A HURRIED NOTE.
(By Harry Furniss.)
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To obtain his portraits Mr. Furniss would stalk his quarries unawares: for self-consciousness in a sitter kills all character. A favourite ruse was for him to tell Mr. A. that he wanted to sketch Mr. B., and that his work would be greatly facilitated if the hon. member would keep the other in conversation. Mr. A. would enter gleefully into the joke, and then Harry Furniss would sketch Mr. A! If need be, he would make his sketch, unseen and unseeing, upon a piece of cardboard or in a sketch-book, in the side-pocket of his overcoat. In this way detail, mannerism, gesture, pose—character, in fact, would be secured, and next week's Punch might contain the portrait—sometimes severe, generally humorous, and always well-observed. A rapid worker, too, is Furniss—incomparably the quickest of his colleagues—who could produce anything from a thumbnail sketch to a full-page drawing, portraits and all, in an hour or so, although he would prefer, of course, to have fair time to arrange his composition, to pencil it in, and then work it up carefully from the living model. On the occasion when Lord Randolph Churchill's hunting adventures in South Africa kept London amused, Mr. Furniss, who was in the country and about to start for town by rail, saw an account of the exploit in the morning paper. He wired to Mr. Burnand: "See Churchill's lion-hunt, page — 'Times.' Splendid opportunity. Reply —— Junction." At ten-thirty he found the answer awaiting him at the junction: "Good. Let engravers have it to-day." He set to work at once in the train. Having to change several times, he found the junctions of great use for drawing in the faces; and by half-past four the finished page was in Mr. Swain's possession.

TWO FRIENDS.
(By Harry Furniss.)

Indefatigable and unconventional, as much a journalist as an artist, gifted with a rapid intelligence and a subacid humour, Mr. Furniss, in his work on Punch, has been extremely varied, and by the strength of his personality he imparted to the Parliamentary side of the paper a touch of his own convictions. It was obvious from his treatment of the Irish that he was a strong Unionist, and that his sympathy with the Irish party was neither very deep nor very cordial. This was emphasised by some of the best caricatures he ever produced. They were bitterly resented; but probably more ill-feeling was created by the ludicrous picture he subsequently drew of the patriots as they returned, sea-sick, moist, and dejected, to Dublin from the "London Conference," entitled "A Sketch at Kingstown." On the top of this came the irritation caused by his laughable but merciless mimicry, in his famous entertainment of "The Humours of Parliament," of the imaginary Member for Ballyhooly; but it was the caricatures of Mr. Swift MacNeill, M.P., that brought matters to a head. Mr. MacNeill had previously appreciated the sketches, and begged certain of them. But at last, on the occasion of an exuberant and unflattering, but still not an ill-humoured, portrait, supported by a solid contingent of his Party, he sought the artist out and, reproaching him in excited and unmeasured terms, he committed a "technical assault" upon him. Mr. Furniss was not to be induced to retaliate, even when Dr. Tanner, M.P., and others who surrounded him addressed him in words more violent and offensive than Mr. MacNeill's, and threatened him with corporal punishment. As it appeared to the draughtsman that it was all a pre-arranged affair, he remained passive, lest a development of the situation should lead—as it was probably intended that it should lead—to his exclusion from the Lobby. Punch himself, however, snapped his fingers at this argumentum baculinum, and Mr. Furniss, with rare good taste, revenged himself by a full-page drawing (21st September, 1893) of "A House of Apollo-ticians," in which every member has been idealised to a point of extraordinary personal beauty, while the artist himself appears in the corner as a malignant ape of hideous aspect. This was balm, no doubt, to the gentleman who had been so incensed at being "caricatured, now as a potato, now as a gorilla;" while the situation was cleverly summed up thus:—

"O, Mr. MacNeill was quite happy until a
Draughtsman in Punch made him like a gorilla—
At the Zoo the gorilla quite happy did feel
Till the draughtsman in Punch made him like the MacNeill."

Meanwhile, several series of importance had come from his pencil. His "Puzzle-heads" are marvels of ingenuity, in each of which a portrait of a celebrity is built up of personal attributes, characteristics, or incidents in the career of the person represented; his Lika Joko "Japanneries" caught with amazing truth the spirit of Japanese draughtsmanship—far more completely than either Bennett or Brunton ever succeeded in achieving; and his "Interiors and Exteriors" reflect social and public life with exuberant, almost with extravagant, humour.

But the end of his connection with Punch was at hand. He had joined in October, 1880. He had been called to the Table four years later, and on the 21st February, 1894, he ate his last dinner at it, and resigned in the following month. Meanwhile, like Charles Keene, he was never one of the salaried Staff, but to the end was paid by the square inch. This permitted him to do as much work as he chose for other papers; but it made him feel, at the same time, that he was not flesh of their flesh, while he suspected himself of getting into a cast-iron groove from which he sought to free himself. So, after a minor "misunderstanding" had been put right, Mr. Furniss quitted his old friend Punch, and forthwith set about starting a monthly magazine of his own. This enterprise, in the course of evolution, was considerably modified; and for a time the weekly "Lika Joko" soon emerged into open rivalry with the paper which for nearly fourteen years had made the name of Furniss as celebrated throughout all English-speaking lands as that of any of his colleagues.

And such is the Passing of Furniss, whose extraordinary powers of observation (he was the first, by the way, to detect and represent truthfully Mr. Gladstone's loss of a digit) and of catching a likeness in its essential lines, and whose unbounded and buoyant good-humour early justified Mr. Burnand's selection. Though he so soon drifted into Parliamentary sketching, there is no class of work, except the officially-recognised political "cartoons," which he did not attempt; and he romped through Punch's pages with unlimited invention and inexhaustible resource—with comedy and farce, with drama and tragedy, and sometimes with work startling in its truth and touching in its pathos.