"There is nobody to-day to touch him," were May's words. "Look at his sweep of line and his astonishing mastery over the grotesque and ridiculous. There are pictures so extraordinarily funny that you can't laugh—'too funny for words,' if you catch what I mean." As he spoke he turned to a folio containing several specimens of Gillray's drawings. One in particular was, if too funny for words, not too funny to be laughed at, for May's smile broadened enormously as he held it up for inspection—"Company Shocked at a Lady Getting Up to Ring the Bell." "Now, I call that funny," he said, "and it was, perhaps, a hundred times funnier a hundred years ago, when the characters were well-known people. There's nothing 'dates' so much as the average comic picture, especially a social caricature, but the fun of this is pretty fresh still." On the whole, most of Gillray's and Rowlandson's best work is a little too highly flavoured—too broad—for the taste of to-day.
Passing along a half-century we come to John Leech, and thenceforward to a succession of great masters of pictorial fun—Wilhelm Büsch, Charles Keene, Du Maurier, Sambourne, Oberlander, Caran d'Ache, Phil May, Frederick Opper, Zimmerman, and Raven-Hill. To these names many—fully as distinguished—might be added, such as Forain, Gibson, and Graetz, but for pure fun those we have mentioned may be called the masters. Amongst their numerous productions ought to be found some sketch which deserves to be called the very funniest picture or set of pictures delineating a single humorous idea. Each artist has his own followers. We have seen Phil May singling out a drawing by Gillray as appealing to his sense of humour. The draughtsmen of to-day in this line of work in England doubtless count no cleverer men than Raven-Hill, Tom Browne, John Hassall, Leslie Willson, William Parkinson, Louis Wain, and Charles Harrison.
Wilhelm Büsch was for years the chief comic draughtsman of the celebrated Fliegende Blätter—the German Punch. Not all his best work, however, was done for this paper, as Büsch illustrated and occasionally wrote numerous humorous brochures, which enjoyed a wide sale, and in his own opinion—according to one of his intimate friends whom we have consulted—he never achieved anything funnier than the pictures which accompanied a little book called "The Fools' Paradise," and the funniest drawings in that book are those which appear on this page.
"A Pianoforte Performance."—By Wilhelm Büsch.
SELECTED BY MR. LINLEY SAMBOURNE.
But now let us hear what Mr. Linley Sambourne has to say about the work of this artist:—
"To attempt to even indicate the birthplace of the world's masterpiece of pictorial humour is beyond the capacity of a single individual. So very few can see humour with the same eyes or appreciation. What you seek has probably perished in past ages, together with its contemporaneous companions in a higher branch. To me, personally, some of the designs of the late Wilhelm Büsch, of Munich, seem to have more humour, if by that is meant fun, than anything I can remember having seen."
Under Her Breath.—Mrs. Conlan: "Whisht, Pat!"
Pat: "Whisht, Dalia!"
Mrs. Conlan: "Aise yure face. It's an upright we're havin' took."
From the New York "Judge."
SELECTED BY MR. RAVEN-HILL.
Mr. Sambourne's clever colleague, Mr. Leonard Raven-Hill, finds "the very funniest picture" amongst the work of the American artist, Zimmerman.