"Look here," I began, "I didn't ask you here to teach me my business. I really can't continue under your instructions."
"Oh, very well," he said, changing his tone, "I'm sure we're both hungry, and I think you'd better come with me and have a bit of lunch at my club, and we'll settle this after."
I agreed, thinking perhaps he had been out of humour. We had an excellent lunch and parted good friends. Before leaving he said, "I have no doubt you'll see there was something in my suggestion, and I'll come again to-morrow."
I finished the drawing, without further discussion, but he did not leave my studio looking quite happy, and he carefully ascertained before getting the address of the lithographers who were going to reproduce the drawing. I heard afterwards that he lost very little time in paying them a visit and begging them to cut a considerable piece off the ears, which they informed him was impossible as they had no right of alterations, and it would be quite against their principles.
An officer in my unhappy subject's regiment said to me afterwards, that the result was greatly appreciated at Aldershot, but that they were all greatly disappointed to find that I had flattered him!
My caricatures are frequently described as "gross" by the wife who is hurt by the pencil that points a joke at her husband's peculiarities; or she says, "Why don't you do my husband as you did So-and-so!" (referring to a decided and unsparing caricature). I have been described as unkind; or sometimes when, carried away by a fascinating subject, I have perhaps not sufficiently controlled my pencil, I have been accused of "brutality." The truth is that in working one may not intend anything personal, or for one moment imagine any one could take the result seriously; but the finished work, made with a detailed, and possibly inhuman devotion to one's own conception, strikes the beholder in a mood entirely different. Very few of those who admire a caricature realize that its satire lies, not in any personal venom, but in the artist's detached observation of life and character. In the early days of Vanity Fair people viewed caricature as something entirely new, and in the light of this novelty viewed it in the right spirit; later they grew particular, and, as they frequently paid (from which I did not benefit), an entirely new type of subject came to me; it was as though a spirit of commercialism crept between me and my sitters.
FIFTH EARL OF PORTSMOUTH,
1876.
MAJOR OSWALD AMES (OZZIE).
1896.