The History of "Punch"

by M. H. Spielmann

The artist's personality, as it should, impresses us first, powerfully and irresistibly. While under Mark Lemon, Mr. Sambourne, as an artist, was still unformed. Under Shirley Brooks was awakened his wonderful inventive faculty. Under the régime of masterly inactivity—the happy policy of laissez faire—of Tom Taylor, the talent had burst forth into luxuriance, not to say exuberance. And under Mr. Burnand it was schooled and restrained within severer limits.

It was many years before regular political cartooning[64] fell to his lot. He illustrated several of Mr. Burnand's serials in Punch, and some of his work out of it. But afterwards he rose to the treatment of actuality. Upon the event of the hour his picture is formed, and each week his work must be forthcoming. There can be no question of failure, no dallying with the subject, however elaborate or unpromising it may appear. A decision must be come to, and that rapidly; and there the artist sits, his watch hung up before him, "one eye on the dial and the other on the drawing-paper," knowing that at the appointed hour the work must be ready for the messenger. Thus the majority of his four thousand designs have been greatly hurried—hurried in thought as well as in execution. Many have been wrought in a single day; the great majority within two days; very few, indeed, have taken more. But when he has the time he wants, what amazing results are achieved! Sir John Tenniel once exclaimed to me: "What extraordinary improvement there is in Sambourne's work! Although a little hard and mechanical, it is of absolutely inexhaustible ingenuity and firmness of touch. His diploma for the Fisheries Exhibition almost gave me a headache to look at it—so full, cram-full of suggestion, yet leaving nothing to the imagination, so perfectly and completely drawn, with a certainty of touch which baffles me to understand how he does it."

For the rest, Mr. Sambourne's method, like his work, is unique. Keen of observation though he is, his memory for detail is not to be compared to that of Sir John Tenniel; and, actuated by that desire for accuracy which he holds desirable in a journal specially devoted to topical allusion, he avails himself extensively of the use of photography. In the cabinets in his studio, filled full of drawers, each labelled according to their contents, over ten thousand photographs are classified: every celebrity of the day, and to a certain extent of the past, British and foreign, at various ages, in various costumes, and in various attitudes; representatives of the Church, the Bench, and the Bar; of Science, Art, Literature, and the Stage; the beasts and birds and insects in and out of the Zoological Gardens; figures by the score, nude and draped; costumes of all ages and every country; soldiers, sailors, and the uniforms of every army and navy; land and sea and sky; boating and botany, nuns and clowns, hospital-nurses, musical instruments, and rifles, locomotives, wheel-barrows, shop-windows, and everything else besides—everything, in short, as he himself declared, "from a weasel to a Welshman"—all are photographed mostly by himself, and all are arranged by himself, in readiness against the demand for accuracy and the exigencies of haste. But when time permits, Mr. Sambourne goes to greater trouble still. Does he require a special uniform? he begs the War Office—not unsuccessfully—to lend him one or two men, or even a detachment; does he want to represent Mr. Gladstone—say, as Wellington (as he did November 2nd, 1889)? he procures the loan of the duke's own raiment, and only stops short at borrowing Mr. Gladstone himself. For his types, too, he takes pains not less thorough. For Britannia's helmet, he made working drawings of the unique Greek piece in the British Museum, and from that had a replica constructed—one of the most notable items in a notable "property" room.

At the back of his house is a paved courtyard, wherein his servant poses as every character under the sun while he is photographed by his master, who then runs inside to develop the plate and make a dash at his drawing. Or he will photograph himself, or the model in the desired attitude; or he will get his friends to pose. Among his sitters there is none more useful than the burly man who serves equally well for "Policeman A 1" or John Bull, for the Duke of Cambridge or Prince Bismarck. It was he who sat for one of the finest of Mr. Sambourne's "junior cartoons" on the occasion when the great ex-Chancellor had said: "I am like the traveller lost in the snow, who begins to get stiff while the snow-flakes cover him." This picture of the aged and forlorn statesman, accompanied only by his faithful hound, is perhaps the best of the artist's achievements of dignity and pathos—worthy of being named with "Dropping the Pilot" of Sir John Tenniel. His passion for realism is so great that, I remember, when he was engaged on his "Mahogany Tree" for the Jubilee number of Punch—one of the most popular drawings he ever made—he had just such a table duly laid for dinner in the courtyard, with one person sitting at it in order to show the proportion, and photographed it from a window of the house at the necessary elevation.[65] But for his love of accuracy he would not have done these things; nor, but for his love of naturalism, could he have given us his numerous fine studies of Nature. And but for this, Mr. Punch would never have printed one or two of his Norwegian sketches, such as "The Church-going Bell," in which there was not the slightest attempt at humour or fun—nothing but a calm and reposeful love of Nature, the deep, sad impression on the mind and heart of the artist as he watches the northern sun dip in sleepy majesty behind the panting waves.

Like Rabelais, he can use the pencil to greater ends under cover of the motley, and encase bitter truths with the gilt of a printed jest. Like Giotto and his legendary feat, he can draw you a perfect circle with his pen—and perhaps he is the only man in the country who can do it. His is the rare gift that in him sense of fun, of dignity, and of art is equal. He will brook nothing more serious in his sallies than chaff and banter; and yet his kindly art, based upon Nature and observation of the work of others, has, by its very truth, made him enemies even on foreign thrones. Nevertheless, it is less as a politician and a satirist that he claims recognition; it is primarily as an artist that he will assuredly be remembered when his place among his countrymen has to be determined.

ERNEST GRISET.
(From a Photograph by W. G. Parker and Co.)

A Polish artist, with Mr. Sambourne's initials, L. Strasynski by name, also began in 1867, and during that and the following year contributed nine cuts, very foreign in feeling and firm in touch. Then, after an anonymous draughtsman, "M.S.R.," had appeared with a single cut ("Candles"), Mr. F. Wilfrid Lawson, the elder brother and teacher of Cecil Lawson, contributed a sheetful of initials and vignettes which dribbled forth in the paper up to 1876; and Mr. T. Walters, a half-a-dozen, up to 1875. Mr. E. J. Ellis, now better known in other fields than comic draughtsmanship, began on December 12th, 1867. He had received an introduction to Mark Lemon through Mr. (now Sir) Algernon Borthwick, and found the Editor "good-natured enough," as he himself says, "to allow me to do a dozen or so of initials, and a quarter-page illustration. They were all more or less pinched and painful things, and Mr. Lemon did not conceal from me that 'he was not knocked over by them.' But they were drawn on the block—not on paper—and from the strangeness and discomfort of it came the tight-elbowed style of the work. Of what I did altogether, only about a third were printed; half were paid for; but what they paid for they did not print, and what they printed they did not pay for." At that time Mr. Ellis caught the fever of decorative art, classic and romantic, which culminated in the "interpreted" edition of Blake's "Prophetic Books," in collaboration with Mr. Yeats; and Punch lost a promising recruit.

The experience of Mr. Ernest Griset, who is first seen on p. 61 of Vol. LIV., was more extensive but less gratifying. He excelled at comic animals—his human figures are most of them of one ragged type—but on Bennett's sudden disappearance he was quickly encouraged to take up the dead man's work, and was enabled to show in many of his three-and-sixty drawings of that year the full range of his talent, his remarkable invention and ingenuity. Mr. Griset, though born in Boulogne, was educated in England, and after studying art under Gallait, intended to follow water-colour painting, taking subjects by preference of a Glacial Prehistoric kind. But the foundation of "Fun" gave him the opportunity of comic draughtsmanship, and the work he did for the paper brought him Mark Lemon's invitation to call upon him. A cordial reception and a flattering tribute to his ability were followed by an understanding of regular employment, and the young draughtsman became a Punch artist unattached. But he did not remain long in favour. His work, perhaps, was not highly popular, and Mark Lemon perceptibly cooled towards him. So, finding he was no longer wanted, Mr. Griset, who was then no more than twenty-four years of age, retired, and consoled himself in other directions—notably by illustrating "Æsop's Fables," which had attracted Bennett and Sir John Tenniel before him.