"After all, the best of KEENE's life-work is to be found in the innumerable cuts which he contributed to Punch during a period of nearly forty years; and still more in the originals of these, the masterly pen-and-ink drawings which are now for the first time shown in a collected form to the Public."
So says Mr. CLAUDE PHILLIPS, in his "Prefatory Note," to the "Catalogue of a Collection of Drawings of the late CHARLES KEENE," now on view at the Rooms of the Fine Arts Society, 148, New Bond Street.
If the British Public possess that "taste for Art" and that "sense of humour" which some claim for and others deny to it, it (the B.P.) will throng the comfortable and well-lighted Gallery in New Bond Street, where hang some hundreds of specimens of the later work of the most unaffected humorist, and most masterly "Black-and-White" artist of his time. Walk up, Ladies and Gentlemen, and see—such miracles of delineation, such witcheries of effect, as were never before put on paper by simple pen-and-ink!
It is difficult to realise sometimes that it is pen and ink, and that only—all the delightful display of fresh English landscape and unsophisticated British humanity, teeming with effects of distance, hints of atmosphere, and suggestions of colour. Many a much-belauded brush is but a fumbling and ineffective tool, compared with the ink-charged crowquill handled by CHARLES KEENE. Look at "Grandiloquence!" (No. 220) There's composition! There's effect! Stretch of sea, schooner, PAT's petty craft, grandiloquent PAT himself, a nautical Colossus astride on his own cock-boat, with stable sea-legs firmly dispread, the swirl of the sea, the swish of the waves, the very whiff of the wind so vividly suggested!—and all in some few square inches of "Black-and-White!"
Look, again, at the breadth of treatment, the power of humorous characterisation, the strong charm of technique, the colour, the action, the marvellous ease and accuracy of street perspective in No. 16 ("The Penny Toy!"). Action? Why, you can see the old lady jump, let alone the frog! Fix your eye on the frightened dame's foot, and you'll swear it jerks in time to the leap of the "horrid reptile."
Or at that vivid bit of London "hoarding," and London low life, and London street-distance in "'Andicapped!" (No. 25.) Good as is the "gaol-bird," is not the wonderfully real "hoarding" almost better?
Who now can draw—or, for that matter, paint—such a shopkeeper, such a shop, such a child customer as those in "All Alive!" (No. 41), where the Little Girl a-tip-toe with a wedge of cheap "Cheddar" at the counter, comes down upon him of the apron with the crusher, "Oh, mother's sent back this piece o' cheese, 'cause father says if he wants any bait when he's goin' a fishin', he can dig 'em up in our garden!"
Are you a fisherman, reader? Then will you feel your angling as well as your artistic heart warmed by No. 75 ("The Old Adam") and No. 6 ("Wet and Dry"), the former especially! What water, what Scotch boys, what a "prencipled" (but piscatorial) "Meenister"! Don't you feel your elbow twitch? Don't you want to snatch the rod from SANDY McDOUGAL's hand, and land that "fush" yourself, Sawbath or no Sawbath?
But, bless us, one wants to describe, and praise, and purchase them all! A KEENE drawing, almost any KEENE drawing, is "a thing of beauty and a joy for ever" to everyone who has an eye for admirable art and adorable drollery. And good as is the fun of these drawings, the graphic force, and breadth, and delicacy, and freshness, and buoyancy, and breeziness, and masterly ease, and miraculous open-airiness, and general delightfulness of them, are yet more marked and marvellous. Time would fail to tell a tithe of their merits. An essay might be penned on any one of them—but fate forbid it should be, unless a sort of artistic CHARLES LAMB could take the task in hand. Better far go again to New Bond Street and pass another happy hour or two with the ruddy rustics and 'cute cockneys, the Scotch elders and Anglican curates, the stodgy "Old Gents" and broad-backed, bunchy middle-class matrons, the paunchy port-swigging-buffers, and hungry but alert street-boys, the stertorous cabbies, and chatty 'bus-drivers, the "festive" diners-out and wary waiters, the Volunteers and vauriens, the Artists and 'Arries, the policemen and sportsmen, amidst the incomparable street scenes, and the equally inimitable lanes, coppices, turnip-fields and stubbles, green glades and snowbound country roads of wonderful, ever-delightful, and—for his comrades and the Public alike—all-too-soon-departed CHARLES KEENE!
Nothing really worthy of his astonishing life-work, of even that part of it exhibited here, could be written within brief compass, even by the most appreciative, admiring, and art-loving of his sorrowing friends or colleagues. Let the British Public go to New Bond Street, and see for itself, in the very hand-work of this great artist, what he made manifest during so many years in the pages of Punch, namely, the supreme triumph of "Black-and-White" in the achievements of its greatest master.