The satirical grotesque of the 18th century had been characterized by a sort of grandiose brutality, by a certain vigorous obscenity, by a violence of expression and intention, that appear monstrous in these days of reserve and restraint, but that doubtless sorted well enough with the strong party feelings and fierce political passions of the age. After the downfall of Napoleon (1815), however, when strife was over and men were weary and satisfied, a change in matter and manner came over the caricature of the period. In connection with this change, the name of George Cruikshank (1792-1878), an artist who stretches hands on the one side towards Hogarth and Gillray, and on the other towards Leech and Tenniel, deserves honourable mention. Those of Cruikshank’s political caricatures which were designed for the squibs of William Hone (1779-1842) are, comparatively speaking, uninteresting; his ambition was that of Hogarth—the production of “moral comedies.” Much of his work, therefore, may be said to form a link in the chain of development through which has passed that ironical genre to which reference has already been made. In 1829, however, began to appear the famous series of lithographs, signed H.B., the work of John Doyle (1798-1868). These jocularities are interesting otherwise than politically; thin and weakly as they are, they inaugurated the style of later political caricature. In France, meanwhile, with the farcical designs of Edme Jean Pigal (b. 1794) and the realistic sketches of Henri Monnier (1805-1872), the admirable portrait-busts of Jean Pierre Dantan the younger (1800-1869) and the fine military and low-life drolleries of Nicolas Toussaint Charlet (1792-1845) were appearing. Up to this date, though journalism and caricature had sometimes joined hands (as in the case of the Craftsman and the Anti-Jacobin, and particularly in Les Révolutions de France et de Brabant and Les Actes des Apôtres), the alliance had been but brief; it was reserved for Charles Philipon (1802-1862), who may be called the father of comic journalism, to make it lasting. The foundation of La Caricature, by Philipon in 1831, suppressed in 1835 after a brief but glorious career, was followed by Le Charivari (December 1832), which is perhaps the most renowned of the innumerable enterprises of this extraordinary man. Among the artists he assembled round him, the highest place is held by Honoré Daumier (1808-1879), a draughtsman of great skill, and a caricaturist of immense vigour and audacity. Another of Philipon’s band was Sulpice Paul Chevalier (1801-1866), better known as Gavarni, in whose hands modern social caricature, advanced by Cruikshank and Charlet, assumed its present guise and became elegant. Mention must also be made of Grandville (J.I.I. Gérard) (1803-1847), the illustrator of La Fontaine, and a modern patron of the medieval skeleton; of Charles Joseph Traviès de Villers, the father of the famous hunchback “Mayeux”; and of Amedée de Noé, or “Cham,” the wittiest and most ephemeral of pictorial satirists. In 1840 the pleasantries of “H.B.” having come to an end, there was founded, in imitation of this enterprise of Philipon, the comic journal which, under the title of Punch, or the London Charivari, has since become famous all over the world. Among its early illustrators were John Leech (1817-1864) and Richard Doyle (1824-1883), whose drawings were full of the richest grotesque humour.

In 1862 Carlo Pellegrini, in Vanity Fair, began a series of portraits of public men, which may be considered the most remarkable instances of personal caricature in England.

For the later developments of caricature, it is convenient to take them by countries in the following sections:—

Great Britain.—During the later 19th century the term caricature, somewhat loosely used at all times, came gradually to cover almost every form of humorous art, from the pictorial wit and wisdom of Sir John Tenniel to the weird grotesques of Mr S.H. Sime, from the gay pleasantries of Randolph Caldecott to the graceful but sedate fancies of Mr Walter Crane. It is made to embrace alike the social studies, satirical and sympathetic, of Du Maurier and Keene, the political cartoons of Mr Harry Furniss and Sir F.C. Gould, the unextenuating likenesses of “Ape,” and “Spy,” and “Max,” the subtle conceits of Mr Linley Sambourne, the whimsicalities of Mr E.T. Reed, the exuberant burlesques of Mr J.F. Sullivan, the frank buffooneries of W.G. Baxter, Of these diverse forms of graphic humour, some have no other object than to amuse, and therefore do not call for serious notice. The work of Mr Max Beerbohm (“Max”) has the note of originality and extravagance too; while that of “Spy” (Mr Leslie Ward) in Vanity Fair, if it does not rival the occasional brilliancy of his predecessor “Ape” (Carlo Pellegrini, 1839-1889), maintains a higher average of merit. The pupil, too, is much more genial than the master, and he is content if his pencil evokes the comment, “How ridiculously like!” Caricature of this kind is merely an entertainment. Here we are concerned rather with those branches of caricature which, merrily or mordantly, reflect and comment upon the actual life we live. In treating of recent caricature of this kind, we must give the first place to Punch. Mr Punch’s outlook upon life has not changed much since the ’seventies of the last century. His influence upon the tone of caricature made itself felt most appreciably in the days of John Leech and Richard Doyle. Their successors but follow in their steps. In their work, says a clever German critic, is to be found no vestige of the “sour bilious temper of John Bull” that pervaded the pictures of Hogarth and Rowlandson. Charles Keene (1823-1891) and Du Maurier (1834-1896), he declares, are not caricaturists or satirists, but amiable and tenderly grave observers of life, friendly optimists. The characterization is truer of Keene, perhaps, than of Du Maurier. Charles Keene’s sketches are almost always cheerful; almost without exception they make you smile or laugh. In many of Du Maurier’s, on the other hand, there is an underlying seriousness. While Keene looks on at life with easy tolerance, an amused spectator, Du Maurier shows himself sensitive, emotional, sympathetic, taking infinite delight in what is pretty and gay and charming, but hurt and offended by the sordid and the ugly. Thus while Keene takes things dispassionately as they come, seeing only the humorous side of them, we find Du Maurier ever and anon attacking some new phase of snobbishness or philistinism or cant. For all his kindliness in depicting congenial scenes, he is at times as unrelenting a satirist as Rowlandson. The other Punch artists, whose work is in the same field, resemble Keene in this respect rather than Du Maurier. Mr Leonard Raven-Hill recalls Charles Keene not merely in temperament but in technique; like Keene, too, he finds his subjects principally in bourgeois life. Mr J. Bernard Partridge, though, like Du Maurier, he has an eye for physical beauty, is a spectator rather than a critic of life, yet he has made his mark as a “cartoonist.” Phil May (d. 1903), a modern Touchstone, is less easily classified. Though he wears the cap and bells, he is alive to the pity of things; he sees the pathos no less than the humour of his street-boys and “gutter-snipes.” He is, however, a jester primarily: an artist, too, of high achievement. Two others stand out as masters of the art of social caricature—Frederick Barnard and Mr J.F. Sullivan. Barnard’s illustrations to Dickens, like his original sketches, have a lively humour—the humour of irrepressible high spirits—and endless invention. High spirits and invention are characteristics also of Mr Sullivan. It is at the British artisan and petty tradesman—at the grocer given to adulteration and the plumber who outstays his welcome—that he aims his most boisterous fun. He rebels, too, delightfully, against red tape and all the petty tyrannies of officialdom. In political caricature Sir John Tenniel (q.v.) remained the leading artist of his day. The death of Abraham Lincoln, Bismarck’s fall from power, the tragedy of Khartum—to subjects such as these, worthy of a great painter, Tenniel has brought a classic simplicity and a sense of dignity unknown previously to caricature. It is hard to say in which field Tenniel most excels—whether in those ingenious parables in which the British Lion and the Russian Bear, John Chinaman, Jacques Bonhomme and Uncle Sam play their part—or in the ever-changing scenes of the great parliamentary Comedy—or in sombre dramas of Anarchy, Famine or Crime—or in those London extravaganzas in which the symbolic personalities of Gog and Magog, Father Thames and the Fog Fiend, the duke of Mudford and Mr Punch himself, have become familiar. Subjects similar to these have been treated also for many years by Mr Linley Sambourne in his fanciful and often beautiful designs. In the field of humorous portraiture also, as in cartoon-designing, Mr Sambourne has made his mark, and he may be said almost to have originated, in a small way, that practice of illustrating the doings of parliament with comic sketches in which Mr Furniss, Mr E.T. Reed and Sir F.C. Gould were his most notable successors. Mr Furniss satirized the Royal Academy as effectively as the Houses of Parliament, but he has been above all the illustrator of parliament—the creator of Mr Gladstone’s collars, the thief of Lord Randolph Churchill’s inches, the immortalizer of so many otherwise obscure politicians who has worked the House of Commons and its doings into so many hundreds of eccentric designs. But Mr Furniss was never, like Sir F.C. Gould (of the Westminster Gazette), a politician first and a caricaturist afterwards. Gould is an avowed partisan, and his caricatures became the most formidable weapons of the Radical party. Caustic, witty and telling, not specially well drawn, but drawn well enough—the likenesses unfailingly caught and recognizable at a glance—his “Picture Politics” won him a place unique in the ranks of caricaturists. There is no evidence of such strenuousness in the work of Mr E.T. Read (of Punch). In his parliamentary sketches, as in his “Animal Land” and “Prehistoric Peeps,” Mr Reed is a wholly irresponsible humorist and parodist. One finds keen satire, however, in those “Ready-made Coats of Arms,” in which he turned at once his heraldic lore and his insight into character to excellent account. In his more serious picture in which he has drawn a parallel between the tricoteuses awaiting with grim enjoyment the fall of the guillotine and those modern English gentlewomen who flock to the Old Bailey as to the play, we have the true Hogarthian touch. Mr Gunning King, Mr F.H. Townshend, Mr C.E. Brock, Mr Tom Browne, are among the younger humorists who have advanced to the front rank. Though there have been some notable competitors with Punch, there has never been a really “good second.” In Matt Morgan the Tomahawk (1865-1867) could boast an original cartoonist after Tenniel’s style, but without Tenniel’s power and humour. Morgan’s Tomahawk cartoons gained in effect from an ingenious method of printing in two colours. In Fred Barnard, W.G. Baxter, and Mr J.F. Sullivan, Judy (founded in 1867) possessed a trio of pictorial humorists of the first rank, and in W. Bowcher a political cartoonist thoroughly to the taste of those hot and strong Conservatives to whom Punch’s faint Whiggery was but Radicalism in disguise. His successor, Mr William Parkinson, was not less loyal to Tory ideas, though more urbane in his methods. Fun has had cartoonists of high merit in Mr Gordon Thomson and in Mr John Proctor, who worked also for Moonshine (founded in 1879, now extinct). Moonshine afterwards enlisted the services of Alfred Bryan, to whose clever pencil the Christmas number of the World was indebted for many years. Ally Sloper, founded in 1884, is notable only as the widely circulated medium for W.G. Baxter’s wild humours, kept up in the same spirit by Mr W.F. Thomas, his successor. Pick-me-up could once count a staff which rivalled at least the social side of Punch; Mr Raven-Hill, Phil May, Mr Maurice Greiffenhagen and Mr Dudley Hardy all contributed in their time to its sprightly pages, while Mr S.H. Sime made it the vehicle for his “squint-brained” imaginings. The Will o’ the Wisp, the Butterfly and the Unicorn, kindred ventures, though on different lines, all met with an early death. Lika Joko, founded in 1894 by Mr Harry Furniss, who in that year abandoned Punch, and afterwards Fair Game, were also short-lived. To this brief list of purely comic or satirical journals should be added the names of several daily and weekly publications—and among monthlies the Idler, with its caricatures by Mr Scott Rankin, Mr Sime and Mr Beerbohm—which have made a special feature of humorous art. Among these are the Graphic, whose Christmas numbers were first brightened by Randolph Caldecott; the Daily Graphic, enlivened sometimes by Phil May and Mr A.S. Boyd; Vanity Fair, with its grotesque portraits; Truth, to whose Christmas numbers Sir F.C. Gould contributed some of his best and most ambitious work, printed in colours; the Sketch, with Phil May and others; Black and White, with Mr Henry Meyer; the Pall Mall Gazette, first with Sir F.C. Gould, and later with Mr G.R. Halkett. The St Stephen’s Review, whose crudely powerful cartoons, the work of Tom Merry, were so popular, ceased publication in 1892. A tribute should be paid in conclusion to the coloured cartoons of the Weekly Freeman and other Irish papers, often remarkable for their humour and talent. (See also [Cartoon] and [Illustration].)

France.—In that peculiar branch of art which is based on irony, fun, oddity and wit, and in which Honoré Daumier (1808-1879), next to “Gavarni” (1804-1866), remains the undisputed master, France—as has already been shown—can produce an unbroken series of draughtsmen of strong individuality. Though “Cham” died in 1879, Eugène Giraud in 1881, “Randon” in 1884, “André Gill” in 1885, “Marcelin” in 1887, Edouard de Beaumont in 1888, Lami in 1891, Alfred Grévin in 1892, and “Stop” in 1899, a new group arose under the leadership of “Nadar” (b. 1820) and Etienne Carjat (b. 1828). Mirthful or satirical, and less philosophical than of yore, neglecting history for incident, and humanity for the puppets of the day, their drawings, which illustrate daily events, will perpetuate the manner and anecdotes of the time, though the illustrations to newspapers, or prints which need a paragraph of explanation, show nothing to compare with the Propos de Thomas Virelocque by “Gavarni.” Quantity perhaps makes up for quality, and some of these artists deserve special mention. “Draner” (b. 1833) and “Henriot” (b. 1857) are journalists, carrying on the method first introduced by “Cham” in the Univers Illustré: realistic sketches, with no purpose beyond the droll illustration of facts, amusing at the time, but of no value to the print-collector. M. J.L. Forain, born at Reims in 1852, studied at the École des Beaux Arts under Jean Léon Gérôme and J.B. Carpeaux. He first worked for the Courrier Français in 1887, and afterwards for Figaro; he was then drawn into the polemical work of politics. Though he has created some great types of flunkeydom, the explanatory story is more to him than the picture, which is often too sketchy, though masterly. Reduced reproductions of his work have been issued in volumes, a common form of popularity never attempted with Daumier’s fine lithographs. M. A.L. Willette, born at Châlons-sur-Marne in 1857, a son of Colonel Willette, the aide-de-camp to Marshal Bazaine, worked for four years in Alexandre Cabanel’s studio, and so gained an artistic training which alone would have distinguished him from his fellows, even without the delightful poetical fancy and Watteau-like grace which are somewhat unexpected amid the ugliness of modern life. His work has the value, no doubt, of deep and various meaning, but it has also intrinsic artistic worth. M. Willette is, in fact, the ideal delineator of the more voluptuous and highly spiced aspects of contemporary life. “Caran d’Ache,” a native of Moscow, born in 1858, borrowed from the German caricaturists—mainly from W. Busch—his methods of illustrating “a story without words.” He makes fun even of animals, and is a master of canine physiognomy. His simple and unerring outline is a method peculiarly his own; now and again his wit rises to grandiloquence, as in his Bellona, rushing on an automobile through massacre and conflagrations, and in his Épopée (Epic) of shadows thrown on a sheet. Among his followers may be included A. Guillaume and Gerbault. M.C.L. Léandre, born at Champsecret (Orne), in 1862, is, like “André Gill,” a draughtsman of monstrosities; he can get a perfect likeness of a face while exaggerating some particular feature, gives his figure a hump-back, as Dantan did in his statuettes, and has a facial dexterity which sometimes does scant justice to his very original wit. At the same time he has a true sense of beauty. M. Théophile A. Steinlen, born at Lausanne in 1859, went to Paris in 1881. He should be studied in his illustrations to Bruant. He knows the inmost core of the Butte-Montmartre, and depicts it with realistic and brutal relish. M. Albert Robida, born at Compiègne in 1848, collaborated with Decaux in 1871 to found La Caricature; he is a paradoxical seer of the possible future and a curiosity-hunter of the past. Old Paris has no secrets from him; he knows all the old stones and costumes of the middle ages, and has illustrated Rabelais; and for fertility of fancy he reminds us of Gustave Doré, but with a sense of movement so vibrant as to be almost distressing. “Bac,” born at Vienna in 1859, has infused a strain of the Austrian woman into the Parisienne; representing her merely as a pleasure- and love-seeking creature, as the toy of an evening, he has recorded her peccadilloes, her witcheries and her vices. Others who have shot folly as it flies are M. Albert Guillaume, who illustrated the Exhibition of 1900 in a series of remarkable silhouettes; “Mars”; “Henri Somm”; Gerbault; and Grün. M. Huard depicts to perfection the country townsfolk in their elementary psychology. M. Hermann Paul, M. Forain’s not unworthy successor on the Figaro, is a cruel satirist, who in a single face can epitomize a whole class of society, and could catalogue the actors of the comédie humaine in a series of drawings. M. Jean Veber loves fantastic subjects, the gnomes of fairy-tales and myths; but he has a biting irony for contemporary history, as in the Butcher’s Shop, where Bismarck is the blood-stained butcher. M. Abel Faivre, a refined and charming painter, is a whimiscal humorist with the pencil. He shows us monstrous women, fabulously hideous, drawing them with a sort of realism which is droll by sheer ugliness. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec startles us by extraordinary dislocations, scrawled limbs and inexplicable anatomy; he has left an inimitable series of sketches of Mme Yvette Guilbert when she was at her thinnest. M. Felix Vallotton reproduces crows in blots of black with a Japanese use of the brush. M. G. Jeanniot, a notable illustrator, sometimes amuses himself by contributing to Le Rire, Le Sourire, Le Pompon, L’Assiette au Beurre, &c., drawing the two types he most affects: the fashionable world and soldiers. M. Ibels, Capiello and many more might be enumerated, but it is impossible to chronicle all the clever humorous artists of the illustrated papers.

It is the frequent habit of French caricaturists to employ a nom-de-guerre. We therefore give here a list of the genuine names represented by the pseudonyms used above, together with others familiar to the public:—

“André Gill”= L.A. Gosset de Guine (1840-1885).
“Bac” (“Cab” and “Saro”)= Ferdinand Bach (b. 1859).
“Caran d’Ache”= Emmanuel Poiré.
“Cham”= Comte Amédée de Noé (b. 1818).
“Crafty”= Victor Gérusez (b. 1840).
“Draner” (and “Paf”)= Jules Renard (b. 1833).
“Faustin”= Faustin Betbeder (b. 1847).
“Gavarni”= S.G. Chevalier (1804-1866).
“Gédéon”= Gédéon Baril (b. 1832).
“Grandville”= J.I.I. Gérard (1803-1847).
“Henriot” (and “Piff”)= Henri Maigrot (b. 1857).
“Henri Somm”= Henri Sommier (b. 1844).
“Job”= J.O. de Bréville (b. 1858).
“Marcelin”= Émile Planat (1825-1887).
“Mars”= Maurice Bonvoisin (b. 1849).
“Moloch”= Colomb (b. 1849).
“Montbard”= C.A. Loye (1841-1905).
“Nadar”= Félix Tournachon (b. 1820).
“Pasquin”= Georges Coutan (b. 1853).
“Pépin”= Ed. Guillaume (b. 1842).
“Randon”= Gilbert (1814-1845).
“Sahib”= L.E. Lesage (b. 1847).
“Said”= Alphonse Lévy (b. 1845).
“Sem”= George Goursat.
“Stop”= L.P. Morel-Retz (b. 1825).

Germany.—During the later 19th century German caricature flourished principally in the comic papers Kladderadatsch of Berlin and Fliegende Blätter of Munich; the former a political paper with little artistic value, in which the ideas alone are clever, whilst the illustrations are merely a more or less clumsy adjunct to the text, while the Fliegende Blätter, on the contrary, has artistic merit as well as wit. Wilhelm Busch (b. 1832), the most brilliant German draughtsman of the last generation, made his dêbut with an illustrated poem “The Peasant and the Miller,” and won a world-wide reputation with the following works: Pater Filucius, Die Fromme Helene, Max und Moritz, Der heilige Antonius, Maler Kleksel, Balduin Bählamm, Die Erlebnisse Knopps des Junggesellen. Busch stands alone among the caricaturists of his nation, inasmuch as he is both the author and the illustrator of these works, his witty doggerel supplying Germany with household words. The drawings that accompany the text are amazing for the skill and directness with which he hits the vital mark. A flourish or two and a few touches are enough to set before us figures of intensely comical aspect. This distinguishes Busch from Adolf Oberländer (1845), who became the chief draughtsman on Fliegende Blätter. Busch’s drawings would have no meaning apart from the humorous words. Oberländer works with the pencil only. Men, animals, trees, objects, are endowed by him with a mysterious life of their own. Without the help of any verbal joke, he achieves the funniest results simply by seeing and accentuating the comical side of everything. His drawings are caricature in the strict sense of the word, its principle being the exaggeration of some natural characteristic. The new generation of contributors to Fliegende Blätter do not work on these lines. Busch and Oberländer were both offshoots of the romantic school; they made fun of modern novelties. Hermann Schlittgen, Meggendorfer, H. Vogel-Plauen, Réne Reinicke, Adolf Hengeler and Fritz Wahle are the sons of a self-satisfied time, triumphing in its own chic, elegance and grace; hence they do not parody what they see, but simply depict it. The wit lies exclusively in the text; the illustrations aim merely at a direct representation of street or drawing-room scenes. It is this which gives to Fliegende Blätter its value as a pictorial record of the history of German manners. Its pages are a permanent authority on the subject for those who desire to see the social aspects of Germany during the last quarter of the 19th century onwards. At the same time a falling-off in the brilliancy of this periodical was perceptible. Its fun became domestic and homely; it has faithfully adhered to the old technique of wood-engraving, and made no effort to keep pace with the modern methods of reproduction. German caricature, to live and flourish, was not keeping pace with the development of the art; it had to take into its service the gay effects of colour, and derive fresh inspiration from the sweeping lines of the ornamental draughtsman. This led to the appearance of three new weekly papers: Jugend, Das Narrenschiff and Simplicissimus. Jugend, started in 1896 by Georg Hirth in Munich, collected from the first a group of gifted young artists, more especially Thöny, Bernhard Pankok and Julius Diez, who based their style on old German wood-engraving; Fidus, who lavished the utmost beauty of line in unshaded pen-and-ink work; Rudolf Wilke, whose grotesques have much in common with Forain’s clever drawings; Angelo Jank and R.M. Eichler, who work with a delightful bonhomie. Among the draughtsmen on the Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools), Hans Baluschek is worthy of mention as having made the types of Berlin life all his own; and while this paper gives us for the most part inoffensive satire on society, Simplicissimus, first printed at Munich and then at Zurich, under the editorship of Albert Langen, shows a marked Socialist and indeed Anarchist tendency, subjecting to ridicule and mockery everything that has hitherto been held as unassailable by such weapons; it reminds us of the scathing satire of Honoré Daumier in La Caricature at the time of Louis Philippe. Thomas Theodor Heine (1867) is unsurpassed in this style for his power of expression and variety of technique. We must admire his delicate draughtsmanship, or again, his drawing of the figure with the heavy line of heraldic ornament, and his broad and monumental grasp of the grotesque. His laughter is often insolent, but he is more often the preacher, scourge in hand, who ruthlessly unveils all the dark side of life. Next to him come Paul, an incomparable limner of student life and the manners and customs of the Bavarian populace; E. Thöny, a wonderfully clever caricaturist of the airs and assumption of the Prussian Junker and the Prussian subaltern; J.C. Eugh and F. von Regnieck, who make fun of the townsman and political spouter in biting and searching satire. The standard of caricature is at the present time a high one in Germany; indeed, the modern adoption of the pen-line, which has arisen since the impressionists in oil-painting repudiated line, had its origin in the influence of caricature.

United States.—The proverbial irreverence of the American mind even towards its most cherished personages and ideals has made it particularly responsive to the appeal of caricature. At first an importation, it developed but slowly; then it burst into luxuriant growth, sometimes exceeding the limits of wise and careful cultivation. In the early period of American caricature, almost the only native is F.O.C. Darley (1822-1888), an illustrator of some importance; the other names include the engraver Paul Revere (chiefly famous for a picturesque exploit in the War of Independence); a Scotsman, William Charles; the Englishmen, Matt Morgan and E.P. Bellew; and the Germans, Thomas Nast and Joseph Keppler.

The name of Thomas Nast overshadows and sums up American political caricature. Nast, who was born in Bavaria in 1840, was brought to America at the age of six; and his training and all his interests were strongly American. At fourteen he was an illustrator on Leslie’s Weekly, and was sent at twenty to England to illustrate the famous Sayers-Heenan prize-fight. He then went as recorder of Garibaldi’s campaign of 1860. He returned to America known only as an illustrator. The Civil War did not awaken his latent genius till 1864, when he published a cartoon of fierce irony against the political party which opposed Lincoln’s re-election and advocated peace measures with the Southern confederacy. This cartoon not only made Nast famous, but may be said to contain the germ of American caricature; for all that had gone before was too crude in technique to pass muster even as good caricature.