Mag. of Art.
SIR GEO. REID.   PORTRAIT OF CHARLES KEENE.

But, curiously enough, this same man, who as an observer could be so uncompromisingly sombre, and so rough and brutal as a caricaturist, had also a wonderfully delicate feeling for feminine charm. In the pages he has devoted to the German waltz there lives again the chivalrous elegance of the period of Werther, and that peculiarly English grace which is so fascinating in Gainsborough. His young girls are graceful and wholesome in their round straw hats with broad ribbons; his pretty little wives in their white aprons and coquettish caps recall Chardin. One feels that he has seen Paris and appreciated the fine fragrance of Watteau’s pictures.

Mention should also be made of Henry William Bunbury, who excelled in the drawing of horses and ponies. “A long Story” is an excellent example of his powers as a caricaturist pure and simple. The variations rung on the theme of boredom and the self-centred and animated stupidity of the narrator have been vividly observed, and are earnestly rendered. Rowlandson has the savage indignation of Swift; Bunbury is not savage, but he has the same English seriousness and something of the same brutality. The faces here are crapulous and distorted, and the subject is treated without lightness or good-nature. Perhaps the English do not take their pleasures so very seriously, but undoubtedly they jest in earnest. Yet Bunbury’s incisiveness and his thorough command of what it is his design to express assure him a distinct position as an artist. His “Richmond Hill” shows the pleasanter side of English character. The breeze billowing in the trees, the little lady riding by on her cob, the buxom dames in the shay, and the man spinning past on his curricle, give the scene a spirit of life and movement, besides rendering it an historical document of the period of social history that lies between The Virginians and Vanity Fair.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
KEENE.FROM “OUR PEOPLE.”

As a political caricaturist George Cruikshank has the same significance for England as Henri Monnier has for France, and the drawings of the latter often go straight back to the great English artist. But his first works in 1815 were children’s books, and such simple delineations from the world of childhood and the life of society have done more to preserve his name than political caricatures. Their touch of satire is only very slight. Cruikshank’s ladies panting under heavy chignons, his serious and exceedingly prosy dames pouring out tea for serious and not less ceremonious gentlemen, whilst the girls are galloping round Hyde Park on their thoroughbreds, accompanied by a brilliant escort of fashionable young men—they are all of them not so much caricatures as pictures freshly caught from life. He had a great sense for toilettes, balls, and parties. And he could draw with artistic observation and tender feeling the babbling lips and shining eyes of children, the shy confidence of the little ones, their timid curiosity and their bashful advances. And thus he opened up the way along which his disciples advanced with so much success.

KLEIN.A TRAVELLING LANDSCAPE PAINTER.

The style of illustration has adapted itself to the altered character of English life. What at first constituted the originality of English caricaturists was their mordant satire. Everything was painted in exceedingly vivid colours. Whatever was calculated to bring out an idea in comic or brutal relief—great heads and little bodies, an absurd similarity between persons and animals, the afflorescence of costume—was seized upon eagerly. These artists fought for the weary and heavy-laden, and mercilessly lashed the cut-throats and charlatans. They delighted in spontaneous obscenity, exuberant vigour, and undisguised coarseness. Men were shaken by a broad Aristophanic laughter till they seemed like epileptics. At the time when the Empire style came into England, Gillray could dare to represent by speaking likenesses some of the best-known London beauties, in a toilette which the well developed Madame Tallien could not have worn with more assurance. Such things were no longer possible when England grew out of her awkward age. After the time of Gillray a complete change came over the spirit of English caricature. Everything brutal or bitterly personal was abandoned. The clown put on his dress-clothes, and John Bull became a gentleman. Even by Cruikshank’s time caricature had become serious and well-bred. And his disciples were indeed not caricaturists at all, but addressed themselves solely to a delicately poetic representation of subjects. They know neither Rowlandson’s innate force and bitter laughter, nor the gallows humour and savagery of Hogarth; they are amiable and tenderly grave observers, and their drawings are not caricatures, but charming pictures of manners.

Punch, which was founded in 1841, has perhaps caught the social and political physiognomy of England in the middle of the nineteenth century with the greatest delicacy. It is a household paper, a periodical read by the youngest girls. All the piquant things with which the Parisian papers are filled are therefore absolutely excluded. It scrupulously ignores the style of thing to which the Journal Amusant owes three-fourths of its matter. Every number contains one big political caricature, but otherwise it moves almost entirely in the region of domestic life. Students flirting with pretty barmaids, neat little dressmakers carrying heavy bonnet-boxes and pursued by old gentlemen—even these are scenes which go a little too far for the refined tone of the paper which has been adapted to the drawing-room.

JOHANN CHRISTOPH ERHARD.

Next to Cruikshank, the Nestor of caricature, must be mentioned John Leech, who between 1841 and 1864 was the leading artist on Punch. In his drawings there is already to be found the high-bred and fragrant delicacy of the English painting of the present time. They stand in relation to the whimsical and vigorous works of Rowlandson as the fine esprit of a rococo abbé to the coarse and healthy wit of Rabelais. The mildness of his own temperament is reflected in his sketches. Others have been the cause of more laughter, but he loved beauty and purity. Men are not often drawn by him, or if he draws them they are always “pretty fellows,” born gentlemen. His young women are not coquettish and chic, but simple, natural, and comely. The old English brutality and coarseness have become amiable, subtle, refined, mild, and seductive in John Leech. He is a fine and delicate spirit, who seems very ethereal beside Hogarth and Rowlandson, those giants fed on roast-beef; he prefers to occupy himself with sport and boating, the season and its fashions, and is at home in public gardens, at balls, and at the theatre. Here a pretty baby is being taken for an airing in Hyde Park by a tidy little nurse-maid, and there on mamma’s arm goes a charming schoolgirl, who is being enthusiastically greeted by good-looking boys; here again a young wife is sitting by the fireside with a novel in her hand and her feet out of her slippers, while she looks dreamily at the glimmering flame. Or a girl is standing on the shore in a large straw hat, with her hand shading her eyes and the wind fluttering her dress. Even his “Children of the Mobility” are little angels of grace and purity, in spite of their rags. The background, be it room, street, or landscape, is merely given with a few strokes, but it is of more than common charm. Every plate of Leech has a certain fragrance and lightness of touch and a delicacy of line which has since been attained only by Frederick Walker. His simplicity of stroke recalls the old Venetian woodcuts. There is not an unnecessary touch. Everything is in keeping, everything has a significance.