, he was told, to his bitter disappointment, that new blood was wanted; and the great mantle which had fallen was now drawn round the shoulders of Charles Keene and Mr. du Maurier. Captain Howard then practically retired. Although in the first year of his contributions he was £30 out of pocket by his Punch work, as he bought his own blocks instead of claiming them from Swain, he was soon making £100 a year from the paper. Just before he retired an officer recently returned from India expressed the desire to draw also for Punch as a profession. "I hear," said he, "that Leech makes £1,500 a year out of it." "So that you would be satisfied with £1,200?" asked Captain Howard. His friend admitted that even the inferior sum would be acceptable. "Very well," replied Howard encouragingly; "come and dine with me, and I'll show you by my books that my Punch income last year was just twelve pounds!"
Captain Howard's work, though clever and ingenious, was weak. Its humour, often fresh enough, was never very pronounced; nor did the draughtsman's hand ever become that of a master. In 1853 he had made no fewer than sixty-six cuts, and about doubled that number each year up to 1867, when, with only two drawings in the volume, he finally vanished from Punch's pages. Three years later there was printed an initial by him, representing a comic hammer-fish (p. 265, Vol. LIX.), but this belonged to "old stock;" and it marks the failure of its author's long-sustained effort to obtain a recognised position in the front rank of the artistic Staff. He died 31st August, 1895.
A contemporary of his was G. H. Thomas, brother of one of the founders of the "Graphic," and a popular painter of the day, who received much employment from the Queen. Mark Lemon was very anxious to secure the services of so admirable a draughtsman; but Thomas, who was trying to shake himself free from wood-drawing in favour of oil-painting, showed little responsive enthusiasm. He did, however, contribute a couple of drawings—one of them a large head-piece to the preface, representing a feast given to Punch on his twenty-first volume day. In it he is supported by the Queen and Court, and at the round table are the representatives of the nations. It is not a happy effort, and is clearly inspired by Doyle—whose fancy the Editor was still seeking to replace; and, moreover, it is poorly engraved; but it is as full of figures as of incident. Then came C. H. Bradley, who seldom got beyond initials and trifles of large heads on little bodies, being only once or twice promoted to "socials" during the nine years of his connection with the paper. On occasion he showed real humour, while his artistic merit seems to have owed most of what excellence it possessed to the study of Tenniel's work. Bradley, whose monogram might easily be mistaken by the unwary for that of C. H. Bennett, who followed eight years later, executed but five-and-thirty cuts between 1852 and 1860.
CHARLES S. KEENE.
(Drawn by J. D. Watson. By Courtesy of "Black and White.")
Punch was ten years old when the hand of Charles Keene, but not Charles Keene himself, was introduced to the Editor, through the instrumentality of Mr. Henry Silver. Keene had at first been intended for the law, and afterwards had spent a short period in an architect's office. But he decided to throw himself into art; and in order to learn engraving and drawing on the wood, he followed the practice of the day (such as had been adopted by Leech, William Harvey, Fred Walker, Mr. Birket Foster, Mr. Walter Crane, and other of Punch's artists), and apprenticed himself to an engraver—Whymper, for choice. Then he studied along with his comrade Tenniel and other incipient geniuses at the Clipstone Street Academy, and as early as 1846 produced with his friend—who was soon to be his fellow-giant on Punch—the "Book of Beauty," already referred to. He took a studio in the Strand—a sky-parlour renowned for its dust and inaccessibility—and lived, as all good Bohemians should, chiefly on art, song, and smoke: an existence sweetened by a few warm but eclectic friendships. He worked desperately hard, and having, through his fellow-shireman Samuel Read, become connected with the "Illustrated London News," he made for it many drawings of the sort now called "actuality."
By that time Mr. Henry Silver had contracted with Keene an acquaintanceship which was to grow into a warm friendship, and it was under the shadow of that intimacy that his earlier contributions were made. As Mr. Silver himself explains in his statement written for Mr. George S. Layard's admirable "Life and Letters of Charles Keene of Punch" (p. 47): "It may seem a little strange that Keene at first showed some reluctance to let his name be known where it was finally so famous. Still, it is the fact that while his earliest Punch drawings were of my devising, he steadily declined to own himself the doer of them. I was writing then for Punch as an outsider, but my ambition was to draw, and for this I had no talent. As for working on the wood, I soon 'cut' it in despair, and, like a baffled tyrant, I knew not how to bring my subjects to the block. Keene very kindly undertook the labour for me, and the first design he executed was 'A Sketch of the New Paris Street-sweeping Machines'—a couple of cannon, namely—which was published in December, 1851, immediately after the bloody coup d'état."