A HfSTORY OF
CARICATURE
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Max Beerbohm.
Philip Guedalla, Esq.
THE CARICATURISTS
11 Bohun Lynch, Edmond Kapp, and ' Quiz ',
wondering how long the veteran exile will go
doddering on ",
A HISTORY OF
CARICATURE
By
Bohun Lynch
LONDON
Faber and Gwyer
MCMXXVI
First published in mcmxxvi by Faber and
Gwyer Limited 24 Russell Square
London. Made and printed in
Great Britain by The West-
minster Press Harrow
Road London
To H. M. M. B.
PREFACE
THE word history is rather portentous, and I feel that
on the cover of a book of these dimensions it needs
two or three words of apology. Handbook or guidebook
would seem to me more appropriate titles but for certain
qualities implied of which I have tried to be guiltless.
If the art of caricature is regarded in its widest and most
popular sense, the subject is enormous. It is big enough, in all
conscience, if it embraces only that part of comic art which is
definitely satiric. Reference to the bibliography at the end of this
little book will show what I mean. Certain authors evidently re-
gard caricature as a convenient word to cover all comic art : and
this is a little too narrow as it is much too wide. The meaning
given to the word by various authorities is discussed in the first
chapter, but we arrive at a point beyond all discussion when the
final definition virtually becomes personal, when a particular
drawing is or is not caricature according to private perceptions
or even the mood of the moment. Apart from satires upon in-
dividuals, I can think of, as caricature, typifications by Callot,
Daumier, or Max Beerbohm, but not of those made by du
Maurier. With a field of inquiry diminished to a personal but at
the same time decently antique definition, I beg the reader's
indulgence if it appears that I have sometimes shown myself a
little inconsistent, and have allowed personal predilections to
outweigh a sense of proportion.
It will be found in the early chapters that much space is
devoted to work which is not to be regarded as true caricature
now ; but which calls for detailed scrutiny as being the founda-
tion of the art, as now understood.
Besides acknowledgment to several authors whose books are
ix
PREFACE
mentioned in the bibliography, I have to express gratitude to a
number of people who have lent original caricatures for the
purpose of reproduction, and to those who have given me much
help in other ways : to the officials of the Record Office, to those
of the Departments of Printed Books, Manuscripts, and Prints
and Drawings at the British Museum, to Messrs. Ralph Barton,
Max Beerbohm, Captain Desmond Coke, Messrs. Edmund
Dulac, Powys Evans, Herr Eduard Fuchs, Messrs. Philip Gue-
dalla, J. A. Hammerton, Edmond X. Kapp, Alfred A. Knopf,
William Nicholson, Monsieur Andre* Rouveyre, and Mr. Otto
Theis. B. L.
May, 1926
Mr. Stacy Aumonier
By Aubrey Hammond
CONTENTS
Preface, page ix
Chapter i. The Nature of Caricature, i
II. From the Antique to the Middle Ages, n
in. Early Secular Caricature, 20
iv. The Caricature of Bigotry, 32
v. The Eighteenth Century in England, 46
VI. The Eighteenth Century in England (continued), 57
vii. Vanity Fair, 70
viii. Continental Caricature, 76
ix. The Recent Past, 93
x. Max Beerbohm, 97
xi. England and America To-day, 109
End, 120
Bibliography, 121
Index, 124
Plates (see list of illustrations), 127
xi
PLATES AT THE END OF THE BOOK
Frontispiece. The Caricaturists. By Max Beerbohm
Plate i. Isaac of Norwich
II. Marginal Drawings from a Harleian MS.
HI. Caricatures. By Leonardo da Vinci
iv. The Monk-Calf of Freiberg. After a German wood-engraving
v. Martin Luther. After a German wood-engraving
vi. The Toper. After a German wood-engraving
vn. Two Figures from Les Songes Drolatiques de Pantagruel
Yin. " Billy's Political Plaything ". By Richard Newton
ix. General Howe and Miss . By Thomas Rowlandson
x. The Czar Paul I of Russia. By James Gillray
xi. An Oxford Don. By Robert Dighton
xii. Irlande et Jamaique. By Honore Daumier
xin. Algernon Charles Swinburne: a study on blotting paper.
By Ape (Carlo Pellegrini)
xiv. Algernon Charles Swinburne. By Max Beerbohm
xv. "94": Admiral the Hon. Sir Harry Keppel. By A-O
(Roland le Strange)
xvi. Mr. George Grossmith. By Henry Ospovat
xvn. Monsieur Clemenceau. By Edmund Dulac
xvm. " Buffoon ": Mr. George Graves. By Edmond X. Kapp
xix. Mr. Edmund Blunden. By Quiz (Powys Evans)
xx. " As Others see us ". By Ralph Barton
xin
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
H. M. M. B. By Bohun Lynch, page vii
Mr. Stacy Aumonier. By Aubrey Hammond, x
A Dwarf. By Jacques Callot, 10
La Divine Venus et Le Bel Adonis. After an early French
caricature, 19
A Fifteenth-Century Fashion-Caricature. From a MS. in the
Harleian Collection, 31
Two Heads. By Leonardo da Vinci, 45
Mask of Charles X of France. By Charles Philipon, 56
M. Maurice Barr&s. By Andre Rouveyre, 69
Mr. W. Somerset Maugham. By Miguel Covarrubias, 92
Mr. H. L. Mencken. By Miguel Covarrubias, 96
M. Claude Debussy. By Andre Rouveyre, 108
The Earl of Lonsdale. By the Author, 120
xiv
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
Chapter I
THE NATURE OF CARICATURE
THE word Caricature is derived from the Italian caricare,
to load, so that to define the art as " overloaded repre-
sentation " has the merit of age and the convenience of
brevity: but the actual word Caricatura was not used in Italy
until the second half of the seventeenth century. " C'est la
meme chose que charge en peinture " says an old French
dictionary which conveys a similar meaning.
Dr. Johnson called it "an exaggerated resemblance in
drawings "; Walker and Webster a " ludicrous representation ".
Murray defines caricature in art as " grotesque and ludicrous
representation of persons or things by exaggeration of their most
characteristic or striking features", and " a portrait or other
artistic representation in which the characteristic features of the
original are exaggerated with ludicrous effect ".
For the ordinary traffic of discussion we may say that carica-
ture is, amongst other things, the portrayal of an individual, as
seen by another, without regard to the rules of drawing. Joseph
Conrad, in Nostromo, speaks (and, as it happens, without any
apparent thought of caricature in his mind) of " putting the face
of a joke upon the body of a truth ", which very neatly serves to
describe at least one aspect of the art.
A caricature may be none the worse for having a grotesque
and impossible form : it may be none the better. Many academic
portraits have elements of caricature in them, and Macaulay*
suggests that the best histories contain a little of the exaggeration
of fiction, just as " the best portraits are perhaps those in which
there is a slight mixture of caricature ", and thereby gives his
* The essay on Macchiavelli, 1827.
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
benediction to the intuitive faculties, which, in the want of
absolute truth, serve better than the registration of mere " fact ".
On the other hand a good caricaturist needs no great talent
in any other artistic direction : he is governed only by his own
sense of truthful misrepresentation. He draws, as a rule, from
memory and does not allow himself to be hampered by irrelevant
exactitudes. Salient peculiarities remain in his mind's eye, and
these he puts down, exaggerated or not, at the expense of
anatomical truths which do not interest him. Intertwined with
physical individuality, he tries to make his drawing indicate
character, and the better the caricaturist the less dependent is
he, to this end, upon accessory properties. A greedy man, for
example, is plainly and easily indicated if he is represented as
sitting at a table " groaning " under masses of fine food. Such
a drawing may be very funny, but the good caricaturist can
suggest lips that are smacked at dishes left out of the drawing.
Again, one method of caricature is to exaggerate these sen-
sually smacking lips until they form the central content of the
drawing, and even to repeat them in various forms, or suggest
and hint at them by several symbols. Here the artist transcends
mere exaggeration, and is making a drawing wherein fat lips
stand for the victim : but the remainder of the face and body or
the attitude should convey some likeness of the victim as well.
And, when it comes to the point, considerable skill and talent
are necessary in order that the caricaturist may preserve the
unities of his own convention. He must not only be able to
draw a man so that he looks like a pig: but the tweed cap he
wears must look like a tweed cap and be unmistakable.
It has been suggested that Horace's vultum alicujus in pejus
fingere conveyed the notion of caricature; and an old English-
Latin dictionary puts forward gryllorum pictor, a painter of comic
figures, as a plausible rendering which it is in so far as the Greek
derivation of the word supplies us with the pig the favourite
vehicle of insult from time immemorial. Horace's idea of putting
the worse construction on anyone's face is more generally true of
caricature than not, but it is, like the symbolic porker, too narrow.
THE NATURE OF CARICATURE
The occasional use of the word in England forestalled the
true practice of the art. Sir Thomas Browne in his posthumous
work on Christian Morals (1690) said: " When men's faces are
drawn with resemblance to some other animals the Italians call
it, to be drawn in caricatura." Later, in the Spectator for Novem-
ber i5th, 1712, Pascal is quoted by Hughes in an essay on The
Dignity oj Human Nature :
" It is of dangerous consequence to represent to man how
near he is to the level of the beasts, without showing him at the
same time his greatness. It is likewise dangerous to let him see
his greatness without his meanness. It is more dangerous yet to
leave him ignorant of either ; but very beneficial that he should
be made sensible of both."
Hughes had been discussing partiality in the judgment of
human nature, giving as instances politicians, who " can resolve
the most shining actions among men into artifice and design " ;
and satirists who " describe nothing but deformity ". " From all
these hands," he goes on, " we have such draughts of mankind,
as are represented in those burlesque pictures which the Italians
call caricaturas; where the art consists in preserving, amidst
distorted proportions and aggravated features, some distin-
guishing likeness of the person, but in such a manner as to
transform the most agreeable beauty into the most odious
monster."
Francis Grose, in his Rules j or Drawing Caricaturas (1788),
demonstrates their origin in the following passage :
" The sculptors of ancient Greece seem to have diligently
observed the forms and proportions constituting the European
ideas of beauty; and upon them to have formed their statues.
These measures are to be met with in many drawing books;
a slight deviation from them, by the predominancy of any
feature, constitutes what is called character, and serves to dis-
criminate the owner thereof, and to fix the idea of identity. This
deviation or peculiarity, aggravated, forms caricatura"
3
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
Grose goes on to say that " Caricaturists should be careful
not to overcharge the peculiarities of their subjects, as they
would thereby become hideous instead of ridiculous, and instead
of laughter excite horror. It is therefore always best to keep
within the bounds of probability. Ugliness, according to our
local idea, may be divided into genteel and vulgar. The difference
between these kinds of ugliness seems to be, that the former is
positive or redundant, the latter wanting or negative. . . Con-
vex faces give an air of dignity to their owners ; whereas concave
faces . . . always stamp a meanness and vulgarity. The one
seems to have passed through the limits of beauty, the other
never to have arrived at them."
Grose, who used as a frontispiece for his pamphlet, an en-
graved plate giving a number of odd faces, representative of
types subsequently classified, analyses each feature in turn. He
distinguishes the concavo-convexo face from the convexo-recto
face, and so forth. He prints also a plate illustrating various
noses, mouths, and chins. " The nose," he says, " may be
divided into the angular; the aquiline or Roman; the parrot's
beak; the straight or Grecian; the bulbous or bottled; the
turned up or snub ; and the mixed or broken."
Graham Everitt, in his English Caricaturists (1886), demands
that Dr. Johnson's definition be now regarded as obsolete and
maintains that the word " includes and has now for a long time
been understood to include within its meaning, any pictorial or
graphic satire, political or otherwise, and whether the drawing
be exaggerated or not ".
Everitt was writing a book the principal subjects of which
were the Cruikshanks, Seymour, Leech, the Doyles, and
Hablot Knight Browne (" Phiz ") none of whom, except on the
rarest occasions, were caricaturists in what I humbly maintain
to be the true sense. It is true that the word " has now for a
long time been understood to include " all manner of things
remote from the old meaning : caricature is not the only word of
which this is vexatiously true. But it does seem rather a pity that
the old word, even if it is not indigenous, should not be reserved
THE NATURE OF CARICATURE
for its peculiar but important duty, and that " comic art "
should not be content with its own wider significance.
The best elaborate description of caricature in modern
literature, has been made by Monsieur Henri Bergson in his
essay on Laughter*.
" However regular we may imagine a face to be, however
harmonious its lines and supple its movements, their adjustment
is never altogether perfect : there will always be discoverable the
sign of some impending bias, the vague suggestion of a possible
grimace, in short some favourite distortion towards which
Nature seems to be particularly inclined. The art of the carica-
turist consists in detecting this, at times, imperceptible tendency,
and in rendering it visible to all eyes by magnifying it. He makes
his models grimace, as they would do themselves if they went
to the end of their tether. Beneath the skin-deep harmony of
form, he divines the deep-seated recalcitrance of matter. He
realizes disproportions and deformations which must have
existed in Nature as mere inclinations, but which have not suc-
ceeded in coming to a head, being held in check by a higher
force. This art, which has a touch of the diabolical, raises up the
demon who had been overthrown by the angel. Certainly, it is
an art that exaggerates, and yet the definition would be very far
from complete were exaggeration alone alleged to be its aim and
object, for there exist caricatures that are more lifelike than
portraits, caricatures in which the exaggeration is scarcely
noticeable, whilst, inversely, it is quite possible to exaggerate to
excess without obtaining a real caricature. "
Here M. Bergson evidently apprehends what the German
pundits might call seelekarikatur, a physical exaggeration which
makes manifest a spiritual tendency, and which represents the
individual not necessarily as he usually appears, or, even, as he
has ever appeared but as, in certain and possibly fabulous circum-
stances he would appear. This is the highest form of caricature.
* Laughter : an essay an the meaning of the Comic. Authorized translation by
Cloudesly Brereton and Fred Rothwell.
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
The nature and province of the art is variously commented
on. Thus: " La caricature, ou ce que nous appelons ainsi,"
intimates M. Remy de Gourmont in a Preface to the brilliantly
cruel Visages des Contemporains (1913) of M. Andre Rouveyre,
" n'est qu'un procede de deformation, dont les miroirs convexes
ou concaves nous donnent les types les plus ingenus," leaving a
loop-hole for individual interpretation in that " ou ce que nous
appelons ainsi " ; and in a letter which introduces M. Paul Gaul-
tier's Le Rire et la Caricature (1906), M. Sully Prudhomme de-
clares that before all else the essential accompaniment of caricature
is laughter, though the caricaturist does not always himself laugh.
In his Die Karikatur der Europdischen Volker (1901), Herr
Eduard Fuchs tells us that caricature is a philosophical analysis
of the comic elements and their media, adding that it is conscious
comicality as opposed to naive comicality.
From all these authorities there gradually emerges some sort
of effectual starting-point whence we may begin to make detailed
enquiries into the story of true caricature, but first we must
return for a moment to Mr. Everitt who, in the Preface to the
work already referred to, makes an extremely suggestive estimate.
" Depending oftentimes for effect upon overdrawing, nearly
always upon a graphic power entirely out of the range of ordi-
nary art, the work of the caricaturist is not to be measured by
the ordinary standard of artistic excellence, but rather by the
light which it throws upon popular opinion or popular prejudice,
in relation to the events, the remembrance of which it perpetuates
and chronicles."
Caricature certainly does depend upon that emphasis which
is commonly called over-drawing, but to say that this is out of
the range of ordinary art is at the least debatable.
For what is ordinary art ? Is it necessarily strict and academic
representation? It used to be, you may say? Yes, but is any
past use or present wont, any admission of ancient or of modern
theory, as such, allowable? Cannot we disentangle for ourselves,
from our own observation of art, some sort of permanent
6
THE NATURE OF CARICATURE
standard, without seeking the aid either of theorists or prac-
ticians? It is very difficult to do so.
Let us see whether a modern writer such as Mr. Roger Fry
can help us. Whatever you may think of his conclusions, his
approach to them is generally stimulating and lucid. In An Essay
in Msthetics, which occurs in his book, Vision and Design (1920),
he tells us that " we may . . . dispense once for all with the
idea of likeness to Nature, of correctness or incorrectness as a
test, and consider only whether the emotional elements inherent
in natural form are adequately discovered, unless, indeed, the
emotional idea depends at any point upon likeness, or complete-
ness of representation ". And later:
" With the new indifference to representation we have become
much less interested in skill and not at all interested in know-
ledge ; we are thus no longer cut off from a great deal of barbaric
and primitive art the very meaning of which escaped the under-
standing of those who demanded a certain standard of skill in
representation before they could give serious consideration to a
work of art."
This leap from the eighteen-eighties to the nineteen-
twenties is not to be ascribed to mere wilfulness. It seems to be,
on the whole, a fair way of demonstrating that an almost im-
measurable change in critical appreciation does support the
assumption that this kind of pictorial satire is to be regarded as
a serious art, and not a lapse, when indulged in by " serious "
artists, to be deplored or derided; not a mode " lacking in
elegance or descending to caricature ", as Thackeray said of
those drawings by George Cruikshank least admired by him.
While, according to the modern way of thinking, much
" serious " art may almost be said to be independent of exactness
in representation, caricature, inversely, is almost dependent upon
inexactness in representation. But the caricaturist must be suffi-
ciently skilful in draughtsmanship to record his meaning plainly,
and if he can add some aesthetic quality to his work, some beauty of
line or of colour, or an adroit sense of design, so much the better.
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
As to the light which the caricaturist throws upon popular
opinion and popular prejudice, and by which, Mr. Everitt
maintains, he is to be measured, this surely applies only to
caricature in that author 's wide sense of the word that is, the
sum of comic art after true caricature has been very carefully
subtracted from it. It may be said indeed that the popularity of
true caricature is in inverse ratio to its excellence. This especi-
ally applies to the caricature of individuals. For one thing, a
subtle caricature is wholly wasted upon the majority ; for another,
caricature which involves adverse criticism, physical or other-
wise, is apt to arouse feelings of personal hostility to the artist
in the breasts of opposing partisans. Moreover, the inner history
of certain journals is as well supplied with evidence of the fury
of individuals who have complained about caricatures made of
them as it is of records of persons who have paid large fees for
the publicity of being caricatured at all.
By those who think of caricature in its true sense, it has
generally been held that it has found little acceptance in England.
Mr. James Bone, writing in The Manchester Guardian, once said
that caricature did not flourish here owing to our national love
of compromise and of our respect for authority.
" There is no art which makes its appeal more directly to the
eye than this art of caricature, " writes Mr. Oliver Onions in his
Appreciation of The Work of Henry Ospovat (1911). " Perhaps
that is the reason why it is so little understood in England. "
And he mentions the old reproach of Canova that the " English
see with their ears ". To support this he points out what excellent
use our eighteenth-century caricaturists made of their " ears ";
for the literary side of their work was admirable. Later, when we
come to investigate the caricaturists of that period, I hope to
show that, really, their eyes were neither idle nor unperceiving ;
and that in those less squeamish days there was a widespread
enjoyment of the art which may be said to have reached popu-
larity, though it must be remembered that popularity then and
now is an almost irrelative conception. It is probable that the
more general satires what are now usually called cartoons of
8
THE NATURE OF CARICATURE
Gillray and his like found more favour than his less eloquent,
less " literary " caricatures; but the Dightons, who were strict
caricaturists of individuals, had a considerable fQllowing, just
as, much later, had Carlo Pellegrini, " Ape " of Vanity Fair.
Nowadays, the true caricaturist has fervent, intelligent, but
few admirers in England, and the English in general find delight
in political, polemical, or social " cartoons " from which all
satire except of the broadest description has been ruthlessly
eliminated. For the delectation of the educated classes the most
genteel humour is mingled with an occasional drawing of serious
import, not unfortified by pomposity. As for the purely popular
cartooning of the twentieth century, we are condemned by our
own old standards and without searching for odious comparison
abroad. We have exchanged the savage, " coarse " vulgarity of
a century ago for the more insidious vulgarity of an imbecile
and spurious refinement. The napkin which served (etymologic-
ally speaking) both to keep the infant dry and for use at meals
has become the serviette which even vitiates the good traditional
speech of the labouring classes: and the honest sweat of the
gardener has been transmogrified into an almost unmentionable
perspiration.
But there is good and true caricature now, as in the past, and
here in England, as abroad. And it is well enough understood
and warmly enough liked to be encouraged to persist.
That most lucid critic, Mr. Charles Marriott, once asked at
what point between accuracy and interpretation was the truest
portraiture to be found ? He observed also (upon another occasion,
in The Nation and Athenceum), that most people in their heart
of hearts preferred a photograph to a painting.
" Ask the lover or the bereaved parent/' he said, " . . . .
we trust the camera because it has no opinions ... or rather
because its opinions are known and calculable . . . the simplest
person knows that there is something to be allowed for the
machine. " And
" Following up this clue, we see that, next to the photograph,
9
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
the human heart trusts the caricature which is all opinion. We
may not agree with the opinions of the caricaturist about that
particular subject, but they are frankly exposed, and we know
what allowance to make for them."
Here is a test, not watertight, but it will serve. Taking a cue
from Mr. Marriott, take also a serious drawing, a portrait plain,
correct, uninspired a simple likeness of a friend in a top hat, a
tail coat, and so on. Frame it and hang it on a wall. How dull!
Then take a caricature of him, with exaggerated eyebrows,
no ears, the topper emphasized, the stoop made salient and
again so on. Frame that, and hang it. How interesting!
The first is silent, the second speaks. A fairly good caricature
excites interest and admiration: but only a very good portrait
does that.
The critic was wrong who remarked that caricature is to
portrait what farce is to comedy, and that it chooses the mon-
strous instead of explaining the average. For that is exactly what
good caricature can do and does, even if it seldom finds the
subject worth while.
A Dwarf : after a drawing
by Jacques Callot
Chapter II
FROM THE ANTIQUE TO THE MIDDLE AGES
CARICATURE, even of the conscious sort, is of the
extremest antiquity. The impulse which makes the
small boy draw an unflattering likeness of his master
upon the flyleaf of his " Liddell and Scott " is about as old as
human nature, just as is that other impulse under which ob-
scenities are drawn or written upon walls.
In the past the art was generally used as a weapon by sub-
jection against authority. In the course of its long history
caricature has been malign, benign, and impartial, but malice
has preponderated. More often than not laughter is at some-
body's expense.
The Egyptians made drawings of men as animals and their
motive was not always obvious. On one papyrus at the British
Museum (10016, i) of the time of Rameses III, a lion is found
playing draughts with an antelope. This papyrus is the proto-
type of the modern " strip-picture ". Next to the lion, a hyena
plays the flute : then there is a cat apparently waving a crooked
stick. The drawing in question may be a parody of two people
playing draughts which is to be seen in the Book of the Dead.
In another papyrus at Turin, used as the last plate in Lepsius'
Auswahl, the lion-headed Pharaoh is seen with a lady in the
form of a gazelle. In a carving on the wall of a tomb Osiris on
his throne condemns a soul to perdition. In the form of a pig
the soul is ferried back in a boat to earthly life by two cynoce-
phalic monkeys. The Reveller of the modern Punch finds realistic
prototypes in ancient Egypt, one of whom a lady too is
depicted in the act of being sick just before her handmaiden
with a basin can reach her. Such a drawing as this may be a
typification, or it may be a personal record.
ii
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
In Indian frescoes we find Krishna riding on an elephant
daintily formed of a number of damsels in appropriate attitudes :
one forms the trunk, the legs of another the tusks, the hair of
the girl who is one of the hind legs makes the tail, and so on.
The design is helped out by draperies. A similar arrangement
represents a bird, one of the girls walking upon her hands.
The Greeks burlesqued their gods, and on one large vase the
oracle of Delphi is devastatingly satirized. In this, Chiron is
seen being helped up the steps to consult the oracle, pushed from
behind and pulled from above, while at the same time he leans
upon a crooked stick. The faces and attitudes in this painting
certainly belong to the realm of true caricature, as does the
apotheosis of Heracles painted upon a vase in the Louvre. Here,
frowning with repellent ugliness, he holds up his club, while
beside him in the chariot a snub-nosed Hermes drives the team
of four obviously unwilling centaurs.
On another vase Zeus is found beneath the window of
Alcmena, and Hermes is bringing him a ladder. Alcmena in
profile, with her hands upon the sill, is attractive enough, but
the faces and especially the figures of Zeus and his attendant can
only be described as rude. What may be a parody of this painting
may be seen on an Etruscan vase, where the lover, hideous in a
comic mask, climbs the ladder to the window giving what may
be coins, or, more innocently apples, to the lady. Nearby stands
his servant holding a torch, a wreath, and a little bag of just the
kind carried by women to-day. In several of the Greek caricatures
the names of the victims are written, not over or under, but in
and about the drawings themselves.
Roman comic art, which was profuse, also included some
caricature. Excavation at Pompeii and elsewhere has exposed
many drawings of Little People, small bearded pigmies who are
shown in perennial warfare with the geese, which are drawn as
of about the same height. Pliny and others talk of these pigmies
quite seriously. M. Jules Henri Champfleury* suggests that
drawings of them were made to amuse children. They were, in
* Histoire de la Caricature Antique.
12
FROM THE ANTIQUE TO THE MIDDLE AGES
fact, just the fairies whose lore so many modern mammas regard
as reprehensible. The Romans delighted too in drawing animals
and birds following the pursuits of men, driving chariots and so
forth. While no doubt many a Roman soldier chalked up a
malicious caricature of an unpopular centurion. At Hercu-
laneum the famous fresco painting of the flight of Aeneas
carrying Anchises on his shoulders and leading Ascanius by the
hand can hardly be brought under the head of caricature as the
drawing is or is intended to be exactly representational. But a
parody of this flight was made in which the figures, though
otherwise human, were given the heads and tails of dogs. Tragic
and comic masks for use in the theatres, on the other hand, were
manifestly exaggerated. In 1857 demolition in a narrow street
of Rome in the gladiators' quarter, near the Forum, uncovered
a rough, scratched drawing which was intended as a caricature
of the Figure on the Cross, which is given an ass's head. Beneath
stands a man with one arm uplifted. About them the legend is
scrawled: AAESAMEN02 SEBETE(I) 0E02 Alexamenos worship-
ping his God. This merely exemplifies the contempt in which
Romans held the early Christians.
In the museum at Avignon there is a gross caricature of
Caligula in bronze, and other instances will suggest themselves
to students of Roman art, such as philosophers with huge heads
and little bodies, the only form of caricature widely accepted and
understood in England to-day; and persons of intemperate
habits, like the Egyptian lady referred to, being sick.
Early Chinese and Japanese art is full of caricature of a sort,
or at least of comic drawings in which distortion plays a pro-
minent part.
James Peller Malcolm, in his Historical Sketch of the Art of
Caricaturing (1813), devotes a good deal of space to the lusus
natura, to people of whom we say in common speech: " You
can't caricature them ; they are caricatures to start with." Taking
this quite literally, Malcolm explores physical idiosyncrasies as
such in life, and not as drawn, and proceeds to describe the
ugliness of savages, the physical blemishes of unusual features.
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
There is much in his book, ill-arranged as it is, of direct and of
what I may call collateral interest. As an example of the latter
he shows us that the desire to find an improving and uplifting
purpose for his work, so frequently found in later years of the
nineteenth century, had already set in ; and did not await, as is
often supposed, the accession of Victoria. Caricature has, he
tells us, " reached a degree of perfection which has rendered it
one of the means for the correction of vice and improper con-
duct ". And he goes on later: " The History of Caricaturing
though even intended to be general, would naturally narrow into
that of English Caricatures ; for the obvious reason, that in no
other country has the art met with equal encouragement,
because no other portion of the globe enjoys equal freedom. "
Coming to Saxon times and later, Malcolm includes any in-
complete or non-representational art within caricature, and in
one of his plates he illustrates a pillar of the west door of Ledbury
Church, in Herefordshire, which has a capital of " neatly
executed foliage ", which terminates in a head. From the mouth
of this issues the shaft of the column.
He also illustrates a drawing of the Temptation from a Liber
Psalmorum (" cum versione Saxonica ") in the British Museum
in which Satan can be described as the caricature of a man, with
claws and up-turned nose. He has no horns or hooves, but he
is provided with hocks, and a subsidiary face appears from the
back of his neck. These subsidiary faces in various inappropriate
parts of the body were much favoured by the early monks in
depicting fiendish personalities.
Viollet-le-Duc (famous as the author of the great work on
French furniture) tells us in his Dictionnaire d* Architecture that
previous to the year A.D. noo there were few traces of the
Devil in the churches, and in much earlier times none at all. But
after the opening of the twelfth century, the Devil becomes
important and is constantly found in sculptures and frescoes.
Here perhaps we may trace the beginnings of the Religion of
Terror, that punitive theology which is only now passing away.
In the Middle Ages there was practically no art that was not
FROM THE ANTIQUE TO THE MIDDLE AGES
definitely religious, so that we turn to carvings in cathedrals and
churches and to missals without much hope of discovery else-
where until the beginning of the fifteenth century. There are
exceptions, some of which will shortly be quoted. But that
religious art throughout Christian Europe produced actual and
deliberate caricature in great abundance there is no doubt. When
the world was younger and the succession of faith less protracted,
simple people found a homely and everyday application for their
religion, which was a matter-of-course, and which contained
much provender for laughter and merry-making. People un-
spoilt and unhampered by puritanical repressions find the same
applications, with much of the same laughter, to-day. The
Italian peasant, for example, sees nothing incongruous or un-
seemly, at a village festa, in going into church to pray, in coming
out for five minutes' chat with a friend over an ice-cream and in
returning to the church, much heartened by this carnal indul-
gence. A similar attitude of mind prevailed amongst simple folk
at one time in England. To them there was nothing irreverent
in making jokes out of their religion. So we find gargoyles and
corbels which are almost certainly personal caricatures, and
groups sculptured at the heads of capitals and carved beneath
miserere seats representing scenes in which individuals played
their (often somewhat undignified) parts. Many of these carvings,
both in wood and stone, were according to modern taste too
gross to be endured and some of them, notably at Rheims, were
long ago destroyed, or at least expurgated with the chisel, on
that account. Here caricature and comic art in the wider sense
alternate, and while sometimes they are distinct to the observer,
they no doubt arose from similar impulses in the artist. Scenes
of flagellation are common and a victim on a miserere seat at
Sherborne is found in the appropriate attitude and appropriately
unclothed in the act of being birched. Malcolm illustrates a
number of these seats and carved capitals with his own engrav-
ings, though only those, of course, of the eminently decorous
type. But we may be sure that the writer who could trace no
encouragement of caricature except in England will have some-
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
thing illuminating to say about those carvings which are obscene,
and we are by no means disappointed.
" Had the dignitaries of these churches directed the persons
employed in ornamenting them to confine their excursions within
the bounds of decency, we might have smiled at the perversion
of taste, though we condemned the introduction of anything
ludicrous to a place of worship ; but there is no demonstration
extant more convincing of the general profligacy of manners
amongst the clergy before the Reformation, than the discovery
beneath their seats of subjects, which, if engraved at present, and
placed in a print-seller's window, would cause him to be prose-
cuted as a promoter of vice. It has been said that this method was
adopted by different orders of the religious to satirize each
other ; and some of the carvings I have seen were probably in-
tended as caricatures of particular persons/'
Malcolm was also, it seems, upset by the drawings in the
prayer-book of Queen Mary (daughter of Henry VIII), and he
contrived to twist her possession of the book to his own purpose
in reviling her religion " in defence of which she spread ruin
and desolation through her kingdom ".
Certainly a good many carvings and drawings of the period
under review are a little " rude " in the nursemaid's sense of the
word, but a certain delight in indecency in one form or another
somehow seems to linger in the generality of mankind, though
the manners of the age have now (for the most part) supplanted
the carved or designed record. Since Malcolm was writing
within the lifetime of Gillray and Rowlandson one admires his
restraint in not seeking to discover in their rather broad effects
the covert devilries of a Popish plot.
At all events, the expression of indecency has been and is a
question of custom, and we may rest assured that so far as
Malcolm's argument is concerned the profligacy of the clergy is
beside the point.
M. Champfleury quotes a letter from the Maxima Bibliotheca
16
FROM THE ANTIQUE TO THE MIDDLE AGES
Patrum, in which St. Nilus* in the fifth century wrote to Olym-
piodorus of Alexandria : Was it seemly to represent animals of
all sorts on the walls of the sanctuary, so that one could see
snares set for them, and hares, goats, and other beasts seeking
safety in flight while, behind, the hunters weary themselves in
the chase and without respite follow with their hounds . . . ?
It was just childishness to amuse the eyes of the faithful.
M. Champfleury also quotes St. Bernard, then Abbe of
Clairvaux writing in the twelfth century to William, Abbe of
Saint-Thierry and complaining of the monstrosities used in the
decoration of sacred buildings.
St. Nilus' answer is significant and explains the presence of
all caricature or ludicrous art of whatever kind in the cathedrals.
Like the Roman pigmies referred to earlier it was done " to
amuse the children " grown up or otherwise. " The policy of
that wonderful organization (the Roman Church) has been in
every age", comments James Parton in Caricature and other
Comic Art, " to make every possible concession to ignorance
that is compatible with the continuance of ignorance. It has
sought always to amuse, to edify, to moralize, and console
ignorance, but never to enlighten it."
This is not, perhaps, a perfectly fair statement of the case,
but one knows what he means.
At any rate the crudities and barbarities referred to no doubt
kindled the imagination and brought home to simple folk the
horrors following misbehaviour. And the worst of them were
harmless, if only because they were frank and not furtive.
The Devil was the personality most often chosen as a subject
for caricature, but as we are still a little uncertain (in despite of
Mr. Beerbohm's adventure in the company of Enoch Soames,
and of other authorities) regarding his exact appearance, it is
difficult to say what naturalistic merit these caricatures may have.
In the British Museum there is a Biblia Pauperum of about
* St. Nilus of Constantinople, who appears to have been a disciple of St.
Chrysostom and one of the early Iconoclasts: not the later saint who founded
a monastery of Basilians near Rome.
17 c
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
1475, which was once the property of George III, and which
contains a woodcut representing the Temptation. There are
the figures of Christ and Satan, and the high mountain with one
tree upon the top of it, and the pinnacles of the Temple. In this
drawing the Devil has a man's hands, horns, webbed feet and
a second face da dietro, as the Italians say. His main face is
dreadful, with an enormous mouth and huge teeth, and long
flopping ears like a retriever's. In his hands he holds the stones
which he tempts Christ to turn into bread.
In the cathedral at Strasburg one carving represents a fox
leaning from a pulpit, with outstretched pad, preaching to a
flock of geese : in another beasts of somewhat doubtful species
form a procession ; one carries a mop and a pail, the next a cross,
a little rabbit follows with a lit torch, and so on. At Magdeburg
a tiny maiden milks a colossal sow, and on another capital nearby
a monkey tucks a huge fiddle under his chin. A bas-relief at
Autun shows souls being weighed in the scales a much favoured
subject an archangel superintending the process on one side,
a devil on the other. Neither is playing fair, for outstretched
hands clutch at the balance, trying to drag it down. In this
instance, happily, the archangel has tilted the scales well to his
side, and the expression of horror and disgust upon the op-
ponent's face shows that he realizes all his effort to be futile.
These instances are but a few from many which typify mediaeval
stone carvings, and in most of them the caricaturish element (as
opposed to unintentional crudity) is manifest. In all forms of
art, exaggeration in one dimension or another is necessary to the
comprehension of simple folk.
In the eighteenth century, during the demolition of the
ancient chateau of Pinon in Picardy, a bronze seal was found
which bears the inscription LE : SCEL : DE : LEVECQUE : DE : LA :
: CYTE : DE : PINON. The seal of the Bishop of the City of
Pinon. This seal is of the usual pointed oval shape, and engraved
within the bordering legend is a monkey seated with legs crossed
on a bishop's throne, wearing vestments and a mitre, and
holding a crooked staff. Two attendant monkeys are on either
18
FROM THE ANTIQUE TO THE MIDDLE AGES
side of him. It has been suggested that this seal was made in
order to ridicule the Church: but M. Champfleury shows that
the more probable explanation involves no malice of the kind.
On the contrary certain prelates, having a sense of humour,
ordered comic seals of this sort to be made for them, and M.
Champfleury quotes the instance of Guy de Munois, Abbe of
Saint-Germain d'Auxerre from 1285 to 1309. The legend on
his seal read: Abbe de singe air main d'os serre. The good man
was, in the phraseology of the modern schoolboy, " trying to be
funny " at his own expense.
Down to the sixteenth century caricature was mainly confined
to the presentment of good and evil, of God and the Devil. Then,
with the great cleavage brought about by the Reformers and
later, the Puritans, the art became the weapon of warring sects,
and in its true form was most conspicuous in religious enmities.
A more general application is, however, to be observed in the
satirical drawing by Holbein and others in which the figure of
Death predominates. But the Dance of Death series can hardly
be included in the category of true caricature.
" La Divine Venus et Le Bel Adonis."
After an early French caricature
Chapter III
EARLY SECULAR CARICATURE
THOUGH gargoyles and certain faces carved on the
stalls of churches and beneath miserere seats were
almost certainly personal caricatures, the more familiar
medium of drawing brings satire home to our modern minds
with greater facility. A manuscript, illustrated with a pen and
ink drawing, or an early woodcut are more readily comparable
with, say, an etching by Dighton or a design by Gulbransson.
Very early drawings of the kind are rare and are peculiarly
interesting when their subjects are the same as those exploited
in a similar manner to-day. The Jews, for example, have been a
source of inspiration to caricaturists from the very earliest times
until the present day. They were foreigners by race and religion,
and foreigners have usually been the subject of jokes. That is a
short-coming, not solely English, seldom but sometimes excused
by the quality of the satire. Down to the last hundred and fifty
years the Jews were solely associated with usury in one form or
another, and this occupation together with the Jewish (or rather,
as I am assured by some Jewish friends, Hittite) nose naturally
lend themselves to pictorial exaggeration not infrequently at
the hands of Jewish artists. And so we find it exaggerated so long
ago as the year 1233 in a drawing on a vellum roll which is to be
seen at the Record Office.*
This caricature is the unofficial but relevant illustration at
the head of a Rotulus Judeorwn, and presumably the work of a
clerk in the Exchequer.
At the period in question, Isaac of Norwich, an exceedingly
wealthy Jew, was the principal creditor of the abbot and monks
* Receipt Roll, Exchequer of Receipts, No. 1565, E. 401.
20
EARLY SECULAR CARICATURE
of Westminster, who were supported by the especial sympathy
of Pandulf, Bishop Elect of Norwich and Papal Legate. Pandulf
was active in his endeavours to expel the Jews from the country.
Isaac was a moneylender and merchant. He owned a quay at
Norwich where his ships could load and unload, and whole
districts were mortgaged to him.
The caricature which is drawn with pen and ink represents
Isaac standing in the midst of a group of Jews on the walls of a
castle, and towering above them. He is crowned and is given
three faces, one full and two in profile. Pike* suggests that a
fourth face looking away from the observer, is, as the gram-
marians say, to be understood; and Isaac is, therefore, looking
towards his possessions North, South, East, and West. Beneath
him are a less distinguished Jew called Mosse Mokke (subse-
quently hanged for clipping coin) and a Jewess named Avegay.
Between these two stands a horned devil with a forefinger upon
the pronounced nose of each. On Avegay's left is Dagon, god of
Philistia, in a turret: and beyond him are certain friends in
armour. On the other side of the drawing behind Mosse Mokke
a figure holds up some scales loaded with coin. This drawing
fills an apex at the head of the roll, the parchment having been
cut to a point at some time and pasted onto another piece of
parchment behind it. The ink used is of a reddish brown, and
though rather crumpled the whole document is in a good state
of preservation.
To about the same period belongs a stout little book, which
is rather confusedly referred to by Malcolm. This is No. 928
of the Harleian collection, preserved in the Department of
Manuscripts at the British Museum. On the first page Harley's
librarian has written his own name Humfredus Wanley. In the
catalogue Wanley refers to the book as " bought of me, being
written by three different hands ", and he adds the following
notes about it:
" i. The main body of the book was (I believe) written in
* History of Crime in England. By Luke Owen Pike. London. 1873.
21
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
France, by some eminent Librarius or Book-writer, during
the reign of our K. Henry the third ; who also adorned it with
many curious and well-drawn Pictures, the rudeness of the age
considered. Among which pictures many (as may be seen) were
intended to expose the wicked and inordinate lives of the then
clergy, who were hated by the Library, as taking away much of
their business.
2. I find certain Ejaculations to our Saviour, &c., written
on several pages and Leaves at the beginning, not touched by
the Book-writer; which may have been done A.D. 1428 according
to the Observation, inserted by a recent hand. . . .
3. The latter part of the Book, is of an English hand, and of
English Parchment, written about the latter end of the reign of
K. Henry the VI. The Book contains the Horae B. Mariae, with
Collects, &c. for the Holy days, whose Kubricks are in French;
the Office for the Dead; and some of the Psalms: all in Latin. "
The book, which is in almost perfect condition, is exquisitely
written, with illuminated capitals. The margins of all the pages
in the earlier part contain coloured drawings which emphatically
belong to the realm of caricature in the old Italian sense, as the
following rough descriptions will show :
a. An animal, with the head of a monk, has his tail knotted
with that of another having the head of a dog. The two faces
exchange glances of disapproval.
. On the contorted bodies of lions are seen two monks*
heads.
7. An animal whose fore-paws are turned backwards has the
head of a man in a cowl : the tail becomes the neck of a Gorgon,
from whose head in turn another neck-tail is joined to a second
animal with a monkey's face beneath its cowl.
B. A woman and a bearded man share a neck and a body
without arms, but having a large tail.
c. The head of a priest, in vestments, has the body of a dog:
and there is another head upon the end of the tail which turns
and bites its own neck-tail.
22
EARLY SECULAR CARICATURE
?. A boar's head on a monkey's body grins at the face of an
old man which grows from a dubious four-footed creature.
rj. Another doubtful beast wears a Bishop's mitre and is in
evident colloquy with a web-footed animal half-fish and half-dog.
0. A kind of monk-centaur has a nun riding on his back.
1. A blue-cowled monk, with a scarlet body and cloven feet.
Then there are numerous animals without any human
characteristics. A red-jacketed monkey rides on the back of a
(St. Bernard) dog. A blue dragon with a white face bites his
own tail. A strange four-footed beast wears the most engaging
little curls at the side of his face. A little fat animal with no tail is
of a beautiful pink and has innocent blue eyes.
The drawing and colour of these little caricatures are alike
beautiful. The faces belong to the best tradition of thrifty pen
and ink work, without one unnecessary line ; and the expressions
on the faces are delightfully rendered. It is easy to imagine that
some of these faces were first-rate caricatures, and, as it happens,
if I may find present opportunity in old occasion, some of them
do make admirable caricatures of living persons. May it be
suggested, with no lack of respect, that Mr. Birrell and Mr.
Bertrand Russell, for example, would find themselves as faith-
fully dealt with here as they have since been dealt with by Max
Beerbohm.
In his History, Thomas Wright illustrates the English con-
ception of an Irish warrior of the year 1280. This ferocious
champion, wearing a tasselled cap and a sort of trousers strapped
over his bare feet, stands in an attitude of defiance, frowning over
his shoulder, with his arms flung back to give play to an enor-
mous battle-axe, the favourite weapon of the Irish at that time.
This fellow and another very like him are drawn in the margin
of a volume, which forms a register of treaties, marriages, and
so on, of the time of Edward I and which is in the Record
Office. The drawings follow the written description of Giraldus
Cambrensis, the historian (Gerald de Barri) who was made an
Archdeacon in Wales in 1184. Later he visited Ireland as King's
chaplain, with Prince John. His travels in Ireland resulted in
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
two works Topographia Hibernica and Expugnatio Hibernica.
Here he writes of the Irish battle-axe with especial horror, as a
most barbarous and frightful weapon ; and he describes the close-
fitting hoods worn by the natives, which hang a cubit's length
below the shoulders, and breeches and hose of one piece. Other
marginal drawings in this manuscript show types of Welshmen,
one with a bow and arrow, and another with a spear.
Enemies, spiritual and otherwise, have always been the
inevitable victims of caricaturists: so too have been the pre-
valent extremes of fashion. Across the field of operations where
Gillray, Isabey, Cham, Ape, and almost innumerable others
in their respective days down to the present found food for
satire, a French artist of the fifteenth century seems to have
led the way. And he gave us a milch sow on red stilts, playing a
red harp, and wearing a tall pointed hat of pale pink. From this
a transparent veil, exquisitely suggested with white paint, de-
pends, falling over face and shoulders. This is a marginal
painting amidst brilliant foliage with a gold background which
accompanies a scene of jousting between Pierre de Courtenay
and the Sire de Clary. The Harleian catalogue has the entry:
" Beautiful vellum MS. containing the fourth volume of Frois-
sart, divided into two parts; finely written and illuminated. "
The manuscript which contains many fine scenes of jousting,
with all manner of odd beasts in the margins, was written to the
order of Philipe de Commines about the year 1475.*
The subject has never been better, nor more cruelly treated
since.
The fashionable head-dress of the first half of the fifteenth
century is seen in a caricature of an ugly and obviously ill-
tempered old woman whose face and head are distinctly and
skilfully carved on a miserere seat in Ludlow church. Two
young men, one on either side of her, seek to protect themselves
with sword and shield respectively.
Yet another marginal drawing, in the Luttrell Psalter, of the
fourteenth century, shows two men, clothed, but having tails
* No. 4379 of the Harleian collection.
24
EARLY SECULAR CARICATURE
and furry, animals' feet, fighting with beer mugs. One of them
smashes his mug on his opponent's pate.
Ugliness for ugliness' sake has from time to time throughout
history fascinated artists who were concerned for the most part
with its antithesis. And the principal claim that Italy has to be
the home of caricature rests mainly on the few grotesquely ugly
heads drawn by Leonardo da Vinci. The artists of the Renaissance
liked to dwell, for a moment, now and then, on the various un-
seemly departures made by Nature from the ideal. In one carica-
ture by Leonardo you see the profile of a hideous old man
repeated in the folds at the back of his neck. In another, Darby
and Joan or, rather, let us say Amedeo and Giovanna, face each
other, the man showing a three-quarter face, the woman in profile
with one hand upon his shoulder. Giovanna is repulsive, with a
meagre but protruding forehead, a squat upturned nose, long,
simian upper lip, and no chin: her ugliness is enhanced by
the ornate cap of the period. Amedeo, on the other hand, is not
really ugly, nor is he grossly exaggerated. The liberties that
Nature has taken with his features are merely the obtrusions of
old age. He is quite typical of the ancient peasants of Northern
Italy : his like may be seen to-day, leaning on a wall in Verona,
drawing the sunshine into his old bones, and spitting, without
bitterness against the world at large, into the Adige. His toothless
mouth has fallen in, so that strong chin and fine hooked nose
are nearly met ; his curly hair is still abundant, and the lines and
creases on his face are but those of normal toil and trouble. His
eyes are sad, but so would yours be if you had to look for long
upon the excessive homeliness of that Giovanna.
In the Print Room of the British Museum, amongst original
drawings by Leonardo, sthere is a page of caricatures, one or two
of which are superb exaggerations. The " Giovanna " referred
to is repeated there together with a caricature of (it would seem)
her sister. These drawings are made with a pen and red pigment.
The exact travesty of the Laocoon made by Titian, about the
year 1540, who substituted monkeys for men, is only super-
ficially funny. This drawing was engraved on wood by Boldrini,
25
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
Titian is said to have made this parody in order to pour ridicule
upon a school of art in Rome, which insisted upon academic
correctness of form as observed by the antique sculptors in order,
so Titian held, to cover their own lack of perception in colour.
The Laocoon has been frequently travestied since then.
Giuseppe Ribera, claimed at one time to have been by birth
an Italian, but really a Spaniard, was also responsible for some
grotesques, which may or may not have been caricatures of
individuals. One of these represents the head of an ancient of
evil mien, loathesomely afflicted with goitre, and with hairs upon
his nose and chin. His expression of insolence mingled with low
cunning is felicitously caught.
To return for a moment to the opening of the sixteenth
century, Herr Fuchs illustrates an early German woodcut,
dated 1510, of a gluttonous wine-bibber, with a belly so pro-
digious that he has to wheel it before him in a barrow. His
bristling chins pass with mere undulations into that colossal
paunch. His head is fixed in an upward direction: upwards he
vomits, with a slight frown. But his hat is jauntily adorned with
feathers, and the empty gourd strapped to his back shows that
he must trundle his barrow along the road before he can get
more wine. A German rhyme accompanying this caricature is
here, very roughly and with due apologies, done into English :
As toper I have made a name :
On barrow pushed before me
I rest my wine-distended wame
And grin when folk deplore me.
It's true I am a laughing-stock
At whom the common people mock.
But when I'm far away from inns
My inward nullibiety*
Evokes reflexion on my sins,
Enforcing strict sobriety.
* Used only by Bishop Wilkins, inventor of the Philosophic Handwriting, in
1668.
26
EARLY SECULAR CARICATURE
It's true I drink too much : and hence
Severe attacks of flatulence.
The gentleman with the stomach and the wheelbarrow served
more than one turn as well he might, for the idea is a good one.
Sixty years later we find a German caricature of Luther treated
in the same way. This is described in the next chapter. Then in
1635 a French caricature adopted the precise figure of the
German toper, in reverse, except that he is breathing smoke.
This drawing is meant to represent Matthias Gallas (1584-1647),
Count of Campo and Duke of Lucera, who was general of the
Austrian Army during the wars in the Netherlands, and who beat
the French. In the caricature he is made to say:
Je suis ce grand Gallas, autrefois dans Parmee
La gloire de TEspagne et de mes compagnons ;
Maintenant, je ne fuis qu'un corps plein de fumee,
Pour avoir trop mange de raves et d'oignons.
Gargantua jamais n'eut une telle panse, etc. . . .
The Songes Drolatiques de Pantagruel, attributed to the im-
mortal Maitre Fra^ois Rabelais, were said also to have been
illustrated by him. We know that the Master was an architect
and M. Champfleury says that the savants of the sixteenth
century had no doubt but that he was a draughtsman in a wider
sense. The drawings illustrating the Songes are, undoubtedly, in
his spirit; but then so from time to time, though rarely, have
been other illustrations with the matter illustrated. Champfleury
quotes a letter written by Rabelais in Latin from Lyons to
Cardinal du Bellay in September, 1534, in which occurs the
phrase Urbis jadem calamo perinde ac penicillo depingere : and
he then proceeds to quote M. Paul Lacroix' argument regarding
the precise value of perinde ac. M. Lacroix* held that the words
meant that Rabelais proposed to use pen and pencil in order to
describe the city of Rome; M. Champfleury denies that perinde
* Franfois Rabelais : sa vie et ses ouvrages. 1854.
27
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
ac ever had the meaning implied, and declares that Rabelais
merely meant that he used his pen as if it were a pencil. This little
falling-out of two learned men is mentioned in order that the
reader may judge by what threads reputations hang. If perinde
ac means what Lacroix takes it to mean, Rabelais was an artist :
if, on the other hand, Champfleury is right, . . . " ce passage
. . . doit done etre retir6 du debat ".
It is possible that these drawings were made by Pieter
Brueghel, the elder, and Champfleury's argument supports this
theory. Whoever made them they are delightful.
Here we have a caricature of Pope Julius II* as a dwarf, with
bees buzzing around his head, his under-lip hugely protruding,
his nose upturned and his collar curving forward and ending in a
star. This design is of peculiar interest, for it very obviously
inspired one of the minor drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. In
another woodcut, a man also snub-nosed, whose shoes dwindle
to heels a yard or more long and end in enormous spurs, sticks
out his under-lip considerably further than does Pope Julius
and observes a large bird perched on the end of it. In a third, a
villain with sword and dagger glowers out of the plate. He wears
a very small cap tied with a string onto a very large head : and a
pair of gloves dangle by a cord from his arm. A fourth represents
a man from whose head a bent leg grows and whose nose is a
horribly twisted monstrosity with seven hairs upon it. Some of
these caricatures are regarded as, in all probability, personal.
There is also a somewhat gross wood-engraving in this book
of a gentleman who, like the toper, carries his stomach on a
wheel before him.
In others, a grasshopper suckles little birds, and a man with
an elephant's face has a trunk which runs along the ground
before him, like the other fellow's stomach, on a wheel.
Pieter Brueghel did at all events sign and date, 1563, a pair
* Formerly Cardinal Guiliano della Rovere, Papal Legate to France in 1480,
and a rival of Roderigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI, q. v.). Subsequently he was
helped to the papal throne by Cesare Borgia, son of Roderigo. He did much in the
cause of literature and art, and laid the foundation-stone of St. Peter's, Rome.
28
EARLY SECULAR CARICATURE
of drawings called respectively The Lean and The Fat. These
are typifications rather than caricatures and are a shade too
horrible to be funny. The thin folk are seen in a miserable
kitchen with a meagre fire. Those at the table quarrel over a
bowl full of dubious shell-fish, a mother with wasted breasts sits
in a cradle and feeds her infant with a horn. A dog, all skin and
bone, lies under the table. A small child upturns a big cooking-
pot to lick out the remnants of the soup, and a couple of shrewish
women are seen driving a fat man from the door.
The antithesis is complete. A fat man pushes out the lean
beggar: a fat dog bites him. Two hearty lads are mopping up the
fat from a roasting dish. Another and protuberant dog is seen
with a long roll in his mouth. An immoderately buxom mamma
suckles a gross infant: and at the table which is heaped with
sausages and pies and sucking-pigs, disgusting, replete brutes sit,
guzzling. One of their number stretches out an arm to carve
a huge lump from a ham. A maid-servant bastes a whole pig
upon its spit before the roaring fire. To contemplate this draw-
ing positively spoils the appetite.
Another drawing of Brueghel is a detailed allegory, describing
physical greed. Here people and beasts, mostly of an apocryphal
kind, are seen in the act of over-drinking: a monkey lifts the
tankard to his lips, even as he draws a fresh supply from the
barrel ; a naked man is seen head-down in another barrel ; a dog
tilts up the tray on a servant's head and snatches at the wine cup
that is sliding from it. In the background is a windmill in the
form of a man's head. A ladder leads up to the open mouth, which
is intended to be the entrance to hell. People are climbing
up this ladder, and disappearing inside. One, however, seems
to be getting a breath of fresh air by peering out of the
windmill's right ear. Pieter Brueghel was a masterly inventor
of ingenious devils and imps, which he devised with a mingling
of obvious laughter and implied depravity which is highly
entertaining.
The last caricaturist to be mentioned in this chapter is
Jacques Callot, who was born at Nancy in Lorraine in 1592. He
29
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
is one of the few caricaturists of that period about whom much is
known, and his story a very old and oft-repeated one is worth
mention. As a child he was extremely precocious, his artistic
taste always running towards satire. He had lessons in drawing
from Claude Henriet and in engraving from Demange Crocq,
engraver to the Duke of Lorraine. When Callot was still only a
lad of twelve, the painter Bellange returned to Nancy from Italy
and excited him with his stories about the wonders of art to be
seen in that country. In the spring of 1604, young Callot wan-
dered off from home, joined a troop of gipsies and with them
tramped to Florence. Here he worked in the studio of Canta
Gallina who tried, quite in vain, to eradicate his taste for the
grotesque. Later he moved on to Rome where he joined an old
friend, Israel Henriet. Not long afterwards, however, he was
recognized by some merchants from Nancy and by them taken
home.
He soon escaped again and by way of Mt. Cenis he journeyed
to Turin, but was immediately caught there by his elder brother
who had been sent to find him. At last, however, his parents
gave way, and he was allowed to study in Rome together with
Henriet under Tempesta. For a living he worked as an engraver.
In 1611 he returned to Florence where he came under the
patronage of Cosimo dei Medici. In 1616 he made a series of
drawings, the Caprici di Varie Figure, which he followed later
with the Gobbi and the Balli. In the second of these series he
was especially skilled, drawing hunchbacks and cripples that are
odd rather than horrible. Some beg comically for alms, one
looks slyly through a hole in his ragged hood and leans upon a
grotesquely short thick crutch, and so forth. One of his drawings,
dated 1615, caricatures the fashions of the age. In the background
a number of fine folk strut and attitudinize and amongst them
runs a poodle shaven in the mode of the present time. In the
foreground two bespectacled raggamuffins dance with a kind of
grim humour. The drawing of these lank figures, especially of
their gesturing hands, is very skilful indeed. In 1628, Callot
went to Brussels in order to pursue a more academic art
30
EARLY SECULAR CARICATURE
and there made the acquaintance of Vandyck. He is better
known by his more elaborate work such as the fantastic and
wonderfully invented Temptation of St. Anthony. He died in
1635-
A Fifteenth-Century
Fashion-Caricature
Chapter IV
THE CARICATURE OF BIGOTRY
CARICATURE of a kind, as we have seen, had been
used mainly in the Middle Ages to point a broad differ-
ence between Good and Evil. The Reformers made use
of the art in a narrower field, and by its means ridiculed the
monks, and discovered the devil beneath the triple tiara. Nor
did their antagonists abstain from reprisals in kind.
The age of book-illustration had begun, and Holbein, before
coming to England and settling comfortably as a painter at the
court of Henry VIII, made designs for a number of works, most
of which seem to have been derived in a greater or less degree
from Brandt's Ship of Fools. This book was published in 1494,
and Jacob Geiler, of Strasburg, made immediate use of it as a
model for his savage indictment of the monastic system. The
Boats of Foolish Women by Badius was another imitation ; but the
most considerable of the books to which Brandt gave precedent
was The Praise of Folly written by Desiderius Erasmus while he
was living in England between 1497 and 1506, when he was
between thirty and forty. In Holbein's illustrations to this book
general satire here and there becomes caricature. A fool in
cap and bells preaches from the pulpit to a congregation which
includes another fool : a monk is represented as absurdly short
and inordinately fat. To go back a little, a miserere at the Church
of St. Spire, at Corbeil, near Paris, now destroyed, used to show
a Bishop of Fools clasping instead of his pastoral staff a fool's
bauble.
Erasmus, with Holbein's assistance, prepared the way for
Martin Luther by drawing attention to certain discrepancies
between sweet reasonableness and those aspects of the Roman
THE CARICATURE OF BIGOTRY
persuasion which were considered and no doubt, from the prag-
matic standpoint, quite rightly considered as good enough for a
stable world and an imperishable tradition. Few traditions, how-
ever, are imperishable, and the world, not always in pleasant
directions, moves on.
Erasmus saw fit to ridicule, as does the modern Protestant,
the place in the Roman observance given to the Mother of God :
he railed as the opponent faction still rails against the offering of
gifts at the shrines of the saints.
The most ferocious caricatures of the Lutheran school are
attributable to Hans Cranach, and his better-known son, the
German master whose paintings show so clearly the influence of
the wood-carving in which the Germans of that epoch excelled.
He made also drawings to interpret the opinions of the Re-
formers. The series illustrating the text of Philip Melanchthon,
published in 1521, and cut on wood by Hans Cranach, set out
to expose the divergence between the humble life of Christ and
the pomp and magnificence of His Vicar. These woodcuts are
arranged in pairs, labelled respectively Christ and anti-Christ.
They came rather under the head of general satire than of actual
caricature, but since Cranach did make caricatures and since the
line between the two wavers and demands indulgence even
papal indulgence they are worth reference. Thus in one
drawing Christ is scourged and the crown of thorns is forced
upon His brow : whilst complementary to that the triple crown is
put upon the head of the Pope by a couple of cardinals. Through
a window we get a crude glimpse of an army, blazing away very
heartily against, no doubt, the enemies of His Holiness.
In another pair Christ overturns the tables of the money-
changers and uplifts a whip against those who sell doves.
Antithetically, the Pope sits on his throne and sells sealed
indulgences for cash down.
Finally Cranach portrays the Ascension and, upon the oppo-
site page, shows the end of the Pope who is cast into the furnace
of hell by a number of delightfully and ingeniously devised
fiends. The tonsured head of a monk, expressing obvious dis-
33 D
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
comfort, rises from the curling flames to watch his master's
headlong arrival.
Another caricature of the period is known as the Monk-Calf
of Freiberg. It is superb. He has a fat grinning face in which
the human and bovine likeness is wonderfully mingled, with a
flattened nose, enormous lips, and a rather merry eye: warts
grow upon his tonsured pate. He is putting out his tongue. His
ragged habit clings tightly to his body, except where the folded
cowl hangs upon his broad back. His extremities, including the
tail, are those of a calf.
The most brutal caricature of the papacy, attributed to Lucas
Cranach, occurs in a pamphlet by Luther dated 1545. This was
in answer to some verses issued from the opposing camp, which
declared that Luther was the child of one of the Furies. Tu quoque
seems always to have been a good enough retort in the sixteenth
century. This woodcut* together with some others presently to
be mentioned are to be found in the Department of Printed Books
in the British Museum.
In this first caricature a black, grinning female demon, por-
trayed, as it were, inflagrante dolore, gives birth to the pope and,
in the antique manner, successive scenes of his infancy are
represented on the same plate : he is rocked in his cradle by his
nurse Alecto, with serpents in her hair ; by Megaera he is suckled ;
Tisiphone leads him by the hand. All the time, even in the article
of birth he wears his triple crown, which emblem seems pecu-
liarly to have incensed the reforming party. The sympathies of a
modern obstetrician would have been with the devilish mamma.
(In 1545 Cranach painted a picture, which has been lost, of
hares catching and roasting their hunters. Mere inversion of the
usual has evidently been a stock form of humour from time
immemorial.)
The same series contains a caricature of Pope Alexander VI.
* The following is the entry in the British Museum catalogue :
Luther, Martin. Abbildung des Bapstum. A collection of thirteen satirical
wood-cuts relating to the Papacy, with German legends, most of them bearing the
name of Luther. [Nuremberg?] 1545.
34
THE CARICATURE OF BIGOTRY
There has been an attempt made during recent years to white-
wash Alexander, and indeed all the Borgia family, especially
Cesare, who owed a great deal in life both in worldly success and
(possibly) in spiritual depravity to having a pope for a father.
Luther, of course, maintained that Roderigo Borgia had sold
himself to the devil, and it was hardly to be expected that his
evident shortcomings as the Head of the Church would fail to
provide munition for his enemies. The caricature referred to is
of a kind not unknown to the purveyors of vulgar postcards
to-day. A leaf folds from the top and at the first glance you see
the usual face and figure of the Pope in his robes. Lift up the
leaf, which reaches to his middle, and you see a devil with more
than a fair share of demoniacal attributes. The apex of the triple
crown is blazing, and from out of its sides grow the twisted
horns of a ram. The bearded face is really horrible : the bifurcated
nose ends in two sharp beaks. Sabre teeth curve up from the
shallow under-jaw. Enormously muscular arms end in pro-
digious talons, the left hand clasping a huge pronged fork with
a hangman's noose caught on it. Dragon's wings attached to the
arms pass imperceptibly into a flowing embroidered robe. Each
black shoe is decorated with a cross. The breast and belly
become a leonine face, and the inscription above, Ego Sum Papa,
has no doubt a double intention.
Another caricature of the series reproduced in this book shows
a pope with an ass's head, playing the bagpipes which is in-
tended to demonstrate that Romish theology is comparable with
the music of asses.
A pamphlet by Luther and Melanchthon, was illustrated by
another woodcut which accompanies those already mentioned.
This describes the Pope-Donkey of Rome, " Papa Doctor
Theologiae et Magister Fidei". In the background a flag with a
device of crossed keys flies from a triple-turreted castle. The
animal which is to represent the Pope is no mere donkey. He
stands erect with ass's head : he is for the most part covered with
scales, one leg ending in an ox's hoof, the other in a dragon's
claw. The right hand is an elephant's foot which is to symbolize
35
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
the Pope's ghostly army which treads the weak heavily under
foot: the left, a human hand, represents his earthly army. The
creature has a woman's breasts and belly which stand, according
to Melanchthon for bishops, cardinals, students, and so on. A
bearded face as well as the head of a dragon emerge from the
hind-quarters and these are to make manifest the fact that the
Papacy must come to an end.
Was this Pope-Donkey intended as a caricature? No. Luther
and Melanchthon explained to simple folk that the beast was
miraculously thrown dead out of the Tiber in the year 1496
Monstrum Romae inventum mortuum in Tiberi, anno 1496 just
as the monk-calf was a real monstrosity sent by God for a Pur-
pose and born at Freiberg in Saxony. It was understood, more-
over, that God had made the original drawings Himself. These
atrocities were taught by Luther as a substitute for the beautiful
devilries of the Church, just as to-day but the reader will supply
the modern equivalent according to personal taste.
Another medium was used at about this time, which supplies
a good instance of caricature. A medal was struck in Germany,
which may briefly be described as follows :
On the obverse within the legend Ecclesia Perversa Tenet
Facem Diaboli the crowned head of the Pope is very skilfully
merged into that of the Fiend. Looked at one way, the Pope's
nose is the Devil's chin. Turn it upside down, and the Devil's
nose is the Pope's chin. They have a mouth in common. The
Devil looks pleased : the Pope does not. The same procedure is
followed on the reverse of the medal, where a Fool in cap and
bells shares a mouth in the same way with a gentleman in a hat.
The legend around this second device is Stulti aliquando Sapi-
entes.
" The cowl does not make the monk " is the title given to a
drawing of a wolf from whose long ears the hood has fallen back,
and whose bushy tail shows beneath his habit and needlessly
gives the lie to the rosary in his paw. But these caricatures had
to be entirely fool-proof.
The title-page of another pamphlet of 1530 has a caricature
36
THE CARICATURE OF BIGOTRY
of the Pope as a wolf, and two wolf-cardinals attend him on
either side. Before him are a number of geese, two of them
crowned, carrying rosaries in their beaks. A net is stretched from
the Pope's paw to that of a bishop in the foreground, in which it
is intended, according to the German script, to catch these geese.
Another favourite caricature directed against the Papacy was
drawn by Tobias Stimmer in 1577. This is called the Papal
Gorgon and represents the head of the Pope as made up of
various objects relating to the Roman observance and cere-
monial. Thus, the nose is a fish, the hat is a bell diversely deco-
rated, the mouth is a wine-flagon, the cheek a patten, the eye a
chalice with a wafer upon it, the shoulder a mass-book bearing
the triple crown and crossed keys. Peering from the orifices of
a decorated oval border we see a bespectacled donkey, a wolf
with a lamb in its mouth, a goose with a rosary hanging from its
beak, and so forth. Above the heads are the words Gorgoneum
caput.
Another version of this drawing, attributed to Master Bat-
man was made four years later. It is almost exactly the same as
Stimmer J s, except that the various emblematic animals' heads are
arranged as looking out from the sides of the bell-crown. Beneath
the main drawing appear feet resting respectively on a dragon and
a lion. These are pierced and are intended to be the feet of
Christ whose Body is covered and hidden by the Pope.
The frontispiece of La Danse des Femmes of Marcial d'Au-
vergne is a woodcut of the Pope and some of his companions
being sucked through the air into the mouth of an undesirable
beast, which serves as the entrance to hell. Over their heads
gallops Death on horseback, arrow in hand and coffin under arm.
And, finally, Luther wrote a pamphlet making fun of Cle-
ment VII and to illustrate it ordered a drawing to be made, of
an extremely intimate impropriety. These pamphlets and
drawings were hawked through Germany during the early years
of the sixteenth century from town to town and from village to
village, gaining many followers for Martin Luther amongst the
simple.
37
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
It is to be deplored that so much stronger are Protestant
countries in works upon ancient caricature than those of the
Roman communion, that while it is easy to multiply accounts of
satires directed against the old faith, I have not found the same
hospitality afforded me for research in the contrary direction.
Nevertheless the impartial observer will be relieved to know that
Luther and his followers did not go quite scatheless.
Martin Luther lived from 1483 to 1546. He was ordained
priest at the age of twenty-four, and became professor of theology
at the University of Wittenberg. He revolted from Rome in
1517, mainly owing to his views regarding the sale of indul-
gences, and married in 1525 a nun, Katherine von Bora.
It is not to be expected that his enemies would let such an
opportunity as that escape them.
One of the caricatures relating to this (very happy) union
was that already referred to, which follows the convention of
the fat toper who wheeled his stomach before him in a barrow.
Here you have " my rib, Kate ", as Luther called her, dressed
as the nun she had been, with a tub on her back to which is
strapped a Bible. In her arms she carries a baby and she leads
a man-faced dog by a string. Luther pushes his wheelbarrow
loaded with his enormous belly, some books, and a few bearded
friends. In a box slung on his back he carries a dozen or so of
his enemies. In his left hand he holds the papal tiara inverted as
a cup. This caricature is dated so late as 1580.
A more impartial French critic made a drawing in which
Luther and Calvin stand on each side of the Pope pulling his
ears. At the same time Luther tweaks Calvin's beard, who in
his turn throws a book at Luther's head. The scene takes place
before a High Altar, and another version of this drawing is
shown in the reverse and is the same as the first but that a
curtain is drawn to hide a scene of martyrdom painted on the
wall of the apse in the background.
An unknown master made a caricature of Luther called
" Martinus Luther Siebenkopff ". A big body, girdled by a
decorated belt, but with the loose sleeves and hood of a monk,
38
THE CARICATURE OF BIGOTRY
and the hands holding open a book, is provided with seven small
heads labelled according to his names and to the various aspects
of the man, thus : Doctor Martin Luther ecclesiast vision-
ary visitationer Barabbas .
As caricature and as design the best of the drawings ad-
dressed to the discomfort of Luther is that in which he is shown
to be inspired by Satan. This is called the Devil's Bagpipes and
is dated 1521. It is a large German woodcut celebrating the
Reformer's examination before the Diet of Worms. Satan with
bird's head and claws and a face of more doubtful origin growing
out of his belly, plays the pipes, the bag of which is represented
by Luther's tonsured head. The Devil is blowing into his right
ear, while his claws manipulate the keys on the ex-monk's long
nose, which forms a chanter. Apart from the evident meaning,
that is, Luther's direct inspiration from Below, we are also to
be reminded of the manner in which both then and since, pro-
testing preachers have been apt to utter their enthusiasms,
drawling through their noses.
This caricature, like that of the wheelbarrow, has been
repeated for one purpose or another, again and again, until
mid- Victorian times when it served its purpose for party political
warfare.
Maintaining the completest innocence of any sectarian bias,
the modern observer cannot ignore the fact that Luther and
Calvin, whatever fruit was subsequently borne of their rebellion,
in their own time only succeeded in substituting one set of in-
fatuations for another. They startled simple minds into discon-
tent by means of fables which were far-fetched, ugly, and on the
whole less infused with the human conception of Divine Love
than the fables they supplanted. The warfare that ensued, waged
with dual sincerity, the terrors and suspicions and hatred still
fill us in our not quite godless freedom with amazement. It is
difficult to make real in our minds an age when such words as
these, from a more responsible pen, and speaking without undue
presumption, might have earned torture and death. But bigotry
which adds a flavour to life, both for the bigot and for the
39
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
spectator, is not quite dead : it is still within the bounds of the
human imagination to conjure up the attitude of intolerance, felt
at large in England, of the Papacy. There are living even yet
those who would find personal and present delight in the
drawing, made in England and engraved in Holland, called
Spayne and Rome Defeated. This drawing, reproduced by Mal-
colm and others, and to be seen in the British Museum, is what
we now call a " cartoon " as distinguished from a caricature, and
it is worth a digression in order to point the difference between
the two, as well as to exemplify the satiric art of its period.
This engraving, published in 1621, illustrated a broadsheet
the text of which was composed by Samuel Ward, of Ipswich, a
vigorous Protestant, who dedicated it
" To God. In memorye of his double deliveraunce from y e
invincible Navie and y e unmatcheable powder Treason, 1605."
Events remained topical far longer in those days than they
do now.
Mr. Parton is at pains to suggest that some of the Pilgrim
Fathers, then living at Leyden, may have been responsible for
the work of graving the plate.
The Pope with a cardinal, a bishop, a Spaniard, some
monks, and a Jesuit sit in conclave with Satan in a tent the flaps
of which are held open by attendant fiends. A large winged devil
urges Guy Fawkes, with his lantern, towards the cellars of
Westminster. A snake at the head of the steps seems to await
him. In one hand this devil holds a papal Bull giving Fawkes his
sanction. Various symbolic birds and animals are seen upon the
roof of the tent. Nearby is Tylbury Camp, and Queen Elizabeth
waiting for news ; and in the sea the Spanish Armada is arrayed
in an oval formation broken at one end by an English vessel
firing broadsides. Cherubs blow upon the Armada and an eye
looks down a shaft of light from Heaven towards the powder
barrels at Westminster. Video 'Rideo: I see and smile, is written
upon this beam. I Blow and Scatter, say the cherubs. Opus
Tenebrarwn: a Deed of Darkness. November y e 5, is written be-
neath the windows of Westminster Hall. Most of the inscriptions
40
THE CARICATURE OF BIGOTRY
are in Latin and English, and the text adds the Dutch tongue as
well. Here too is a piece of verse which delightfully ends:
But Hee, whose never slumbering Eye did view
The dire intendments of this damned crew,
Did soon prevent what they did think most sure.
Thy mercies, Lord! for everymore endure.
Mr. Samuel Ward was flattered by the annoyance of the
Spanish Ambassador regarding this broadsheet, which gave it a
flaming advertisement. Ward was put in gaol, but was released
after petitioning the king.
The Thirty Years' War produced bitter satires in Germany,
including a drawing which typifies the Beast of War, his mouth
full of spoils and his hand holding a pike and two torches,
trampling grapes under foot. Starving folk flee from a burning
village and men do battle on an arid plain. This satire would
stand equally well for another war, more recently remembered ;
which, however, was not fought upon German soil.
Many lampoons, vulgarities, and cheap caricatures were
published against Charles I, the Cavaliers, and Archbishop Laud.
One of these last illustrated a play called Canterburie . . . pri-
vately acted neare the palace yard at Westminster, 1641. The
following Acts are described :
Act I. The Bishop of Canterbury, having variety of dainties,
is not satisfied till he be fed with tippets of men's eares.
Act II. He hath his nose held to the grindstone.
Act III. He is put into a Bird-cage with the Confessor.
Act IV. The Jester tells the King the story.
Act II is illustrated, and (caricaturists as well as historians
repeat one another) the same device was used ten years later,
with regard to the exiled monarch, who is held to the grindstone
by Scottish Presbyterians.
In another drawing of that time we see Folly in his cap riding
4 1
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
on the back of a Sectarian who is on his hands and knees : he
has an ass's ears and he wears a bridle which is held by Folly.
This is called " The Picture of an English Persecutor, or a Fool-
ridden anti-Presbeterian Sectary ": and beneath are the lines:
Folly. Behould my habit, like my witt,
Equals his on whom I sitt.
Anti-Presbeterain. My cursed speeches against Presbetry
Declares unto the world my foolery.
Most of the satire of the early seventeenth century in England
issued from the Puritan side. Tyranny or, perhaps, feeling too
deep for satire (if it ever is) kept Oliver Cromwell out of this
harm's way. A caricature of Prince Rupert was made in 1647,
and called " England's Wolfe with Eagle's clawes ". He is dressed
as a Cavalier, but with a snarling wolf's head and a pigtail
tied with a bow falls below one ear. This drawing, we are to
understand, was intended to expose " the cruell Impieties of
Bloodthirsty Royalists and blasphemous Anti-Parliamentarians
under the Command of that inhuman Prince Rupert, Digby, and
the rest, wherein the barbarous Crueltie of our Civill uncivill
Warres is briefly discovered". But during the domination of the
Puritans, after the Horrable Murder, everything of a humorous
intention passed into abeyance.
On the other hand Mr. Parton quotes a very happy descrip-
tion written in 1636 of Puritans' behaviour in church; this being
occasioned by the imprisonment in Newgate of two weavers,
" infamous, upstart prophets " for heresy.
" His seat in the church is where he may be most seene. In
the time of the Sermon he drawes out his tables to take the
Notes, but still noting who observes him to take them. At every
place of Scripture cited he turnes over the leaves of his Booke,
more pleased with the motion of the leaves than the matter of
the Text ; For he folds downe the leaves though he finds not the
place. Hee lifts up the whites of his eyes towards Heaven when
42
THE CARICATURE OF BIGOTRY
hee meditates on the sordid pleasures of the earth; his body
being in God's Church, when his mind is in the Divel's Chap-
pell."
After the Restoration many amusing caricatures of the
Parliamentary leaders were printed on playing-cards, such as
" Don Haselrigg of y* Codled Braine " and " Lambert " that
is, General Lambert " of y c Golden Tulip ".
Directly Charles II married a Portuguese princess " Popish
Plot " caricatures were revived, and Maria of Modena the second
queen of James II is found making her confession to Father
Petre, in the guise of a wolf. Over this drawing are the words
Converte Angliam; and under it the proverb "It is a foolish
sheep that makes the wolf her confessor".
The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was an especially
prolific occasion for caricature; and this opportunity was
admirably seized by Cornelis Dusart, the Dutch artist, and pupil
of Adrian van Ostade. The Huguenots fled into England and the
Netherlands that year (1685) and the next: and for their delec-
tation no doubt, in 1691, Dusart brought out a book* containing
twenty-five caricatures engraved by Gole, of notable adver-
saries, including Louis XIV himself. Almost from his accession
and certainly to his grave this king was pitilessly pursued by the
scorn of his enemies. Here we have a caricature of him in a circle
labelled LE ROY DE FRANCE: Vhomme immortel Chef de la
Ste. Ligue. A mean little face is drawn as a sun surrounded by its
rays and enveloped in a huge monk's hood. The hand is seen
holding a smoking torch. Beneath the engraving is the rhyme :
Mon soleil parsa force eclaira Pheritique,
II chassa tout d'un coup les brouillards de Calvin :
Non pas par un Zele divin.
Mais a fin de cacher ma fine politique.
* La Procession Monacale conduite par Louis XIV pour la conversion des Pro-
testants de son Royaume.
43
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
This is followed by some splendidly malicious caricatures of
which three are particularized here.
The first is Madame de Maintenon Veuve de Scarron. She
too is given the monkish cowl, falling away from her almost
bald head : her eyes are set crookedly, her mouth wide open, her
upturned nose is adorned with a large pimple. Her ear-rings
alone faintly suggest her sex.
The Archbishop of Paris (Plus ami des Dames que du Pape),
leers horribly with a cap over a winking eye and put his tongue
out: his contours and expression suggest debauchery. He is made
to say :
Le grand Louis et moi avons memes desseins :
Nous somes fort galans, nous aimons fort les dames :
II est vray que cela nous rend tout de infames :
Mais nous serons pourtant un jour au rang des saints.
Asne Mitre is the title given to the Archbishop of Rheims,
the famous Pere la Chaise. He has a snub nose, open animal
mouth, and heavy bearded jowl. Huge keys dangle at his neck;
and his mitre, composed of playing cards, bottles, and clay pipes,
is tilted so as completely to cover one eye.
This series is pleasingly drawn, the linen of vestments being
most deftly treated.
Louis XIV was an easy butt. He stood only two inches over
five foot ; but his shoemaker and perruquier between them gave
him another ten. He was caricatured as a cock pursued by William
III as a fox, as a town-crier of Versailles, as a jay, as a tiger on
trial by the other beasts, trompd by de Maintenon, sharing the
stocks with the Pope, while the Devil behind them bangs their
heads together. Finally, Thackeray illustrates an essay on this
much-abused king, with a threefold caricature which represents
Rex a dummy figure in robes: Ludovicus a poor plain
diminutive discontented Louis, with bald head and low shoes,
pot-bellied and knock-kneed: and Ludovicus Rex that same
Louis in the kingly robes with high heels and towering wig.
44
THE CARICATURE OF BIGOTRY
Dotted lines across the page draw spiteful attention to the
comparative heights.
Well, at least Louis XIV encouraged literature and the arts,
and his name is associated with some very lovely walnut-wood
furniture.
Caricatures by Leonardo da Vinci
(from Die Karikatur der Europaischen Vdlker, by Eduard Fuchs)
Chapter V
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND
IF in England we were slow in adopting caricature, once the
art had a hold upon our imagination, we both encouraged it
and deserved that encouragement : and the century which,
from that point of view, began with some indifferent prints
satirizing the trial of Doctor Sacheverell in 1710, ended in an
orgy of caricature, poured out with Rabelaisian effusion, in the
midst of torrential laughter. Religion, in fact, ceased to be the
only subject for caricature, and though sectarian squabbles have
persisted in pictorial commentary in some sort to the present
day, as time went forward we see less and less of them and more
and more of quarrels and persuasions, absurdities and enthu-
siasms which are secular.
As has been shown, though caricature of a kind did exist in
fact from the remotest times, its recognition as a special form of
art with a name of its own is comparatively recent. Indeed,
during the Sacheverell trial the Tories believed that caricature
had only just been imported from Holland, which country was
then famous for its engravers as well as designers.
" Young man,' 1 said Sarah Duchess of Marlborough to
George Bubb Doddington (afterwards Lord Melcombe and the
defender of Admiral Byng), when he was introduced to her at
Brussels. " Young man, you come from Italy. They tell me of a
new invention there called caricatura drawing. Can you find me
somebody that will make me a caricatura of Lady Masham,
describing her covered with running sores and ulcers, that I may
send to the Queen to give her a slight idea of her favourite ? "
This was in 1710, when Sarah had been ousted from royal
favour and supplanted by the other lady.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND
Many years later the poet Gray writes to his friend John
Chute in Florence: " The wit of the times consists in satirical
prints; I believe there have been some hundreds within this
month. If you have any hopeful young designer of caricaturas
that has a political turn, he may pick up a pretty subsistence here ;
let him pass through Holland to improve his taste by the way."
In Italy Stefano della Bella, whom the French called Etienne
de la Belle, and who had been born in Florence at the beginning
of the previous century, had, like Callot, studied under Canta
Gallina, and had so imitated Callot that their works are often
confused. He is said to have etched not less than fourteen hun-
dred plates. He made a great reputation and when he visited
Paris he was employed by Cardinal de Richelieu to make
drawings of the siege and capture of Arras and La Rochelle. In
1646 he published a series of eighteen prints called Raccolta di
varii capricci, which proves his fidelity even to Callot's titles.
He also made a series of sixteen small square plates which
are often attributed to Callot. It was della Bella no doubt who
inspired a school of caricature which was actually Italian.
Romeyn de Hooghe in Holland established a school of
drawing at Haarlem and enjoyed the patronage of our William
III, and through his agency much caricature came to England:
and our own first great painter, William Hogarth, copied, in
his youth, many Dutch prints or adapted them for publica-
tion in England. Though more often satirical than not, he was
only a caricaturist on occasion. The faces and figures in his
congregations and crowds are often exaggerated with a view to
being amusing or repulsive, and in an age which did produce
true caricature scarcely warrant inclusion. Hogarth on one
occasion, however, made a plate called Characters and Carica-
turas, to illustrate the difference, as he saw it ; and though here
and there in over a hundred heads the distinction is not easy to
perceive, the plate is worth careful study. In the margin beneath
it occur various other heads and faces, including that of Gio-
vanna (as I have called her) by Leonardo da Vinci. Amedeo is
omitted.
47
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
No doubt the lessons he learned from the Dutch and his own
inclination bent his mind towards the genre for which he was
most famous. His portrait, however, of Simon Lord Lovat in
1746 certainly contains a strong element of caricature, whilst in
that of John Wilkes, made the year before he died, the wig of that
dissolute wit is drawn so as to suggest the growth of devil's horns,
and the expression, with violently squinting eyes, is fiendishly
derisive. This without any gross exaggeration is pure caricature.
Hogarth is supposed to have invented the trick, still so
favoured by boys of all ages, of drawing a trooper and his dog
going through a doorway in three strokes. In 1753 he made a
most ingenious picture demonstrating every conceivable error
in perspective. It is a marvel of ingenuity and, though not
caricature, would only have been attempted by a man who had
a childlike love of nonsense which is so important an ingredient
in the art. It is also probable that he made the drawing in order
to teach students some of the pitfalls of their craft.
When a topic, foolish or otherwise, runs away with people,
as we say, so that nothing else is talked about by high or low :
so that intelligent folk utter platitudes about it, and foolish
people look forward to the morrow's newspaper : so that it gives
point to catchwords, essence to songs, and kernel to jokes, we
may be quite sure that its central figure will not lack the attention
of the caricaturist.
Such a topic was formed by the machinations of John Law,
and the series of schemes with which he is associated. The
Bubbles, South Sea and otherwise, " ran away with " people
not merely in England and France but everywhere, and it is
doubtful if there has ever been a craze like that one, regarded
only as a matter of common discussion. Since then robberies,
murders, and cinematograph actresses had their share of popular
attention, rather more perhaps than a fair share, and people have
been idiotic about them and (relatively) similar concerns, and
will go on being idiotic, but no whim nor fatuity has ever yet
matched that stirred out of men's idleness and empty-headed-
ness by the Bubbles.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND
John Law, the son of a Scottish goldsmith-banker, bred to
a practical knowledge of finance, unhampered by a conscience,
and fortified to a wonderful degree with impudence, the gift of
talking, charm of manner, and fine presence, with riches too at
his command, ingratiated himself with the French Regent. In
the financial chaos of the country during the end of and following
the reign of Louis XIV, any suggestion for raising funds and
relieving the debt was welcome. Law came forward with a
system, with a series of systems. There is no need to describe
them. For nearly a year these systems worked. Then suspicion,
followed hard by certainty, caused holders of stock to seek for
realization. There was a rush, and frantic disillusionment. Jean
Lass, as he was called in Paris, speech with whom had been
social apotheosis, honoured by the Regent, and pursued by all
the court, escaped not without difficulty from the French capital
at the end of 1720; and, long outlawed from England for having
broken the prison in which he had been confined on account of
a questionable duel, he was forced to eke out the remaining
eight years of his life as a polite gambler in Germany and Italy
which at face value seems to be a far pleasanter way of passing
the time than in what is nowadays called Big Business.
Naturally, he was caricatured: naturally his schemes and
systems were the subjects of innumerable " cartoons ". You see
him, as Amsterdam saw him, a loathesomely ugly dwarf, which
he was not, hawking his wares with a magic lantern slung on his
back, and a walking-stick on the head of which is a windmill.
Wind, reasonably enough, figured largely in these caricatures.
Law is made to resemble Don Quixote, riding Sancho Panza's
donkey. The animal is loaded with gold coin in a box and in
bags slung round his neck. Everywhere paper is scattered by the
breeze, and the rider carries a banner on which is inscribed " I
come, I come, Dulcinea ".
In another satire of that time Folly drives the chariot of
Fortune, to which are harnessed figures with foxes* brushes,
representing the Bubble companies. Fortune scatters paper to
the crowd, and the Devil in the clouds blows soap-bubbles.
49 E
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
In the reign of George II, before English talent had widely
developed, a number of foreigners were regularly employed by
the sellers of prints, who took a pride in buying plates from
beggarly artists for little more than their melting value as
copper.
With the rise to long-lived power of Sir Robert Walpole
political caricaturists on both sides were extremely active ; or, to
be more exactly within the limits of the definition set down
political " cartoonists " : of true caricature of the best kind there
was little till the end of the century. Many artists lent their hands
to political absurdity and the list of their names and works is an
imposing one; but when examined in detail, we find nearly all
the satire in the situation and not in the personal exaggeration.
Clothes and attitudes, it is true, were often burlesqued, but the
faces and figures of people whom the artist regarded or was paid
to regard sympathetically were merely portrayed. Those of the
enemy were made ugly: that was enough. In fact, caricaturists
were content with, or were presumably unable to conceive
anything but, what was obvious. Subtlety of perception is not
always accompanied by the ability to record it; but the per-
ceiving eye can to some extent force the hand, though the utmost
skill of hand can never supply a lack of profundity of judgment.
And while unskilled hands which could point a joke found
employment William Hanlon's, for example, whose drawings
though interesting were often " messy " and incompetent
they were not of the kind which falter under inspiration. With
certain exceptions to be mentioned high technical skill was
likewise uninspired.
Caricature became too the hobby of amateurs, as it has been
almost ever since. The Italian opera gave almost as many oppor-
tunities for ridicule as did the passions and politics of the day,
and the Countess of Burlington, whose husband built Burlington
House, made caricatures of Farinelli, the singer in opera and of
Heidegger, the manager. General (afterwards, Marquess) Town-
send was another amateur. The most celebrated " amateur " of
the eighteenth century (though his status in the narrow and
50
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND
sporting sense of that ill-used word may be called in question)
was Henry William Bunbury, who lived from 1750 to 1811, and
was an almost exact contemporary of Gillray. He was equerry to
the Duke of York and his position gave him an obvious advantage
for the exercise of his talent.
Caricatures at this period were reproduced in all manner of
ways, even upon ladies 5 fans, indicating the intense interest
taken by women in politics. A contemporary rhyme expresses a
view of their activities not entirely obsolete at the present day.
It is quoted from memory.
If women sat in Parliament
A thing unprecedented
The great part of our nation, then,
Would be Miss-represented.
Shops were entirely devoted to the sale of caricature, and in
more than one drawing of that century a print-shop is used as
a convenient background for any street scene: while, in 1808
Gillray made a drawing of an old gentleman slipping and falling
on the pavement outside Humphreys' shop at 27 St. James's
Street. In the window are seen a number of his own caricatures,
including rough suggestions of two or three which are well-
known to collectors at the present day and are easily recognizable.
In the early part of the eighteenth century the word carica-
tura was little used, and satirical drawings of that kind were
called hieroglyphics, largely because their precise meaning was
not always immediately plain. In despite of the many charges
that have been brought against the English of obviousness in all
matters concerned with art we have, as a matter of fact, always
delighted in a little mystery, meanings that at the first glance
are hidden, and a most admirable allusiveness in style. A volume
of seventy-five political caricatures entitled A Political and
Satirical History of the Year 1756 and 1757 was published in the
latter of these. It was described as " A series of humorous and
entertaining prints, containing all the most remarkable Trans-
Si
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
actions, Characters, and Caricatures of these two Memorable
Years ". These were published from the shop of Darly and Ed-
wards, at the Acorn, facing Hungerford, Strand.
During the first part of George Ill's reign, by favour of the
Prince of Wales, Lord Bute and Henry Fox, afterwards Lord
Holland, were the most prominent members of the Court, and
as such became natural targets for the shafts of contemporary
satire. Some of the caricatures directed against them, judged by
the finest standards, are a little coarse. The harmless ones gave
Lord Bute an enormous boot and a petticoat as an emblem of
influence. Prints appeared, illustrating processions in which a
Scotsman always figured, carrying a banner, bearing the signs
of a boot and petticoat. Bute retaliated by employing Hogarth
to draw satires in the opposing interest, and the artist received,
it is said, a pension for so doing. Hogarth's transactions in this
regard becoming known, a lampoon was invented which con-
sisted of a letter from Mr. Hog-garth to Lord Mucklemon, and
his lordship's reply.
" My Lord
The enclosed is a design I intend to publish ; you are sensible
it will not redound to your honour, as it will expose you to all
the world in your proper colours. You likewise know what
induced me to do this ; but it is in y r power to prevent it from
appearing in publick, which I would have you do immediately.
WilK Hog-garth."
" Mais!, By my saul, mon, I am sare troobled for what I
have done ; I didna ken y r muckle merit till noow ; say na mair
aboot it; I'll mak au things easy to you, and gie you bock your
Pension.
Sawney Mucklemon."
The comic rendering of Scots speech was about as good then
as it is the noo.
52
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND
Malcolm observes that Hogarth " seldom indulged in carica-
ture beyond the limits which Nature assigns when she thinks fit
to be capricious ". This is really a little less than the fact. Ho-
garth certainly pointed the way to true caricature if he did not
very often practise the art.
Our national proclivity for repeating jokes, or over a long
period for finding humour in the same subject, can be easily
discovered by a reference to the old files and to the new ones
of such a paper as Punch. But we can go further than that, a full
century further back : Punch only began his career as a paper in
1841. An essay in the Spectator or the Taller of the mid-eigh-
teenth century might, so far as subject and the writer's attitude
towards it goes, frequently have been written at the present tim r &
It is part of the great pleasure to be gained from reading the
eighteenth-century essayists to find how unchanging is human
nature, how " modern " was the outlook of Johnson, of Addison
and the rest.
In 1913 Max Beerbohm exhibited a caricature of (then)
Colonel Seely in the reading-room of the Cavalry Club, pointing
to the card on the mantelshelf on which is written SILENCE. About
him plethoric old generals are represented as upon the verge of
apoplexy, shouting with rage and shaking their newspapers. This
caricature set out to emphasize the attitude of the regular Army
towards the Territorials. Go further back and you will find that
the Volunteers were satirized in analogous ways in the 'sixties.
And then go back to 1731, and in Read's Weekly Journal in
September of that year you will find that the City Trained
Bands, the municipal troops of the City of London, irregulars
who had served with distinction down to the seventeenth cen-
tury, but who had now deteriorated, are the objects of quite
savage ridicule.
" On Tuesday," we read, " the Cripplegate, Whitechapel,
St. Clement's, and Southwark Grenadiers rendezvous'd in
Bridgewater Gardens : from whence they marched through the
City, and afterwards attacked Cripplegate, both posterns, and
53
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
Great Moorgate, with their usual bravery, and thence proceeded
to attack a dunghill near Bunhill Fields, which gloriously com-
pleted their exercise of arms."
These observations accompany a caricature, showing various
animals in uniform : a monkey, an elephant in a wig (whose head,
by the way, is reproduced by Malcolm in his Historical Sketch),
carrying a spear ; an ox, and a drummer-monkey, leading the rank
and file, who are also monkeys. The ox carries a banner with
roast beef and a plum-pudding delineated upon it. They are
drawn up outside the "Hog in Armour " : and a monkey in the
foreground holds a bill on which is written :
Come, taylers and weavers,
And sly penny shavers,
All haste and repair,
To the Hog in Rag Fair,
To 'list in the pay
Of great Captain Day,
And you shall have cheer,
Beef, pudding, and beer.
During the eighteenth century and for a decade or so of the
nineteenth the history of caricature follows the political history
of Europe, though, to be sure, aspects of life other than political
or " historical " have usually produced the best satires because
the best artists have, as a rule, been somewhat indifferent to party
politics and have been more concerned with wider tendencies.
And the best caricatures of all have been of individuals whose
faces, figures, clothes and bearing have told their own story, and
not of groups of people "doing things". It is easier to get an
effect, especially a " popular " effect, by crowding a drawing with
accessories " John Bull taking a luncheon " of battleships, or
Napoleon, surrounded by his marshals, staring in fright towards
the Writing on the Wall, as Gillray did, than it is by making
the solitary caricature of the Czar Paul of Russia, as he also did
54
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND
on another occasion, or as Pellegrini did with single personalities
for twenty years in Vanity Fair.
The great names of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries were those of Gillray and Rowlandson, whose work
has been extensively and exhaustively described by several
writers, though not always from quite the same angle. Mr.
Everitt is, for example, quite overcome by the " coarseness " of
Gillray and Rowlandson. He complains that George Cruikshank,
his especial hero, displayed, from time to time at the outset of
his career, signs of this coarseness which are " directly traceable
to the influence of Rowlandson ", whose shortcomings in that
respect were particularly marked. Grego, on the other hand,
declares that Rowlandson was " master of the most elegant
refinement, both of delineation and colouring, and produced
the most delicious female heads, with that brightness and
daintiness of touch, which was his peculiar gift, bringing all the
graces, sparkle and animation of the French school to bear upon
the models of winsome female beauty ". But even he adds, " we
are constrained to admit . . . that too many of his productions
are strongly tinctured with that coarseness of subject and senti-
ment which has been held to disfigure the works of contemporary
humorists: his wit . . . was of the jocose school of Smollett
and Fielding, and in justice it must be taken into consideration
that his designs, even in their most uncompromising and grosser
aspects, simply reflect the colour of a period which was the
reverse of squeamish. ..."
That is fair enough, but Everitt and others do not give that
merry devil his due.
Much of the humour of that era was of the kind that we
associate with small boys in the lower forms of schools and with
that vague generic term, the " smoking-room ". Our present mode
of civilization has proscribed that kind of humour in print or
picture, but so far it has failed to eradicate it from the aural
tradition. Without the slightest desire either to palliate or to
impeach any kind of impropriety, it must in justice be pointed
out that while it used to be printed and accepted, by word of
55
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
mouth it is still accepted and persists. When coarse humour has
ceased to be generally accepted and chuckled over in private,
then the public uplifting of pious hands in horror at the brutalities
of the eighteenth century may be defended.
\
Mask of Charles X of France
By Charles Philipon
Chapter VI
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND
(continued)
T
^HOMAS ROWLANDSON was born in London, a
year before Gillray, in 1756, and he survived that artist,
with whom his name is so often and so unconscionably
coupled, twelve years, dying in 1827. He began as a serious
painter in water-colour, occasionally making portraits in oils,
and he exhibited in the Royal Academy, where his work was
regularly hung. He composed too a book of etchings, not copies
of other men's work, but done in various styles, so that he seems
to have got into the very skins of other artists. This knack of
parody, satirical or otherwise, is a marked characteristic of the
mind which finds delight at some time or another in caricature.
In 1774 Rowlandson ceased from sending his portraits to the
Academy and sent instead drawings such as those in which he
describes Vauxhall Gardens, where extreme daintiness and re-
finement are a great deal more evident than humour.
To-day we realize that Grego's apologies for Rowlandson in
his capacity of satirist are rather beside the point. His exquisite
draughtsmanship and the elegance with which all his subjects
even the coarse ones were conceived and carried out, are
widely appreciated. A water-colour drawing which shows some
drunken old reprobate in the act of being sick after blowing
kisses, as one might say, to Bacchus, does not suggest beauty.
But beauty is there, if only in the treatment which compensates
the subject. His landscapes and military scenes, in camp and
field, are as devoid of coarseness as violets in the hedgerow. He
was a landscape painter, indeed, of great distinction; his trees
which were done to some extent after the convention of the time
57
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
yet nevertheless invariably show individual qualities of their own.
His use of blue and red is a joy of connoisseurs, his architectural
sense in the treatment of houses was precise and scholarly. His
interiors were filled but not over-filled with decorative detail
which always refreshes the eye.
If he felt that a subject warranted that particular form of
comment he would be coarse enough to indicate his meaning.
The etching that he made of the Boxing Match* between Ward
and Quirk in 1812 is quite evidently the expression of his
opinion of the noble art. Gross beasts are pounding each other,
their faces distorted with anger, their attitudes quite unsug-
gestive of science. The onlookers, held back by no rope such as
would in fact have kept them from the ring, are meant no doubt
to be typical of the ordinary crowd at a prize fight. That they
remain typical of the crowd at a modern boxing match says as
much for Rowlandson's perceptions as it does for the collateral
unsavouriness of the Ring to-day.
He seldom practised true caricature, but instances do occur
here and there amongst his personal satires. There was a series
known as the Delicate Investigation, which made fun of the
scandal involving the Duke of York and Mrs. Mary Anne
Clarke, a lady of more brains than virtue, whose activities in and
out of the law courts formed one of the causes celebres at the
beginning of the last century. In the illustration in this book
made from an original water-colour drawing the caricaturish
element is probably slight and subtle : sometimes it was broader.
No doubt its implications are highly scandalous.
Living in Wardour Street as he did from 1777 to 1781,
Rowlandson had a wide knowledge of the world of Pleasure:
he was a popular and genial personality, as his self-portrait
very readily tells us. He had the wide eye, the good nose and
sensitive mouth, one of which features at least is usually to
be found in men who understood the art of being worldly and
at the same time of enjoying its practice. He was a desperate
* This etching, with notes regarding the curious mistakes both in names and
dates which it records, is reproduced in The Prize Ring (Country Life), 1925.
58
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND
gambler and is said upon one occasion to have sat for thirty-six
hours at a stretch at the card table. As a lad, he had been to the
same school Dr. Barrow's Academy in Soho Square with
Henry Angelo, who went thence to Eton, and who shared rooms
at No. 13 Old Bond Street with John Jackson the pugilist
champion of England.
In Rowlandson's day the principal print-sellers were Fores,
Tegg, and Ackermann, besides Mrs. Humphreys. The first and
third of these are still represented by members of their respective
families in Piccadilly and Regent Street at the present day.
Rowlandson found an especially good friend in the Mr. Acker-
mann of 1800. He was apt to lose all his money at the card
table, but without regrets he would hold up his reed pen and
assure his friends that it would soon produce more pelf.
Rowlandson was used to strengthening his outlines with a
mixture of vermilion and indian ink. The tint of his pen line is
therefore distinctive without being unique: and yet such is the
stupidity of modern forgers (and since original Rowlandsons have
become valuable in the market, there are many) that they use
plain indian ink, sometimes without even taking the trouble to
dilute it, in making their spurious drawings. This and Rowland-
son's own very infrequent use of large spaces of yellow are two
points, apart from the general character and manner of drawing,
for the collector to bear in mind. One rather notorious " adapter"
of Rowlandson, who was also one of his biographers, was ex-
tremely apt to give himself away by introducing into pictures
large patches of a brightish yellow. Generally, however, pictures
by a master of Rowlandson's measure proclaim their authenticity
by the treatment of line and composition. Moreover, the forgers
are fond of signing their pictures (to increase the value) a thing
that Rowlandson very seldom did.
James Gillray was born in 1757 and worked as a lad as a
letter engraver. The monotony of this labour, however, induced
him to run away with a company of strolling players, in much
the same way as Callot had done nearly two hundred years
before. Creative artists have not seldom shown a disposition to
59
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
prefer vagabondage to the bondage of spirit which is inseparable
from dull, unpromising, and settled occupations. The desire to
roam and to be a rolling stone is yet not to be regarded as the
measure of talent.
Gillray had a quite genuine love of drawing which almost
amounted to genius. " This coarseness and vulgarity," Everitt
says of him, " may be said to be rather the exception than the
rule, whereas the exact contrary holds good of his able and too
often careless contemporary " that is Rowlandson. Leaving
subject out of the question Gillray's technique, vigorous and
masculine, suggests that quality (which writers of the later
nineteenth century found so deplorable) far more strongly than
does Rowlandson's. There was nothing pretty-pretty about
Gillray's work and not that personal character is any too surely
indicated by a man's work, or at all events not obviously in-
dicated James Gillray was a drunkard and a raffish fellow who
descended, as drunkards do, to the most reprehensible tricks in
order to supply funds to spend in taverns. In a miniature
portrait, painted by himself, we seem to see a heavy-eyed weari-
ness, almost despair, which ill accords with the vigour and high
spirits of his work. Here, in the portrait, is a man of great
intellect, but no illusions. It is a sad face.
For a long time he lived in the house of Mrs. Humphreys the
print-seller of Old and New Bond Streets, before she moved to
St. James's Street. He had contracted with her not to sell his
work elsewhere, but it is known that, in order to raise a little
extra money, he disguised his name and manner of drawing on
various occasions and etched plates for Fores of Piccadilly. Some
of his work is signed J. Hurd, some J. Kent, and J. Penn.
In his earliest plates, the scrupulous care of the practised en-
graver is manifest to the detriment of freedom and spontaneity.
Later on his work as a student at the Royal Academy enabled
him to throw off these shackles and to maintain a line which
shows little sign of being cramped. Upwards of twelve hundred
caricatures and satires are known to have been made by him,
the best known being concerned with Napoleon Buonaparte and
60
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND
Josephine, whom, as is generally conceded, he treated pictorially
with the grossest possible injustice. We have John Bull holding
up the dripping severed head of Napoleon on a pitchfork : this
indicating what would happen if he invaded England.
" Ha! my little Boney! What do'st think of Johnny Bull
now? Plunder Old England, hay? Make French slaves of us all,
hay? Ravish all our wives and daughters, hay? O, Lord help that
silly head! To think that Johnny Bull would ever suffer those
lanthorn jaws to become king of Old England's Roast Beef and
Plum Pudding !"
The meaning of this last sentence seems a little difficult to
catch. The " hay " is no doubt aimed at George III who was
always represented as using that form of interrogation in every
sentence that he uttered.
" Hay? Hay? " says the old king, under a caricature, de-
signed to perpetuate the memory of an ancient joke against him.
He is looking into a telescope through an open window at an
old woman making apple dumplings. " Hay? Hay? Apple
dumplings? How get the apples in? How? Are they made
without seams? "
Another drawing is an amusing but extremely cruel carica-
ture of the same monarch, reaching up to whose arm is a dwarf-
like, hideous little woman, intended to be the Queen. This is
called " Royal Affability ", the object of that affability, hat in
hand, being about to feed pigs.
" Well, friend, where a' you going, hay? What's your name,
hay? Where do you live, hay? hay? "
Gillray burlesqued the French Revolution: he dealt with
new fashions as they arose, but his exaggerations were mainly
confined to expression, clothes, and postures, and did not
include to any marked extent the facial peculiarities.
An excellent drawing by Gillray, published in 1796, most
copies of which, however, are greatly spoiled by being clumsily
and tastelessly daubed with water-colour, is called " A Peep at
61
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
Christie's, or Tally-ho and his Nimeney-Pimeney Taking the
Morning Lounge : a study of Lord Derby and Miss Farren (the
Actress), a few months before their marriage enjoying the Fine
Arts, he studying the Death of Reynard, she Zenocrates and
Phryne."
In the background a lady wears a hat with a feather of the
period exaggerated to about the size of her body, standing with
some other people whose costumes are somewhat less eccentric.
The main interest of the print lies in the tall thin figure of the
actress standing beside an absurd tubby dwarf, with an enor-
mous bulging forehead, a nondescript hat loosely set upon it,
spurs, and a crop. Each holds a catalogue and stares at the
respective choice.
In the same year Gillray found an opportunity in a remark
of Lord Kenyon, for satirizing two women of fashion. Mrs.
Hobart (afterwards Lady Buckinghamshire) and Lady Archer
were notorious not only for playing for high stakes, but for
inveigling reckless young men into their houses with that end
in view, and fleecing them. Kenyon, in the Court of King's
Bench, hearing a peculiarly flagrant case which arose from these
ladies' play, observed that he wished women in no matter what
position could, for keeping gambling houses, be put in the pillory.
In those days there would be no delicate restraint from with-
in, nor public opinion pressing from without to keep Gillray
from publishing " The Exaltation of Faro's Daughters ", which
was to be the cure for that type of gambling as prescribed by the
Lord Chief Justice. The two ladies in question are seen with
their necks encircled, looking out from the rough boards of the
pillory, beneath which is pinned a paper bearing Lord Kenyon's
observations. Another caricature was published in that same
year, 1796, by Isaac Cruikshank, the father of George, drawn on
almost exactly the same lines except that it includes the figure of
the learned judge in the foreground. This print is entitled
"Cocking the Greeks".
In personal caricatures Gillray made conspicuous successes of
Grattan, Shelburne, and " Tommy Paine, the American Tailor".
62
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND
George Moutard Woodward, for whom Rowlandson en-
graved some plates, also made a considerable name at this
period, his earliest work appearing in 1792. He was less fortunate
than the others, dying in destitution seventeen years later. Two
years before his death, however, he initiated The Caricature
Magazine, which achieved a certain success.
William Heath excelled in his caricatures of fashion, which
he signed P. Pry : and James Sayer also made a name for himself,
and being under the patronage of Pitt his treatment of Charles
James Fox will readily be imagined. The savagery with which
Fox was caricatured is scarcely equalled by the treatment meted
out even to Napoleon. This is probably due to the fact that a
fellow-countryman is instinctively abler to find the really open
joint in the armour. It is easy to call the general commanding
enemy troops "Boney the Carcase Butcher", and to make a
drawing to match : such a drawing would enjoy the certainty of
popular acceptance, just as in recent times similar (but less
skilful) satires upon the ex-Emperor Wilhelm have delighted
thousands of people to whom that vain, unwise, and disappointed
man was a symbol of brutal enmity.
People in general could know little more of the Kaiser than
they did of Napoleon Buonaparte that little being supplied by
infrequent appearances in this country, for friendly or for
practical purposes, such as Boney never made. But Charles
James Fox could always be seen and not infrequently heard : and
he could be interpreted, or misinterpreted, to the populace with
shrewder venom and real insight.
In this book will be found a caricature " Billy's Political
Plaything " in which Pitt is seen with whip held high about to
beat the severed head of his opponent on a spinning top. This
drawing is a little ferocious, but a most admirable piece of
designing. The caricature was made by Richard Newton, who
lived only from 1777 to 1798, and in his short career made
caricatures and satirical drawings which, few as they are, should
be better known. He was also a painter of portraits in miniature.
Another caricature by him on the fashion prevalent in 1795 * s
63
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
called " The Rage ". A lady is represented in the then new
Directoire style of dress, seen from in front and from behind.
Beneath the drawing is the rhyme :
Shepherds, I have lost my waist!
Have you seen my body ?
Sacrificed to modern taste,
I'm quite a Hoddy-Doddy.
To return for a moment to " Billy's Political Plaything " it
should be added that the caricature, at all events that copy of it
preserved in the Print Room of the British Museum, is most
delightfully coloured, with a simplicity, taste, and clarity which
is extremely uncommon in the hand-colouring of the etchings
and engravings of that time.
In 1810, a Fashion-caricature was made and called " The
Invisibles ", showing women whose faces were entirely hidden
by bonnet and frills : men who could perhaps just see out be-
neath their hats, and over their high stocks. It is interesting to
compare this convention with one of Max Beerbohm, who in
successive caricatures of Lord Spencer, over a number of years,
made his collar higher and higher until at length you see his
eyes, glancing kindly and gravely out through two round holes
in a starchy pillar. Dandy was the name in current use for an
exquisitely dressed man about the year 1819: well-dressed and
over-dressed women were called Dandizettes.
The Hobby-horse, the forerunner of the bicycle, became at
this time a fashionable mania; and we see the Duke of York,
who was Commander-in- Chief, and also, for reasons which
to-day we should regard as insufficient, Prince-Bishop of Osna-
burg, riding one. There had been considerable outcry against
the enormity of the Civil List, a decent proportion of which was
ear-marked for H.R.H. He nevertheless led the van in calling
for economy and here we see him tearing along the road to
Windsor on his hobby in order to save the expense of a stable.
John Bull apostrophizes him :
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND
" Dang it, Mr. Bishop, thee art saving, indeed; thee used to
ride in a coach and six : now I pay thee ten thousand pounds a
year more, thee art riding a wooden horse for all the world like
a gate-post. "
A few years before, Vansittart had introduced a tax on soap,
so that we got a drawing the scene of which is a washhouse,
where the figure of that minister jumps out of a frothing tub to
the amazement of the washerwoman.
" Here I am, Betty; " he says, " How are you off for suds? "
" Lord, Mr. Vansittart! who could have thought of seeing
you in the washing-tub ? "
Francis Grose, whose work was referred to in the first chapter
of this one, lived from about 1731 to 1791. He was the son of
an Irish jeweller, and was elected a member of the Society of
Artists, held the rank of captain in the Surrey Militia, and the
post of Richmond Herald. He goes down to fame almost every
day, if one of his own national bulls be permitted, without being
mentioned by name, for he was " the chiel amang us takin'
notes " of Robert Burns. He made a portrait of himself with a
good deal of obvious caricature in it, leaning on a twisted stick,
with a face and figure that scarcely belie his name.
George Cruikshank is another artist who has been copiously
discussed and whose work as a caricaturist is somewhat over-
shadowed by his better-known and nowadays more popular
work as an illustrator of books. In his youth he finished some of
Gillray's plates for him, when that unfortunate genius went off
his head in 1811. Thackeray in his critical essay on him in the
Westminster Review for June, 1840, speaks of him as the champion
of woman : who had an honest, hearty hatred for everyone who
abused her. For example, Cruikshank took the princess's part
against the Regent. Indeed, it may be said, quite rightly, that
most of the more distinguished caricaturists have been of the
Whiggish persuasion.
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
" Canning, Castlereagh, Bexley, Sidmouth, he is at them, one
and all; and as for the Prince, up to what a whipping-post of
ridicule did he tie that unfortunate old man! And do not let
squeamish Tories cry out about disloyalty; if the Crown does
wrong, the Crown must be corrected by the nation, out of
respect, of course, for the Crown. In those days and by those
people who so bitterly attacked the son, no word was ever
breathed against the father, simply because he was a good
husband, and a sober, thrifty, pious, orderly man."
It is doubtful whether any simple thrift, piety or sobriety
would really have broken the pencil point of the ferocious
satirists of that day, but the old King's infirmities might have
done so; and probably when they had done with the Regent
they had no time for anyone else.
Cruikshank's work between 1811 and 1815 appeared in
periodicals, called respectively The Scourge and The Satirist;
or Monthly Meteor. The Scourge was edited by one Jack Mitford,
a man of education who had fought in the Navy under Nelson
and Hood, and who edited besides The Bon Ton magazine, and
The Quizzical Gazette. He was a loafer, a vagabond, and a
drunkard. For one book of which he was the author his pub-
lisher paid him a shilling a day till he had finished it. Mitford
died in the workhouse.*
Cruikshank contributed his quota to the satires regarding
Napoleon. He directed a most pointed caricature at John Bull
buying stones at the time his numerous family want bread. This
refers to the indemnification by the Government of Lord Elgin
for his much greater expenses in procuring the marbles from the
frieze of the Parthenon at Athens. Like the others Cruikshank
caricatured the fashions with grotesque exaggeration, both of
garments male and female, as well as of faces and figures. So
late as 1850 we find him making fun of crinolines so enormous
that men are handing plates and glasses to women by means of
long sticks on the ends of which are trays.
* Everitt's English Caricaturists.
66
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND
Of Cruikshank's drawings Philip Gilbert Hamerton writes in
his Etching and Etchers : " They are full of keen satire and happy
invention, and their moral purpose is always good ; but all these
qualities are compatible with a carelessness of art, which is not
to be tolerated in anyone but a professional caricaturist/'
There lies implicit the later English attitude to caricature.
Bah! The thing's a caricature: it can be done as badly and as
carelessly as you please. We must reserve our serious endeavours
for the Royal Academy, for pictures of sea-shells in a be-
ribboned basket, for the Sailor's Return, the Soldier's Farewell.
Caricature must never be confused with Art; and it is such a
pity that opportunities for such confusion should arise in the
minds of uninstructed persons, because men like Cruikshank
could draw a bit and displayed a good moral purpose.
The one caricaturist of this period who devoted himself
almost entirely to the face and form of current celebrities was
Robert Dighton, who born about 1752 and who died in 1814.
Many authorities refuse the name of caricaturist to Dighton,
because, it must be presumed, he was the first artist of that kind
to rely on a very slight exaggeration of salient peculiarities, and
who introduced into that form of portraiture a good deal of
subtlety. It is extremely doubtful whether we should feel im-
pelled to say of, for example, the caricature reproduced in this
book " That is the old Don incarnate: that is Oxford," unless
there was some element of over-statement. Most art, whether
writing, or acting, or painting, is to some extent chargt. If it
were not, there is always a question whether we should ever see
the point : and Dighton whose unskilfulness seldom went further
than a certain inability to draw a man's hands, treated their
faces, figures, and clothes with just that slight extravagance
which the connoisseurs of caricature most keenly enjoy.
He was in point of fact a portrait painter as well, and between
1769 and 1773 he exhibited heads done in chalk at the Free
Society of Arts. In 1775 ^ e hung at the Royal Academy a
number of what he called " stain'd drawings "; and two years
later and this shows him without any doubt to have been of
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
the genuinely caricaturish turn of mind " A Drawing of a
Gentleman from Memory ". He seems to have lived all his life
in London, and was the forerunner of some modern carica-
turists in that he classified his subjects by occupation, running
through the Bar, the Army, the Navy, Oxford and Cambridge,
actors and actresses, and other groups.
In 1795 he etched a Book of Heads, exhibiting a number of
men in various walks of life. He signed his etchings R. Dighton,
and Dighton. (His son, Richard, a lesser performer, signed in
full.) Some years before his death it was discovered that he had
removed some prints from the British Museum, a dealer,
named Woodburn, giving evidence before the Trustees to the
effect that he had bought a Rembrandt etching from the carica-
turist. Dighton confessed his guilt and all the prints were
returned.
There is an unusually large collection of Dighton's carica-
tures to be seen in the rooms of Rule's restaurant in Maiden
Lane, near Covent Garden.
After the first decade or so of the nineteenth century, we
find that the polite school of Cruikshank in his later incarnation
and of his followers coming after the fiercely masculine but
sometimes brutal period of the Napoleonic wars, killed carica-
ture and replaced it by Comic Art, into which was infused a little
humane satire and a great deal of inanity. True caricature became
very scarce and has so remained. John Doyle is referred to as
" innocent and amusing " when compared to the previous
masters of " savage vulgarity ". In comic art of his sort there is
little exaggeration, and as we have seen, caricature depends for
its existence on that quality. Current humour lay more and more
in the situation described. Richard Doyle and Robert Seymour,
the illustrator of Pickwick practically never made caricatures.
John Leech, in the early days of Punchy came occasionally within
measurable distance, such as in his drawing of the Duke of
Wellington and Prince de Joinville in 1845; and that of Earl
Russell six years later. It is beside the strict point of the present
purpose, but as du Maurier has been so often called a carica-
68
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND
turist it is worth while observing that his exaggeration of types
a very real and marked exaggeration was due to no intention
of his. He was an ardent and capable apostle of that sentimental
creed which believes in the slight, agreeable falsehood; which
has endeared him, not unnaturally, to a generation which could
look almost anything bravely in the face except a fact.
M. Maurice Barr&s
By Andr6 Rouveyre
Chapter VII
" VANITY FAIR"
WHILE, as various writers have copiously pointed out,
comic art in general became, after the first quarter of
the nineteenth century, " refined " and only gently
satirical, true caricature almost ceased to exist until Vanity
Fair was founded by Thomas Gibson Bowles in 1868; and
Vanity Fair, so long as the paper is remembered, will always be
associated with the name of its most considerable regular contri-
butor, the outstanding caricaturist of the Victorian era, Carlo
Pellegrini.
This brilliant but kindly satirist was born at Capua in 1839,
being on the distaff side descended from the Medici family. As
a young man he was much seen in Neapolitan society and his
happy knack of making caricatures was much admired. He
volunteered and fought with Garibaldi at Capua and Volturno.
But, the path of true love being too rough for him, he left Italy
for England in November 1864. Five years later he became a
regular caricaturist employed constantly by Vanity Fair. He
had done a certain amount of work over the signature Singe, but
from his first connexion with Vanity Fair used the equivalent,
now so familiar to us, Ape. In Forty Years of " Spy", the late
Sir Leslie Ward, the other caricaturist for so long attached to
Vanity Fair, tells us how when he joined that paper he and
Pellegrini for some time shared the task of making caricatures
between them.
The Italian was a small stout fastidious man, something of a
dandy, who invariably wore white spats and immensely long
finger-nails, like a Chinese mandarin. He and Spy became friends
and the younger man tells us how his rival, never very strong,
70
" VANITY FAIR"
probably debilitated himself by steadfastly refusing to walk any-
where when he could take a cab. Amongst his odder accomplish-
ments Pellegrini could lie in an armchair and hold a cigar in his
mouth while he not only slept, but snored.
As to method, Pellegrini, like others of his craft, would make
as many preliminary sketches as might be required before he
was satisfied. He would then make a tracing from the study
which pleased him best. In this way he insured a firm and steady
line such as could be well and clearly reproduced on a stone;
but this must have mitigated very severely the spontaneity of the
drawing.
Ape's first caricature in Vanity Fair was of Disraeli, whom
he makes to look like a theatrical impresario. The following week
he made one of Mr. Gladstone, who is unconscionably dour.
During the next twenty years the caricatures in Vanity Fair were
labelled for the most part Statesmen and Men of the Day. Ape
drew almost entirely from memory, as does his great successor
Max. He personally regarded as his most successful caricatures
those of Baron Brunnow and of Lord Stanley, afterwards Earl
of Derby. " Brunnow " is indeed a magnificent design a
stoutish elderly gentleman, bald, with an enormous ear, and a
huge slit of good-humoured mouth: the eyes are cunning, and
the drawing as such, regarded just as a pattern upon paper,
instantly catches the eye, and compels the attention. Of the
Lord Stanley you say, as good caricatures so often call upon you
to say, when you have no knowledge of the originals " That
must be good " which simply means that the artist has put
character into his drawing. In this case the stalwart shoulders
are set back, lifting the coat right away from the shirt-collar.
Exaggeration is manifest, but you know that an exaggeration of
this sort is bound to be founded upon fact. The famous carica-
ture of the Earl of Dudley with the long curled hair hiding his
ears looks something between Beau Brummel and a spaniel. It
is extremely interesting to perceive in a caricature also made in
1869 of the then Lord Chelmsford a likeness to his living kins-
man the artist-actor Mr. Ernest Thesiger. Dr. Frederick Quin,
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
the famous homoeopathist, who on account of his conversion to
that form of medical procedure, was most vigorously black-
balled by the Athenaeum Club, must have been, as we say, a
caricature to start with. A man much liked, a favourite in society,
Dr. Quin looks out of the caricature with minute widely set eyes,
twinkling with good humour, a grotesquely upturned nose, and
a mouth which stretches from ear to ear. It is one of those out-
rageously ugly faces which positively attract you. Pellegrini may
have made the man uglier than did nature, but he served him
well. It would be impossible to think otherwise than with
affection and trust of anyone who in such reliable hands could
inspire such a portrait.
In 1874 Vanity Fair published a singularly fine caricature of
Algernon Charles Swinburne, with his aureole of red hair, his small
queer beard, his prosaic clothes, his hands behind him and one foot
kicking against the other. " Before Sunrise " is printed beneath
the lithograph. For this drawing he made a study upon blotting-
paper which had already been used for its ordinary purpose. A
reproduction of this study, which is of considerable interest,
appears among the illustrations here. The original piece of
blotting-paper is the property of Mr. William Nicholson, who
reproduced it in The Winter Owl* of 1923, and who has given
me leave to use it again here. One of his most searching cari-
catures was of General Gordon. This almost exactly complements
Mr. Strachey's account of that officer in Eminent Victorians.
Ape hardly ever descended as did Spy to mere portraiture.
Through the medium of exaggeration of one sort or another he
always made his comment, was amusing, occasionally a little
acid. He is said to have been invariably fair.
Pellegrini was only fifty-three when he died in January of
1889. The last drawing that he made was a caricature of Edison,
the inventor. This was not published.
In April of the same year a drawing of him signed by a
hieroglyphic consisting of the letters A. J. M. and standing for
* The Winter Owl. Edited by Robert Graves and William Nicholson. (Cecil
Palmer.) 1923.
72
"VANITY FAIR"
Arthur J. Marks, appeared in Vanity Fair as the weekly carica-
ture : and we see a good-humoured, fat little man with a bifurcated
reddish-grey beard, a slight cast in his eye, the inevitable cigar,
and the finger-nails. An admirable rough impression of Pelle-
grini, emphasizing his gait, was made once by Degas.
If he did not inspire Sir Leslie Ward, who in his reminis-
cences rather heatedly denies that extremely soft impeachment,
he has undoubtedly pointed the way to others. Max's first book
of caricatures was dedicated to his shade.
Max himself contributed very little to Vanity Fair, his best-
remembered drawing for that paper being one of George Mere-
dith, with huge eyes and uplifted finger, seeming perhaps to
listen to skylarks.
Contemporaneous with Pellegrini, but surviving him for
many years was Mr. (later Sir Leslie) Ward, who over the signa-
ture of Spy, contributed to Vanity Fair from 1873 unt il just
before the Great War, when the paper in its old form ceased to
exist. In an article in an early number of Vanity Fair Spy was
himself caricatured and Jehu Junior, who wrote the accompany-
ing letterpress to all the plates, suggested that in years to come a
wonderful book of reminiscences should await the public,
when Ward looked back at the long career upon which he had
just set out. In 1915 this book* was published not long before
the author's death. The pseudonym, he tells us, came when dis-
cussing that quite important detail with Gibson Bowles. The
editor handed him a dictionary and suggested that he should
hunt up a name then and there. The dictionary opened at the
s's, and the matter was speedily settled. Of Spy's work for
Vanity Fair almost only the earliest can be called caricature at
all. His first contribution in 1873 was " Old Bones ", which was
the nickname given to Professor Owen. You see a huge hat, a
rugged stick, untidy clothes. It is very like photographs of the
old gentleman, but it suggests only good humour, and does not
begin to hint at intellect. His Anthony Trollope of the same year
was a good caricature as was the " Abb6 Liszt " of 1886. But
* Forty Years of" Spy ". By Leslie Ward. (Chatto and Windus.) 1915.
73
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
gradually and, presumably owing to the portrait painting to which
the artist gave more and more time as he grew older, the carica-
turish element almost entirely departed from his work for
Vanity Fair, until we get, in 1907, a perfectly plain, straight-
forward, and quite uninspired likeness of (then Mr.) Chartres
Biron, the magistrate. Referring to the caricature of Liszt, Sir
Leslie Ward tells us in his book that Boehm made a bust of that
great composer, and actually left out the warts which adorned
his face. Spy is here discussing the propriety of dealing faith-
fully with physical blemishes of that kind, which, as he rightly
points out, are as essential to a man's appearance, or at all events
were in that instance, as his eyes and mouth. But that is one of
the points which the public, not greatly caring for the art, is
unable to understand. And there is an instance of the wife of a
celebrity who begged a caricaturist to omit her husband's
smoked glasses without which, however, he was never seen.
One of the most distinguished caricaturists of the years
round about 1900 was an amateur, who, over the signature
A o, abbreviated from Armadillo, made a few contributions of
outstanding excellence to Vanity Fair. One of them is to be found
among the illustrations to this book. It is always a matter of deep
regret to the enthusiastic student of the subject that so much
brilliant work of this kind exists only in private collections. A o
was in private life the late Roland le Strange, the head, though
only for the last few months of his life, of the ancient Norfolk
family. He might very easily have made a great name for himself,
for he had the technical ability to set down exactly what his
perceiving eye took in. There was no trickery about his work,
no wild exaggeration; but always he threw that little extra
emphasis upon the outward physical signs of the inward and
spiritual character, which is the subtlest form of caricature. He
only made drawings when he wanted to and of people who
interested him a personal friend or two, some jockeys, and so
forth. The professional caricaturist, if he be regularly working
for a paper, is handicapped in this regard : he is constantly being
required to caricature notabilities of the moment for whom he
74
" VANITY FAIR"
can induce in himself no sort of interest ; and his work suffers
accordingly. The caricature reproduced here is of Admiral Sir
Harry Keppel. It is called, simply, " 94 "; that being the age
of the subject in October, 1903, when the drawing appeared in
Vanity Fair. The original, from which the lithograph for that
periodical was made, was given by the artist to Queen Alexandra.
People who dislike caricature, who are squeamish in their
acceptance of simple, unavoidable facts, find offence in an
artist who draws attention to the signs and infirmities of a great
old age, as A o certainly has done here. This point of view is
easy to understand only if the impartial observer to-day fully
realizes the amazing hatred of truth, which happens to be in
the least degree regrettable or sad, burning in the hearts of
sentimentalists. And yet how otherwise could this and analogous
caricature have been made, even by (though that is not to the
point) a personal friend? The subject was a very old man: he
looked just as he looks in this caricature, less the small margin of
subtle over-statement which differentiates it from an " aca-
demic " portrait. The sentimentalists, we suppose, would have
his head erect, his arms akimbo, his blue eyes sparkling with
youthful ardour. But that is the difficulty with people of this
kind of artistic creed.
The only quality to which they allow over-emphasis is
sweetness. Its antithesis whether infirmity or deformity must
be left out. The retreating forehead must be ennobled ; eyes that
Nature has set much too near together, must be widely separated
to look out with wholesome and generous sincerity. And the
" point " of a face, unless it be of a Greek God or an expensive
doll, must be missed. The process of thought involved (if it can
be called such) is precisely the same as that which urges a
mother to arrange in love-locks the untidy hair, to set a clean,
uncomfortable and unaccustomed collar about a rebellious neck,
of the street urchin who is to have his picture took.
75
Chapter VIII
CONTINENTAL CARICATURE
IN despite of James Peller Malcolm's declaration, made in
1813, that no other country than England has encouraged the
art of caricature because " no other portion of the globe
enjoys equal freedom", people enthusiastically interested in
caricature invariably turn sooner or later to the Continental
Press, old as well as modern; and to pamphlets and books, in
which that art has been encouraged to satisfy the pleasure in
satire which in England can only be obtained on rare occasions,
and at some inconvenience by visiting an exhibition in London,
or by buying expensive books.
Since Malcolm's day more colour has been lent to his asser-
tion regarding the freedom of the Press : that we shall come to
in its turn. But provided that the English observer can submit
his insular prejudices to the discipline of humour and can enjoy
a little satire, be it subtle or savage, directed against himself, as
he may have to do from time to time, he will find an enormous
mine for research where skill, elegance, wit, humour, deep
feeling, and laughter pure and simple, have been diligently ex-
ploited by a number of artists who, to the lover of caricature,
have, especially during the nineteenth century, excelled our
artists at every point.
The way in which one nation is perceived by another through
the medium of caricature tells more to the victim than it does
to the compatriots of the artist. English, Italians, Frenchmen,
Spaniards, and Germans have their national conventions for
foreigners. These have been built up out of an old and very
slowly changing tradition. The Germans usually see us as tall,
thin, with heavy moustaches, with somewhat protruding teeth.
We see Italians only in terms of the Neapolitan organ-grinder
76
CONTINENTAL CARICATURE
who is no more representative of Italy than a cretinous Welshman
is of England, and so on.
In the essay already quoted, Thackeray, in praise of George
Cruikshank, expatiates on that artist's attitude towards the French.
" ... It must be confessed that for that great nation Mr.
Cruikshank entertains a considerable contempt. Let the reader
examine the ' Life in Paris', or the five hundred designs in
which Frenchmen are introduced, and he will find them almost
invariably thin, with ludicrous spindle-shanks, pigtails, out-
stretched hands, shrugging shoulders, and queer hair and
moustachios. He has the British idea of a Frenchman: and if
he does not believe that the inhabitants of France are for the
most part dancing-masters and barbers, yet takes care to depict
such in preference, and would not speak too well of them. It is
curious how these traditions endure. In France, at the present
moment (1840), the Englishman on the stage is the caricatured
Englishman at the time of the war, with a shock red head, a long
white coat, and invariable gaiters. Those who wish to study this
subject, should peruse Monsieur Paul de Kock's histories of
1 Lord Boulingrog ' and ' Lady Crockmilove ' . . . We doubt
if a good- British gallery would believe that such and such a
character was a Frenchman unless he appeared in the ancient
traditional costume."
And, nearly a century later, we find that the " stage-French-
man ", as often as not, and nearly always the Frenchman of the
comic illustrated paper, is attired in a top-hat that in France
would be regarded as an interesting antique ; and the floppy bow
chiefly worn nowadays by American art students who have
heard of Murger at third hand. But how, if the reader of Punch
were to see a drawing of an ordinary foreigner as he is, without
a moustache like Napoleon III and all the rest of the stock
properties, how would he know that a foreigner was intended?
So both sides have to put up with all kinds of little injustices
and misrepresentations which do no harm at all.
77
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
Continental caricature followed, with the necessary differ-
ences of outlook, the same broad lines as the English during the
eighteenth century. But whereas with the death of Dighton and
the others and with the translation of Cruikshank from carica-
ture to book illustration, the art in England passed for a time
into complete abeyance, the same period in France became extra-
ordinarily rich in brilliant satire. Before this, however, the end of
the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth pro-
duced little caricature of extreme distinction. Previous to 1830,
the majority of satires were impersonal and with certain excep-
tions to be mentioned were childish, vulgar, and incompetent.
Unfortunately much of the best caricature of the end of the
century not only in France, but in Germany, was anonymous.
Some of it had need to be.
The French Revolution produced caricatures both native and
foreign of extreme bitterness on both sides. That was natural.
But at the same time, or at all events, just before the Revolution
and just after, all the usual crazes and follies of the moment
were extensively dealt with. In 1785 we see the coiffure of ladies
of fashion so enormously exaggerated that a carpenter must
needs build a species of scaffolding within the wig, in order to
hold it in position. In another a lady is found to be storing all
her household goods, including a dog or two, in the colossal
contraption which arises from her brow.
In 1776 Hubert made a plate of thirteen heads of Voltaire,
in various wigs, caps, and guises; but mostly with the same
expression. This is strongly reminiscent of the plate of Characters
and Caricatures made by Hogarth, somewhat earlier. There are
companion engravings of the Revolution showing UAristocrate
and La Democrate, two women suitably clothed to typify the
opposing orders, though it is, oddly enough, extremely difficult
to say on which side the artist had ranged himself: for the old
aristocratic woman bitterly sneering and bedizened, looks to-
wards the complementary engraving, in which a simply attired
girl is given the face of a fiend incarnate.
German caricaturists at this time, such as Goz, made delight-
78
CONTINENTAL CARICATURE
fully amusing satires upon the fashions exquisite old gentle-
men with beribboned walking-sticks, smiling girls in enormous
hats. While, a little earlier, Pier Leone Ghezzi in Italy had made
a maliciously clever caricature of the secretary of the Elector of
Saxony.
! The best fashion caricatures were drawn by Frenchmen, such
as Carle Vernet, Chataigner, and especially Isabey the elder, who
made the companion pictures illustrating contrasts, which show
a deformed but beautifully attired dwarf, taking the arm of a
fine and buxom young woman. Au contraire, a big strapping man
leads by the hand a gorgeously dressed female with the figure
of a prize pig.
The best of Isabey's caricatures is a satire of fashion made
in 1798 and called " Petit- Coblentz". This is a most exquisitely
coloured drawing and a supremely fine combined caricature of
various notabilities. There is Napoleon, as we never see him
drawn in England, with a prodigious jutting chin; Talleyrand in
a stock which nearly hides his mouth, beautifully attired in a
striped purple coat and yellow waistcoat ; Madame Recamier, her
face entirely hidden by her bonnet, is given a figure like a lamp-
post, draped from the cross-bar downwards in a Directoire gown ;
she takes the arm of Garat, who dances a- tiptoe, his ugly super-
cilious face looking, with the arrangement of his wig, precisely
like a sheep, as does Bestris too, looking across at them through
folding glasses ; Murat lounges in the background ; and the artist
represents himself as a pale and miserable Hebrew on the ex-
treme left of the picture. The colours of the various costumes
are most delicately washed in, and in the background tall houses
are deftly simplified. The caricature is meant to satirize the rise
of the parvenu after the Revolution. It is not too much to say that
its cruelty combined with elegance has never been excelled. It
is a superb example of true personal caricature.
The English in Paris in 1802 are caricatured by Carle Vernet,
who contented himself with fashions and aspects of Society, and
who was quite uninterested in politics. He gives the visitors in
this caricature the most ungainly and untidy clothes: the men
79
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
have coats which do not fit, the women are either overdressed or
mere bundles of wraps: their faces are hideous. It was not to be
expected that tourists from this side of the Channel would,
during that brief peace, be exactly welcome.
At this period we have a number of French caricaturists
illustrating Les Merveilleuses and Les Incroyables, corresponding
to the Dandizettes and Dandies in England. Their fashions were
delightfully preposterous, and are suitably dealt with. After the
Restoration in Paris, satirists formed the habit of placing
weathercocks after the names of various turn-coats. Talleyrand,
the Yellow Dwarf, had six weathercocks. He was also, in 1817,
caricatured as The Man with Six Heads, depicted variously as
Republican, Napoleonic Minister, a Bishop, and so forth. The
head facing the observer shouts " Vive le Roi", the Bishop calls
out " Vive les Notables ", another " Vive le i er Consul".
Gaudissart made capital out of Cambaceres, and in several
drawings he greatly exaggerates his shortness of stature and
girth. In one drawing he is accompanied by the Marquis d'Aigre-
feuille, and by de la Villevielle. d'Aigrefeuille also was fat, and
he and Cambaceres are represented by complete circles: they
entirely hide the thin form of Villevielle, whose mean, severe
face just shows on the left of the composition. But with the
exception of Isabey there was no great caricaturist until the
'thirties.
In 1830 Charles Philipon, himself a young man, gathered
around him an array of talent which, in that especial respect,
was the greatest, although at the time fortuitous, journalistic
triumph that has ever been known. His contributors numbered
amongst them Decamps, Grandville (whose real name was
G6rard), Monnier, Travies (Charles Joseph Travies de Villers),
Gavarni (Sulpice Paul Chevalier), and Honore Daumier; the
last of whom would have given imperishable fame to any editor
who had the insight to employ him.
On November 4th of that year Philipon brought out the first
number of La Caricature, and Daumier used that paper in order
to express opinions which were Republican without being
80
CONTINENTAL CARICATURE
vulgar. He began work for that journal in 1832, a Proven?al by
birth, a lithographer by trade, and, but twenty-four years of age,
he sprang into some sort of notoriety at once. It cannot >e called
fame, for his work was not immediately appreciated, and there
was no very evident reason why it should be. He was not amaz-
ingly precocious and he began with a modest effort, which did
not seem to make any extravagant promises for his future. The
caricature in question was called " Gargantua ", and represented
Louis Philippe seated on his throne and swallowing bags of
money, extracted from the people by attendant ministers. These
bags were carried from the ground up an inclined board to his
open mouth. On the ground below a crowd of miserables are
handing over their cash. For this satire Daumier was imprisoned
from September of that year until the following February. A
writer in La Caricature of August 3Oth, 1832, tearfully de-
scribes him as having been arrested under the eyes of a father
and mother whose only support he was. And M. Champfleury
refers to his imprisonment for the love of art. This is, perhaps, a
slightly picturesque rendering of the case.
Casimir Perier, President of the Chamber of Deputies, had
given orders to the law officers to keep up incessant prosecutions
against the Republican journals. Philipon knew perfectly well
what he was about. He was a man of great pluck and inex-
haustible energy. A caricature of him by Benjamin gives no idea
of the extremely good-looking man, whom, M. Champfleury
tells us, people stopped to look at in the street. The caricature
emphasizes all the elements in a keen and humorous face which
suggest intellect, mingled with a certain self-satisfied amusement.
It is just the face you would, judging him from his record,
expect that great editor to have. In one year only La Caricature
was the object of fifty-four actions, so Perier's instructions were
evidently carried out. La Caricature died, and its place was taken
by Le Charivari. Philipon, it was, who invented the famous
pear which Louis Philippe's head was supposed to resemble.
Upon a page of La Caricature appears first a somewhat exag-
gerated portrait of the bourgeois monarch. He had heavy cheeks
81 G
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
and a multiplicity of chins : his head was somewhat narrowed to
a point, A second head loses a little detail, and his hair is made
to grow into a sharper apex above his forehead : in the third the
hair is beginning to look like a leaf and still more detail disappears
from the face. In the fourth hair and whiskers have become leaves
and the pear is complete.
Travi&s and Wattier had led off by drawing attention to this
resemblance, and Daumier made a somewhat gross caricature
of Lafayette asleep on a sofa with a colossal pear weighing on his
chest. Prosecution followed automatically, whereupon Philipon
in Le Charivari (February zyth, 1834) wrote an account on the
title-page of that journal of the various judgments under which
he had suffered ; and he had the article set up by the printer in
the shape of the now inevitable pear. Philipon was continually
being put into gaol ; issues of his paper constantly being seized ;
and a less obstinate man or a less courageous one would have
long ago given in: but he never did. He fought for his principles
throughout his life.
In order to point their opinions, Philipon and his staff in-
vented a number of characters which were to be the butts, the
Aunt-Sallys to be set up for public ridicule. Thus Daumier made
a puppet of Robert Macaire, who had been the chief character
in a play of that name, which was suppressed as being political
burlesque. Macaire has a foil in Bertrand who played a despic-
able Dr. Watson to his Sherlock Holmes. There was the Joseph
Prudhomme of Monnier; Mayeux, an evil dwarf of Travi&s
(though Daumier occasionally lent a hand with him) ; the Thomas
Vireloque of Gavarni. This last was a kind of tramp-Diogenes:
the dwarf Mayeux was symbolical of all the vices : Macaire was
an impudent adventurer, the swindler of the stupid : Prudhomme
the typical burgess. These last two have so passed into the
French language that they are not infrequently referred to as
actual, historical characters.
Honor6 Daumier had that temper of mind, kindly but
ferocious when needs be; he loved to lash social evils, he
hated sham of all kinds, and he ruthlessly eliminated every
82
CONTINENTAL CARICATURE
taint of the sentimental from his work. He stuck to the truth,
as he saw it, even when he chose to depict a child dead by the
roadside. There is a certain tincture of caricature in almost all
that he did, though besides general social satires, he made from
time to time definitely personal caricature-portraits of individual
people. He was a beautiful draughtsman, with a style so original
and distinct that his work may be said to shout his name down
the length of any long gallery where it is hung. His high lights,
his bony faces, his delicious sweeping curves, his treatment of
hair, the joy he took in the folds of a stock, or the lines of a
well-cut coat are entirely unmistakable. His early and unfortunate
experience of the courts of law helped him, no doubt, to specialize
in the legal scenes for which he is probably most famous.
In his history of Modern France, Monsieur Emile Bourgeois
tells us that " in the comic papers, especially in the Charivari,
Daumier, with fecundity and a vigour which spared no one,
and a talent to which the greatest had to do homage, branded
and exposed the middle-class, its types, its oddities, its preju-
dices of all sorts. A Republican from the first, the advocate of
every kind of liberty, in art as in politics, the foe of every re-
striction behind which private interest and satisfied selfishness
could shelter themselves. ..." And, says M. Bourgeois, " war
was declared between the c Joseph Prudhommes ' (of Monnier),
worthies, whom nothing would have induced to give their
daughters to ' scribblers ', and the men of culture who were more
interested in the common folk with all their roughness and
ignorance."
In short, the point of view of Monnier and Daumier was,
in despite of their republicanism, the aristocratic point of view.
Louis Philippe was widely known as the Bourgeois King. His
ideals were somewhat smug, he was eminently respectable.
Looking back at that time both in France and in England it has
long been customary to mock the renaissance of Puritanism
which we call " Victorian morality", without honest inquiry as
to what in it was of permanent value : and the mockers can no
longer be dismissed by their elders on the score of youth.
83
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
The Sovereign and her court set the fashion in England for
the majority of the people, or at all events the majority of
moderately prosperous people, and the temper of the age was
willing to accept the ideal set before them, without too close a
scrutiny, as a convenient form of Christian life, perhaps rather
prosaically adapted to our modern national disposition. But in
France as well as England it was the age which saw also the
authentication of the middle-class, who found in this fashion
or example, whether exerted by the young Queen, or old Louis
Philippe, a safeguard against relapse into the masses from which
they had recently sprung, and which they now regarded with
hatred and with fear: and who perceived in this example an
antidote to the aristocratic cynicism which they mistrusted, and,
at a distance, adored. To be sure that honesty was the best
policy, to rank safety as a condition of virtue, to find something
intrinsically admirable in the possession of wealth these were
among the cardinal persuasions of that great class, French and
English, who looked to their respective monarchs so positively
as of themselves.
To be perfectly fair it should be added that the mockers
usually make hypocrisy the chief count in their indictment of
Victorian morality, just as though the cant of that and every
other age were invariably deliberate, and as though it were not
better, being human, to fall short of an ideal than to have no
ideal at all. Of actually fraudulent piety that era was not greatly
more prolific than the present or the remoter past. It was only
a great deal more squeamish in the expression of its opinions;
anyhow in England.
On the other hand, people were too prone to believe that
everything done within the law was right and they were able
to take the fullest advantage of it. They were quite " moral ",
and perhaps herein lies the difference between morality and
virtue, for the bare bones of the rule are insufficient to the
virtuous.
In France, then, Philipon and his lieutenants acted as a
wholesome scourge to this self-complacency. They whipped the
CONTINENTAL CARICATURE
burgess from the suburb to the office (in a manner of speaking
and as it would be in England) and home again. They were
genuinely humane. In England we were not so fortunate.
Not that Daumier by any means confined himself to lashing
the respectable citizen: humbug of every description was his
prey. He was a genial, large-hearted artist, with a righteous
but never self-righteous scorn.
Occasionally he modelled figures which were cast in bronze,
and his Ratapoil a kind of raggamuffin Buonapartisan is an
extreme rarity, much longed for by eminent collectors. There
were once, also, according to M. Geoffroy, who described them
in UArt et les Artistes in 1905, thirty-eight clay models in
existence.
The Robert Macaire series continued between 1835 and 1839 ;
but Le Charivari printed most of Daumier's lithographs for
forty years. The point of most of the Macaire jests has now
passed into oblivion.
The Anglo-Saxon attitude towards the incomparable art of
that period is typified by Mr. Thackeray, who, putting his hand,
as it were, upon Daumier's head, observed that if he would
think more and exaggerate less he would add not a little to his
reputation.
From 1860 onwards to his death in 1879, Daumier gave a
great deal of his time to painting.
Travies was a contemporary of the greater man, but died
practically of starvation twenty years before him. His life was
an unhappy one : he was tormented by physical infirmities, and
his political caricatures reflected the temper of his mind, and
there was generally a little poison at the end of his pen. Charles
Baudelaire in his Curiosites d'Esthetiques gives an account of
Mayeux, that evil dwarf, who struts and postures with savage
grin, who puts on a cocked hat and staring at an effigy of Napo-
leon, says to himself how like he is. Travies illustrated Balzac
and in the Salon exhibited portraits of no great distinction.
Another brilliant disciple of Philipon was Gavarni, who began
life as a mechanic. Theophile Gauthier, who was his friend,
85
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
describes him as good-looking and a dandy, a highly civilized
person. As a young man he made a series of bitter caricatures of
Charles X, but later realized with great regret that this was a
somewhat spiteful proceeding against a helpless old gentleman
in exile. A storm of abuse, especially on this side of the Channel,
and the other side of the Atlantic, greeted Gavarni 's treatment
of women. His jests about them, however, were not for the most
part caricatures at all.
" It were as unjust, " says Mr. Parton, " ... to judge the
frugal people of France by the comic annuals as the good-
natured people of England by the Saturday Review"* And in
another place he says of Gavarni :
" Loose women, who are, as a class, very stupid, very
vulgar, most greedy of gain and pleasure, and totally devoid of
every kind of interesting quality, he endowed with a grace and
wit, a fertility of resource, an airy elegance of demeanour, never
found except in honourable women reared in honourable homes. "
These are unexceptionable sentiments, but Mr. Parton had
forgotten Mrs. Mary Anne Clarke, Madame de Pompadour, and
Rahab.
And Mr. Everitt, writing of Gustave Bore's " ghastly
illustrations to the licentious Contes Drolatiques of Balzac "
being " cited in proof of his claims to be considered a carica-
turist ", continues " I will not deny that Dore did try his hand
once upon a time at caricature, and if we are to judge him by
these attempts, we should pronounce him the worst French
caricaturist the world ever saw, which would be saying a good
deal ; for a worse school than that of the modern French carica-
turists (and I do not except even Gavarni, Cham, or Daumier),
does not anywhere exist."
Comment is paralysed.
Referring to caricature of the unfortunate Charles X whilst
in exile, one by Philipon himself is harmless enough a mask
* Without prejudice. B. L.
86
CONTINENTAL CARICATURE
with the exaggerated show of teeth, and loose drooping underlip.
But one by Alexandre Decamps, though extremely clever, is
revoltingly cruel. The exiled King at Holyrood is seated in a
cushioned armchair in dressing-gown and night-cap blazing
away with a miniature gun at a toy rabbit which is being drawn
across the floor on wheels by a lackey. The face, a good physical
caricature, is yet made to suggest extreme imbecility.
Fairer is an anonymous drawing of 1830 of Charles as a
lobster in ermine, with the crown tumbled off his head and
lying on the floor. And without offence too is one by Travi&s
labelled " Patisserie Royale ", in which the King, dressed as a
baker, holds some minute loaves upon a board.
Even Mr. Parton, after a long disquisition, part of which has
already been quoted on the cynically improper predilections of
Gavarni cannot resist quoting one of his jokes, published in the
'seventies in a Parisian paper.
A vivacious young woman, viciously smoking a cigarette,
asks a page-boy who wishes to be engaged by her how old he
is? " Eleven, Madame." " And your name? " " Joseph." " So
young, and already he calls himself Joseph! "
This dialogue was adapted twenty years later by the famous
" Pitcher " of the Pink y un.
Gustave Dore, who was born in 1832, began life as a carica-
turist in the Journal pour Rire. He satirized types rather than
individuals, and his fame in this respect has been obscured by
the deplorable paintings of his later life. When he was content to
point the contrasts between the audience at a theatre full of
excited enthusiasm and one that is asleep with boredom he is
quite amusing. In 1868 he drew a series of Historical Cartoons ,
the descriptive text of which was supplied by Thomas Wright.
The sub-title is " Rough pencillings of the World's History from
the First to the Nineteenth Century ".In this book he too dealt
with " Les Incroyables " of 1798, giving the men a greatly
exaggerated height, as he usually did, twisted sticks, and pre-
posterously long crescent hats. He compared the fashions of
1830 with those of 1840, describing exquisitely turned-out
8?
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
dandies with dainty women rowing about on a lake, serene and
dignified, with a crowd of ragamuffins capering on the floor
of a studio dressed as students with mushroom caps and enor-
mous flopping bows. The essence of this sort of comparison has
recurred at intervals since then and is a stock form of entertain-
ment in the pages of modern Punch.
Italy during the nineteenth century contributed extremely
little to the history of caricature. In 1848 a weekly satirical paper
// Don Pirlone was soon suppressed. Pirlone was a familiar
character in Italian farce, occupying an analogous position to
Robert Macaire in France. The paper was directed against the
Pope, who in one drawing is seen riding a monstrous bird, in
the fork of whose dragon's tail is held the papal crown. The bird
has four heads intended to represent respectively France, Austria,
Spain, and the infamous Bomba. In that year the French, under
General Oudinot, occupied Rome and the paper ceased to exist.
Another political caricaturist was Ratalanga who at the end
of the century made personal caricatures, in black and white, of
a number of statesmen such as Crispi and Giolitti. They are not
without a suggestion of the contemporary work of Caran D'Ache.
Returning to France, Cham (whose real name was Amedee
de Noe, son of the Comte of that name, and hence the pseu-
donym Cham, or Shem son of Noah), was another spasmodic
caricaturist who devoted most of his energy, however, to general
comic art.
Dantan made very clever caricatures of Paganini, Victor
Hugo, Dumas the elder, and Liszt. The first and last of these
being drawn in silhouette, with white lines giving the necessary
detail, just as though they were rubbings from church brasses.
Coming to times of recent memory one of the most brilliant
of the crueller French caricaturists was Charles Leandre. His
is the true art, searching the very soul by means of exaggera-
tion, which varies in intensity according to the qualities that
he wishes to exhibit. The humour and quiet content which
he managed to suggest in Monsieur Coquelin aint is wholly
contained in the long upper lip. The raised eyebrows of Monsieur
CONTINENTAL CARICATURE
Clemenceau as caricatured by him in 1898 hint at calm reflection,
an outlook undimmed by any illusions, while the mouth demon-
strates the Tiger. Zola, his bearded chin resting on a pile of
books, his left eye greatly magnified by his pince-nez, gazing into
the infinite, his moustache drawn up on one side to indicate
a snarl, smashes down his quill pen with a vigorous right hand
into a little pool of ink. The caricatures by which Leandre is best
remembered, not with affection, in this country, were of Queen
Victoria. Regarded as drawings, as suggested likenesses, they
are incomparable. They appeared in Le Rire at the time of the
South African War.
Andre Gill (Gosset de Guine) who lived from 1840 to 1885
made a number of interesting caricatures. There is Richard
Wagner in 1869 splitting a huge ear with a hammer and a chisel
which is composed of a crotchet. Gambetta is spitefully and
Thiers amusingly dealt with by him. In one drawing of the latter,
a tiny, bespectacled, benevolent, elderly gentleman stands hand
on hip right down in the corner of the page, casting behind him
an enormous shadow in which his features are repeated in profile.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the most brilliant
French caricature of a political nature was made by Caran
D'Ache (which is the Russian for pencil: his real name being
Emmanuel Poiree), and Forain. Both of these artists dealt more
in general satire than in personalities, but their work in both
kinds was of great brilliance: and together they illustrated a
short-lived periodical during 1898 and 1899, dealing mainly
with the Dreyfus scandal, and known by the engaging name of
Psst! The work of these two men was extraordinarily diverse.
Forain had an untidy, scratchy technique, spontaneous, full of
vitality. Caran D'Ache was finished, neat, precise. In his general
satires he exaggerated wildly. When the lieutenant, showing his
corporal how to utter the word of command, opens his mouth, the
ranks fall prostrate back, the houses in the square are shattered.
Of social caricature, the chief practitioner was and still is
Monsieur Georges Goursat, who, under the name of Sem, has
long achieved a wide fame. For the last few years he has made
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
a speciality of the visitors to Deauville, and hanging in Giro's
Club in London there is a very fine collection of his work. Sem
can, when he chooses, be almost viciously cruel: and Argentine
merchants and other people who display inordinate wealth in
France are appropriately dealt with. In one caricature we have
a visitor to the Ritz in Paris, exclaiming of another: " It is the
Comte de Chester! " " No," says the waiter, " That is the
Prince de Galles! " And the shade of Napoleon I toasts H.R.H.
in Dry Monopole.
We see the Agha Khan as himself, we see him as a stout
fish; and here is the King of Spain, set in a favourable light;
there Ferdinand, late of Bulgaria, with the obvious emphasis
laid upon his nose.
On one occasion many years ago Sem paid a visit to New-
market and made a series of caricatures of all sorts of people
whom he saw beside the course, without any knowledge as to
who or what they were. He cannot speak a word of English, and
he merely made drawings of faces and figures that attracted him.
It is interesting to know that at the end of the day, when he
showed the drawings to an English friend, there was not one
to which the latter could not put a name. His gift for reading
and recording character is so acute as to be positively dangerous.
Monsieur Andre Rouveyre made a series of caricatures,
originally published in the Mercure de France between 1908 and
I 9 I 3> which were called Visages des Contemporains* These
drawings, says M. de Gourmont, vary from photography to
caricature. But it is evident that most of them belong to the
latter category. M. Rouveyre is one of the most intellectual
French caricaturists, his manner consisting in what appears at
the first glance to be a roughly scribbled impression. He is
" modern " in his contempt for natural form, where facts have
no special message to give. But a second and a third glance and
these are compelled at these extraordinarily brilliant drawings
(some of which he has been so kind as to allow me to reproduce
* Visages des Contemporains : Portraits dessinfes d'aprfes le vif: Par Andrfe
Rouveyre. Prfeface de Remy de Gourmont. Paris, Mercure de France. 1913.
90
CONTINENTAL CARICATURE
here) convinces us that nothing of importance to the caricature,
as such, has been left out or slurred over. Though his physical
likenesses are never to be despised, it is the character of the
individual all the time that he is hunting down into the last
hiding place of its ultimate essence.
M. de Gourmont admits that Rouveyre is cruel and of his
caricatures of women, which, to our way of thinking, are positively
diabolical, he adds: " They ought not to make us laugh, but
only to think. " That is true. Once again we have, in regarding
this artist's work, as we must always, when we encounter a
vital and original mind, we have to lay aside or try to lay aside
preconceived ideas, and accepting for the moment the result of
his vision as a workable hypothesis, to inquire whether it is to
be relied upon: and having made that inquiry honestly and
without prejudice (if that is possible : it is not easy) we shall be
forced to the conclusion which on one or two occasions we
have reached before that the truth, seen to the best of an alert
human capability, is not very cheering.
Some of the best caricatures, so far, at least, as physical
resemblance is concerned, have been made during the last thirty
years or so in German papers, such as Simplicissimus* Jugend
(before the war), and Kladderadatsch. Jugend has now given up
caricature, but Simplicissimus still continues with the aid of old
contributors to chastise what seems to the conductors the follies
and injustices of the moment. We were fond, during the war, of
assuming that no word in Germany was permitted to be uttered
against the family of Hohenzollern : but a glance at this paper
once a month or so, before the war, would have dispelled this
illusion. Neither the then All-Highest nor any of his family
escaped. And during the war, though Simplicissimus excelled
its customary violence and humourless brutality, its satire was
occasionally tempered by a sort of grim respect for us.
* Sir Edmund Gosse, writing in The Gypsy (May 1915), traces the origin of
the name from Der Abentheurliche Simplicissimus Teutsch, an autobiographical
novel by Hans Jacob Christoph von Grimmelshausen, published in 1669, which
describes certain phases of the Thirty Years' War.
91
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
The principal artist on the staff of this paper is, and has been
for many years, a man of Danish birth, Olaf Gulbransson. His
usual method is to make caricatures, personal or general, with
a very fine pen line. His work is brimming with invention, in
which he is constantly surprising and charming the observer
with all manner of technical conceits. His perceptions, at all
events of foreigners, seldom go very far beneath the surface.
The merit of his caricatures are usually to be found in the situa-
tion together with his ingenious tricks for producing likenesses.
His coadjutors, Heine, Thony, and Blix, are not so fond of
personal caricature; but all three of them have made skilful
contributions to that art at one time or another.
In Spain excellent caricatures are made in El Sol, and other
papers, by Sancha and Bagarya.
The most distinguished Italian caricaturist during the last
half-century has been Enrico Sachetti, who once made a superb
drawing of Tomaso Salvini. His perception of Novelli and
Ruggeri are full of vital criticism. Filiberto Scarpelli made a
series of caricatures early in the twentieth century of which that
of the late Madame Duse and Gabriele D'Annunzio were
absurd without being ridiculous.
Mr. W. Somerset Maugham
By Miguel Covarrubias
Chapter IX
THE RECENT PAST
AS we have already seen caricature has very often been
the recreation of serious artists, several of whom,
however, would have bettered themselves and their
reputations by reversing the procedure. It is a pathetic fact that
Nature, who knows what is best for us, often tricks us into
believing that what we do badly is our appointed task, that what
we most enjoy is but a game. And it is, perhaps, not Nature who
tricks us after all: perhaps it is that damnable tradition which
lingers yet, flogging our minds to accept all that is unpleasant as
dutiful, all that is joyous as of dubious moral worth.
A few years ago, before the war, there died at the age of
thirty-one, at the outset of his career, an artist of great promise,
a caricaturist of small but brilliant achievement. Henry Ospovat
was like other caricaturists before him, a lithographer by trade,
who designed book-plates in his youth, of little interest, in what
Mr. Oliver Onions* calls the " Birmingham tradition ".
He had, at the age of twenty, a scholarship at South Kensing-
ton ; and his work, especially as a black and white artist developed
rapidly. Two years later, in 1899, he was illustrating the poems
of Matthew Arnold for an edition to be published by Mr. John
Lane. Some of his book illustrations are very fine indeed. The
age-old sorrows of Israel (at all events of Israel in Russia) were
in his blood, and are evident in the more original of his works.
In pen and ink drawing, Mr. Onions says that he " over-fulfilled
the requirements ", and " to other men, their work was something
that they did ; Henry Ospovat 's work was something that he was ".
* The Work of Henry Ospovat. With an appreciation by Oliver Onions. (The
St. Catherine Press.) 1911.
93
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
Not very long before his premature death he began painting,
his first picture being " The Portrait of a Musician ". This be-
ginning was quite sudden and without practice : he felt, it seems,
abruptly inspired to express himself in paint ; and the technical
difficulties which most painters learn only to overcome during a
long drudgery of apprenticeship, for him resolved themselves
by instinct. Whether he would have ever become a very great
portrait painter, as his friends believed, there is insufficient
evidence to tell us. But, with an equal suddenness, he began to
make caricatures, and these are unquestionably of extreme
brilliance. Judging by the little that he left behind him, he was
a far better caricaturist than he was painter. We are to conclude
from Mr. Onion's essay that for Ospovat caricature was just
eye-practice in essentials, with the end of portrait-painting in
view : and he had projected a book Stars of the Music-Hall Stage
which, however, was never published.
The considerable time at the end of his life given by this
artist to caricature was regretted by many of his friends, who
believed, with the unmitigated seriousness of young artists, that
he was wasting that time : and, possibly, if caricature is to be
regarded as a wholly frivolous occupation, they were right. If
we are, however, to judge by what he accomplished and if,
looking fore and aft of us, we find that we can allow the inclusion
of this art in a serious category (and many of us do so) we shall
find that our regrets cling to the unmade caricatures of Ospovat
and not to his unmade paintings.
His best caricatures were, then, of people who are widely
known to the public ; and they can therefore be submitted to no
mere narrow tribunal. Arthur Roberts, Marie Lloyd here they
were in life upon the stage, over-stating themselves, as it were,
in expressing that incomparable way-with-them to a delighted
audience: and here they are in the caricatures, doubly over-
stated, since the pictorial artist must in this sort of case go one
better than the actor. Mr. George Grossmith, the caricature of
whom is amongst the illustrations of this book, is the victim here
of extraordinarily discerning comment. His laughter is not only
94
THE RECENT PAST
his own, it is the insensate laughter of the crowd who shout with
merriment immediately a comedian, in whatever innocence,
comes upon the stage. Signor Caruso (himself a crafty carica-
turist of few lines and entertaining invention) stands forth in
Ospovat's interpretation with a naked soul. We see, as it were,
the personification of that exquisite voice and beyond that
almost nullity. The fat, contented personality, excessively
pleased with himself, prosperous and pampered is there: but
he is only a voice.
Claude Lovat Fraser, on the other hand, who no doubt found
a recreation in caricature, was not nearly so successful in the art
as in the main body of his work. He displayed considerable
ingenuity in " catching " a likeness in a few lines, but it was
scarcely more than a clever trick. There was no penetration be-
neath surface appearances, no comment to speak of, and no
attempt, probably, at any such thing. For him caricature was a
game: that was all.
It must have come with a great surprise to admirers of the
late Derwent Wood, R.A., for all his versatility, to find in the
memorial exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, held in the
Spring of 1926, that in odd moments he had made a large
number of shrewd caricatures. There, amongst signs of mani-
fold activities, sculptures, landscapes, studies from the nude,
architectural designs, are a few framed and a large number of
merely mounted drawings of various friends and notabilities.
They are made upon odd scraps of paper, upon envelopes and
so forth. Most of them were drawn at dinner-parties and consist
of pencil sketches, tinted here and there, with a drop of port
wine smudged on with a finger. In one case, a victim is given
an actual buttonhole of a leaf of smilax from the table decora-
tions, and thrust through a little slit in the paper. They are
eminently the caricatures of an accomplished and academic
artist. That is to say, that while the likeness to the individual is
sometimes grievously at fault the actual line, hastily scribbled,
has that deft assurance, that spontaneity, that meaning, which
can only come of long practice and great accomplishment in a
95
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
more deliberate manner. There is Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, and
Mr. Edmund J. Sullivan, that genius of black and white drawing,
looking dour and discontented; Mr. Charles Ricketts, seriously
serene ; Sir Frederick Ponsonby and Mr. Fiddes Watt. They are
only jokes, eked out with a felicitous dexterity by such pigments
and accessories as the dinner table afforded. But they must have
been great fun to do, just as they provide great fun to look at.
Phil May and Harry Furniss were neither of them true
caricaturists, as it were, by profession, though both of them made
caricatures from time to time. But the use that Furniss made of
Mr. Gladstone's famous collars will be remembered long after
the work of some more accomplished caricaturists has passed
into oblivion. In his drawings of that same subject he also gave
very skilled emphasis to the expression of fiery anger on the face
of the G.O.M. Phil May often introduced caricatures of himself
into groups of individuals who are scarcely exaggerated at all.
Probably his most successful caricature is a swift and masterly
impression in red and black chalk of Sir Henry Irving as Mephis-
topheles, which hangs in the Savage Club.
Mr. H. L. Mencken
By Miguel Covarrubias
Chapter X
MAX BEERBOHM
THE fact which strikes the beholder at the first glance
of one of Mr. Beerbohm's exhibitions, or on a visit to
any considerable collection of his work is the inherent
gaiety and the pleasure which he has taken in executing it, a
pleasure which communicates itself to the spectator long before
he has time to admire the individual drawings for their peculiar
merits.
At the time of writing Mr. Beerbohm has given about eight
exhibitions, between 1901 and 1925, at the Carfax and the
Leicester Galleries, and these have been followed by the pub-
lication in book form of some, but not of all, the caricatures
hung there. A great deal of his work, moreover, has never been
exhibited or reproduced at all: for he has that rare fastidious
temper of mind which finds satisfaction in giving pleasure to
private individuals, a greater satisfaction, maybe, and for that
sort of mind than is derived from an exhibition or a book in
which mercantile interests are involved.
Max Beerbohm's ironic tastes are manifested in two ways, by
writing and by drawing : each complement the other. But while
the writing explains itself and stands alone, much of his work
as a caricaturist is eked out by legends. Critics have complained
about this : they have pointed out that a drawing should explain
itself; although why it should do so, and why the two branches
of a similar art should not be compounded, it is difficult to say.
Writing, though it comes from interior necessity, has ever been
an irksome task to Mr. Beerbohm: he finds it extraordinarily
difficult to conciliate his own conscience in the laying out and
setting down of any story or essay, however hot within him may
have been the original impulse to begin it.
97 H
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
Drawing, on the other hand, is a recreation, a delight, a joke,
an absorbing occupation. What is writing? Hours of that exercise
may produce an inch or so of laboured scrawl. Literally and in
dismal fact you sit at a table; you have pen, ink, blotter, and
paper. With those dull tools alone to beguile the tedium of your
work, you must cudgel your brains and put down what they all
too slowly and reluctantly vouchsafe. From time to time the job
is lightened by the need to refer to a dictionary or an encyclo-
paedia. But neither dictionaries nor encyclopaedias are really
things to play with : they are heavy and difficult to put back into
their shelves, their backs are liable to break. The irrelevant
information scattered on their thousand pages is not unlikely to
distract the writer from the matter in hand. In the course of
discovering how many 1's there are in callipers, my eye is struck
by calorimeter and calumet, which must forthwith be explored;
and one thing leads to another. Writing is not a game.
But drawing, now: and especially the drawing of caricatures.
Let the artist count his blessings, one by one. On the sheet,
neatly pinned upon the board, so soon to the practised on by the
lucky hand, comes out some result, something satisfying, some-
thing done. The caricaturist sits or stands in a good light he
must. He has (as least this caricaturist of whom we are talking
has) all manner of delightful playthings pencils, indiarubber,
saucers into which bright tubes of tinfoil have disgorged en-
chanting pigments. There is hard labour in the job, but it does
not need a moralist to tell you that jobs performed without
effort are seldom very flattering to self-complacency. There
may be good days and bad. The caricaturist may " get " his
victim at the first shot, or he may be, as Mr. Ralph Barton, the
American caricaturist, has informed me, permitted by God only
to draw a really good caricature after the first hundred attempts.
But the tools of his trade are objects of affection and interest in
themselves. Without any substantial result in view there is the
most delicate pleasure to be got by messing about with a paint-
box and a pot of water and brushes of various sizes, in sharpen-
ing a good pencil with a well-tempered knife. There is indeed a
MAX BEERBOHM
very primitive joy in all these performances, as we know from
the extreme and proved antiquity of the pastime. Aad ancient
pastimes are, we are sure, the best: " things ", as Mr. Beerbohm
once said, " that always have been and never will not be ".
And then, what a mixture of delights, what an answering
chord to every human mood, caricature provides. The artist
seldom, I hope, feels responsible and heavy. Full of public
spirit, he champions an obvious cause with impressiveness, but
never, if he happens to be Max Beerbohm, with pomposity. He
feels merry; the light airs of spring fan him through the open
window, the sea and the sky are one incredible blue, the red
sealing-wax is reflected in the dark tones of the glass ink-pot,
everything is very well. Some happy fancy arises, some new
invention, some odd revealing flash comes to the joyous mind,
which shall expose some facet of a great man's character. Not
less joyous the morning, not less serene the equanimity of the
caricaturist, when there suddenly crosses his mind, and is
remembered in crossing, some little fault, some damned in-
elegance which will repay pictorial attention. The work is full
of variety, it is variety in essence. No wonder that the craftsman
finds pleasure in it ; and that it is not spoiled for him by necessary
commercial implications is a fortunate accident.
And perhaps more fortunate than most, Mr. Beerbohm
requires no collaborator. During the period of his task he seldom
draws from life : seldom are the results satisfactory when he does.
His caricatures, like Pellegrini's were, are made from memory.
His best drawings are, though not without exception, of people
with whose faces he is not intimately familiar. The reason for
this is simple. What remains in his memory, which is a good one,
is the salient residuum of a face and figure : salient for him, that
is. A big nose, instantly to be seized on and grossly to be exag-
gerated by the commonplace artist, may leave Max Beerbohm
quite uninterested and forgetful. He may perceive that the nose,
though big, has no significance in regard to the individual's
character. Some other feature, not immediately remarkable,
may have it. He remembers, then, that feature which does seem
99
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
to him important and draws attention to it, and leaves the nose
severely alone. That is, he treats it with the contempt of plain
reality or understatement. Clothes, likewise, not necessarily the
exact clothes that the subject habitually wears, but clothes in
keeping with his character are what he chooses to delineate. He
delights in drawing pictures of dandies and this delight of his
has, in these days, but little opportunity. He finds, however,
dandiacal tendencies in one man who in life is ordinarily clothed :
he emphatically finds slovenly tendencies in persons who are
neat and tidy. His treatment of feet especially demonstrate this
trick. With few exceptions he has two formulae or conventions
for feet: an enormous, round-toed shapeless monstrosity and a
mere tapering off of the legs into nothing at all. It may be dodging
a limitation, but it serves a positive purpose as well.
Another convention, this time for dandies, is the beautifully
curved arm, which has no elbow: a third, and this a personal
one, is the enormous hand which he invariably gives to Professor
Rothenstein to indicate that artist's abounding energy. Other
instances occur to the close observer. In another book,* now out
of print, an attempt was made to observe Max Beerbohm's work
in perspective. The instrument used for this purpose was
intended to be a magnifying glass, but was in fact a curry-comb.
In it the curious might have found an extremely detailed and
even laborious account of all the various stages of Mr. Beer-
bohm's career, together with an explanation of the many types
of his caricatures. No such detail shall be repeated here: but it
is interesting to remind oneself of a few facts.
Caricaturing was Max Beerbohm's first love, and preceded,
though not by long, any attempts by him at writing. His juvenilia
though promising were not precocious. He was twenty when, in
1892, he contributed some caricatures of Club Types to the
Strand Magazine. There were thirty-six of these types: they
admirably exemplified the clubs named. Here and there in them
is to be observed a hint, no more, of influence by Ape and Spy.
But looked at without such impertinent curiosity as that implies,
* Max Beerbohm in Perspective. (Heinemann.) 1921.
IOO
MAX BEERBOHM
they interpret principally the influence and inspiration of an
original mind. They were not like other people's drawings. They
are dimly, persistingly and as though seen from a great distance
like the Max caricatures that we know to-day.
In 1894 anc ^ J ^95 Max became a regular contributor to the
long defunct Pick-me-up. His drawings in that periodical were
done with a fine pen which is not the medium which suits his
talent best. A pencil drawing of King George IV in the third
number of the Yellow Book demonstrated his interest in clothes
and the exquisite curves for which they give opportunities. The
Savoy, edited by Mr. Arthur Symons, with Aubrey Beardsley
as art editor, provided the next opening, in which Max's drawings
were for the most part of a similar kind to those in Pick-me-up.
There was, for instance, a diagram of Beardsley himself. This is
a good physical likeness and a good caricature, full of comment:
in it actual peculiarities are not merely exaggerated, they be-
come anatomical absurdities. If one must look about for a
comparison, the cunning of Gulbransson of Simplidssimus
suggests itself.
But these drawings belonged only to a probationary period,
as did also the drawings collected in The Poets' Corner, and in
Cartoons : the Second Childhood of John Bull. These were pub-
lished in 1904 and 1911 respectively, but the John Bull series is
apt to give a misleading idea of the artist's progress, because the
drawings for it had been made ten years before. Between the
two, and published in 1907, came A Book of Caricatures. These
mark a very substantial advance upon any work previously ex-
hibited. The original drawings are widely scattered now; but,
the plates being collotypes are the best reproductions that have
ever been made of Max's work. Here for the first time we find
him using, seldom but happily, a quill pen. Sem, the French
caricaturist, Lord Tweedmouth, and Mr. Reginald Turner are
done in this way : and in private collections there are Sir Squire
Bancroft and James Welch, besides the Swinburne reproduced
in this book, which speaks very eloquently for itself.
It may have been an arduous task, the making of that carica-
101
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
ture ; it may have been the hundredth shot, but it does not look
like^that. It looks like the work of a very happy moment.
This caricature of Swinburne was made in 1899, probably
just after that visit paid by Max Beerbohm to No. 2, the Pines,
so felicitously described by him in the essay under that title.
It is interesting to compare it with Pellegrini's study of the poet
reproduced here, though a good many years separated the two
caricaturists' respective observation of the subject.
Max Beerbohm does not " draw well for reproduction",
though his cleaner line and craftier use of water colour are better
in this connexion now than they used to be. But he needs for
reproduction and deserves the best mechanical processes in use
to-day.
His personal and individual caricatures have generally been
better than his groups, at all events groups of more than two
people. But here again his proficiency has so far advanced that the
technical pitfalls inherent in a subject containing a number of
people have been safely filled in. The individual caricatures re-
main the more interesting because the artist's interest in an
individual is informed with a personal feeling, which the true
caricaturist can seldom summon up for a crowd.
Two points of importance are to be observed in Max Beer-
bohm's succeeding exhibitions. First, the permanence of his
inspiration: that is, what pleased him as a young man pleases
him still: what amused him in 1913 tickles some complementary
corner of his mind to-day. In the poet's corner there is a carica-
ture of Matthew Arnold leaning, grinning, against a mantel-
piece. Looking up at him, darkly dressed in red, her hands
demurely clasped behind her, is a little girl, his niece, subse-
quently Mrs. Humphrey Ward.
" Why, Uncle Matthew," she says, " Oh, why, will not you
be always wholly serious? "
In the exhibition of 1923 there was a caricature of Mr.
Lytton Strachey, leaning also on the mantelpiece, not smiling,
however, but seriously regarding a little girl. This is called " An
Echo " merely. You are expected to remember : if you have once
102
MAX BEERBOHM
seen the Matthew Arnold you will. And you will appreciate the
extremely subtle and very splendid compliment to Mr. Strachey.
In 1913 also we saw The Grave Misgivings of the Nine-
teenth Century and the Wicked Amusement of the Eighteenth
in Watching the Progress (or whatever it is) of the Twentieth.
The Nineteenth Century is exemplified by a comfortable, mild,
stout, elderly gentleman with whiskers: the Eighteenth by a
sardonically smiling, elegant, and thin dandy. The Twentieth
wears the dress of an airman, and rushes sweating and desperate
across the picture.
In 1921 a similar idea is illustrated by three drawings: The
Future, as beheld respectively by the Eighteenth, Nineteenth,
and Twentieth Centuries. The Eighteenth Century sees but a
copy of his contented and exquisite self: the Nineteenth, a
stouter, richer, more important self. But the Twentieth is a
young man who has lost an arm in the war, who is pale and
careworn; and he looks into the Future and sees only a vague
mark of interrogation.
The second point especially to be observed about Max's
succeeding exhibitions is that, apart from the necessary stock-
in-trade of even the exceptional caricaturists, he has some
surprise for the spectator on each occasion, some trick or whim,
some new excuse as it were, for fresh invention. In 1921, he
exhibited a series of " doubles " or smudges, made by folding
a sheet of paper in half, making as he himself put it, " some
random blotch on it", folding again, unfolding, and seeing what
possibility was suggested and proceeding " to make blotches of
a more calculated kind. A little cheating a very little of it is
within the rules of the game."
The results of some of these " doubles " were very happy,
but the drawing which Max Beerbohm has " calculated " from
outset to fulfilment is far better.
The new accomplishment of the following exhibition, that
of 1923, was a series of portraits of the 'seventies, drawn in the
artist's most mature manner and signed and dated as though
made in those 'seventies. They were in fact caricatures of indi-
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A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
viduals typical of their time who never existed, but they were
made just exactly as Max makes his caricatures of individuals
to-day. (It need hardly be said that numbers of spectators
believed in their identities, and some even claimed to have
known them, and wondered indeed at the dates written on the
drawings, supposing Mr. Beerbohm to be a much younger
man. And, to be sure, looking at General Sir George Rawlinson,
at Admiral Sir Japhet Kenway, and at Mr. Vansittart, it is hard
to believe that these and the rest were not personally known to
one's parents, for their names, their attitudes, their clothes, their
faces, are entirely authentic so authentic, so natural that
another section of spectators were quite unable to see the point
of their inclusion in the exhibition.)
The analogous contribution to the show in 1925 was a series
entitled The Old and the Young Self, where twenty persons, now
of mature years, converse with themselves when young. The
only demerit of this series as compared with the others men-
tioned, is that, while the former deal with matters or persons of
a more or less permanent interest, the Old and Young Selves
have reputations not all of which will assuredly survive living
memory. These conversations and situations (in two instances
the drawings are not accompanied by any text, and explain
themselves), are variously successful: one of them will call for
mention a little later.
The most important work that Mr. Beerbohm has given us
is the series of nine drawings entitled " Tales of Three Nations ",
symbolising the relative positions of England, France, and
Germany from the time of the Napoleonic wars to the present
day. John Bull, in turn, is apprehensive, prosperous, more
prosperous, youthfully courageous in 1914, and haggard under a
load of debt in the period after the war. Germany grows and
grows in truculence and robustness, only to end as a suppliant
beggar, out at knees and elbows; and France who began with
eagle nose and the huge sabre of the first Napoleon, passes
through varying stages of fortune and misfortune until she is seen
thin, rapacious but very dominant, with the false beak imitating
104
MAX BEERBOHM
the real one of the first Napoleon, emaciated, huge. That is a
solid contribution to history.
The tendencies of his day no less than individuals earn Max
Beerbohm's close attention. The worst of the caricaturist's art
is that, apart from its qualities of colour and design, it so seldom
has a high permanent value. (A high price, on the other hand,
it may easily demand: for price is dependent upon other con-
siderations, such, for example, as fashion. The collector of
prints no longer buys plates etched by Gillray or by Rowlandson
for mere pence : though he may be, now and again, more fortu-
nate in the matter of other men such as Dighton. Original draw-
ings, on the other hand [and no good etchings or engravings
have been made of Max Beerbohm's work], naturally demand
a greater price.) But where the caricaturist has sufficient
skill and taste to give his work intrinsic interest we need not
complain.
The drawing of Mr. Frank Brangwyn " taking a five minutes'
well-earned rest " will not be " topical " for much longer than
Mr. Brangwyn's lifetime. This was exhibited in 1925. Sorry the
succeeding generation for which this caricature, having no point,
fails to earn appreciation for its design and colour. The wretch
who is being beaten by devils carved in stone at the head of
some cathedral column would certainly give us keener delight
if we knew him to be a priest whom we disliked and whom we
could recognize; but neither he nor Isaac of Norwich, nor
Luther Seven-Heads, completely elude our curiosity and
interest. The minor troubles of administration at the end of the
eighteenth century cannot really be said to make our hearts beat
faster, but Newton's caricature of Pitt and Fox need not depend
for its appeal to us upon anything but the way in which it is drawn.
Mr. Beerbohm's approach to caricature may be described
(like Luther) under seven heads.
i. Gross exaggeration he has now almost abandoned for
many years. One of the best examples in this kind was a " King
of Spain " made in 1914,^ which that agile monarch is dressed in
assertively English country clothes, while the Hapsburg lip and
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
the position of the eyes is developed to the furthest legitimate
limit.
2. Elegance has ever been a magnet to him. Lord Chester-
field of long ago cuts dead the elder Earl of later days because he
is wearing a billycock hat: but each self, young and old, suggests
a dandy as seen by another. The same may be said of a caricature
of " Sir Philip Sassoon", drawn in 1913, or a " Sir Claude
Phillips c going on ' " (1914).
3. Serious satire, not always quite seriously expressed has
already been touched upon.
4. General satire, combined with and much strengthened by
honest hate, is admirably shown by that Captain of Industry
(1921) who declares to a pallid curate that " the desire of the
manual workers to be paid exorbitant wages for doing the least
possible amount of work is a sure sign that they have lost their
faith in a future life". Whatever our political sympathies (if
any) nothing could be more repulsive than this captain of in-
dustry, and he is the more repulsive for his evident prosperity.
But in " Civilization and the Industrial System " (1925) the
figure which typifies that system is more than merely repulsive :
it is disgusting, and rightly so. Half-naked, hairy, wearing
diamonds in his belt and spats, an enormity of coarse breeding,
square-fingered and long-lipped, he blows the smoke of his
cigar into the face of the lady, as he says: " No, my dear, you
may Ve ceased to love me ; but you took me for better or wuss
in younger and 'appier days and there'll be no getting away for
you from me, ever." Let us pray that Mr. Beerbohm's per-
spicacity has here, for once, failed him.
5. Malice, of a personal kind, so opposed to the almost-
brutality of the subject of the last paragraph, is a quality common
to almost all men : though many critics almost passionately (but
somewhat mysteriously) deny that our most distinguished cari-
caturist is ever malicious. Max Beerbohm never takes a mean
advantage, but he certainly lunges with his rapier under his man's
guard. Why not ? Was it admiration for the qualities implied which
made him put into the mouth of Mr. Lloyd George as he nudges M.
106
MAX BEERBOHM
Clemenceau and regards that weary invalid, President Wilson, the
words "Thought he was going to get the better of you and I".
6. Laughter, not loud, but happy and chuckling is scarcely
ever absent when contemplating his work. Typical of his wit is
that drawing of Mr. H. G. Wells urging Mr. Arnold Bennett to
stand for Parliament. " Parliament, eh? " he replies, " well, get
'em to raise the screw to forty thou', and perhaps I'll think of
it." But these words enclosed in the usual label proceeding from
the victim's mouth are not written in Max's handwriting, but
typed. This is the keenest and subtlest comment that Max has
ever made. It is of the purest spirit of caricature. Laughter which
is, perhaps, a little savage arises from the contemplation of that
" Miniature design for colossal fresco commemorating the
International Advertising Convention (Wembley, July 1924) and
the truly wondrous torrents of cant and bunkum that were out-
poured from it". Each magnate of commerce wears his halo and
turns up his eyes and folds his hands. We remember as we look
upon this drawing that men have talked of the poetry of Business.
7. Beauty is the last quality that you expect from a carica-
turist, though many instances in the past have outrun expecta-
tion. So much depends upon what you call beauty. That gaiety,
already referred to, grows at the second glance, which takes a
whole wall of framed drawings in one sweep, into a delightful
appreciation of delicate tints and patterns, arranged with taste
and knowledge and a very virtuous gift for design. Max's use of
water-colour upon paper which is not quite white, paper to
which he has been faithful for many years, is deft and individual :
and in his choice of tints and shades his fastidiousness, his enjoy-
ment of the work, and his understanding of each individual
subject is explicit. And the basic likeness of one drawing to
another gives a harmony to a whole room filled with them, which
is seldom to be perceived in other men's collected work.
There is also that beauty of line, true, clean, and unfaltering,
which is to be seen in nearly all his work; but which is seen
perhaps at its cleanest and truest in the caricature of Swinburne
amongst the illustrations here. The sweeping curves each have
107
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
their meaning, either in relation to the subject, or more generally
to the whole design.
Almost as much time as Max Beerbohm has given to exhibited
and published work he has devoted to caricatures which adorn
private collections ; and the American edition* of Seven Men is
supplemented by drawings of six of them (the seventh man was
the author himself). There is Enoch Soames, characteristically
" dim ", snub-nosed, with a thin, vague beard " or rather he
had a chin on which a large number of hairs weakly curled and
clustered to cover its retreat ": he wears a " soft black hat of
clerical kind but of Bohemian intention ". There is Savonarola
Brown, big-headed and innocent-eyed; James Pethel inexpug-
nably usual : there is grim, dark Braxton with wide mouth and
savage frown; there is " pleasant little Maltby", with his tiny
moustache and dapper clothes: lastly there is A. V. Laider, a
rather precise, pleasant-faced fellow, not in his first youth,
dressed in an overcoat and tweed cap ; and he is drawn upon the
hotel note-paper, bearing the proprietor's name: " The Beach
Hotel, Linmouth, Sussex. Propr. R. Garrow ", where the author
is supposed to have met him. The authenticity of this address and
of its proprietor's name seems assured. The note-paper was, in
fact, specially printed for that one drawing.
Mr. Beerbohm lives in Italy, completely out of touch, his
critics often complain, with current events and personalities in
England. His visits to this country are brief and infrequent. But
in that blue and sunlit distance he thinks the more.
* Seven Men. (Alfred A. Knopf, New York.) 1919.
M. Claude Debussy. By Andrl Rouvevrc
Chapter XI
ENGLAND AND AMERICA TO-DAY
caricature in England to-day is accepted with
I appreciation by a few. It is not a popular art, nor is it
A in the derogatory sense " high-brow ". It is liked rather
by observant people, and by those who are willing to learn how
to observe. Before the best of caricature can be finally judged,
some knowledge of the victim is often required by the spectator,
apart from a common knowledge of his actions, motives, and his
general appearance. The less responsible critics often demand
that caricature should be understandable by everyone and fool-
proof, and they have complained (especially with regard to Mr.
Beerbohm) because the subjects of some caricatures are unknown
to the public at large, or because a known subject has been treated
in a recondite manner. This attitude is too absurd to need further
comment. It illustrates merely an old truth: art is constantly
struggling for recognition against ignorance, prejudice, and in-
tolerance ; in short, against stupidity.
Though English caricature, then, does not flourish as general
and popular comic art flourishes, it does exist: and the tradition
of Pellegrini is carried on, apart from the work of Max Beerbohm,
and in the heydey of his fame, by Kapp and others.
Edmond Xavier Kapp first made a local name for himself
when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, and his work
appeared in the Cambridge Magazine. The now defunct Onlooker
reproduced a caricature of Sir Henry Wood in 1912, and other
drawings appeared in the Daily News, and The New Weekly.
Another caricature of Sir Henry Wood, which later became well-
known, much admired, and often reproduced in the periodical
press, was printed in the first number of Colour in the summer of
1914.
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A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
After the war Kapp held his first exhibition at the Little Art
Rooms in the Adelphi, and won immediate recognition as a
brilliant craftsman who made caricature a " serious branch of
art ". Mr. Beerbohm, whose generosity never fails either his
fellows or younger men, and is trebly valuable in its sincerity,
wrote in a letter printed at the beginning of Kapp's catalogue:
" If people in general rate your sense of design and your
grasp of form, and your humour and fantasy, half as high as I
in particular rate them, then, depend on it, your exhibition will
be a very great success indeed. "
Apart from the usual exclamations about malice, reasoned
criticism was benedictory. Mr. Jan Gordon wrote of the " music-
hall bestiality which seems to be the mainspring of so much of
our satiric art " as being absent from Kapp's work, though he
too, could not resist saying, and with truth, that the caricatures
in question were " malin without being malicious ". Sir Claude
Phillips found in Kapp's drawings a threefold style the in-
fluence of Max, of Japan, and of his own impulses in which a
cubistic inclination was evident. The fact is that cubism and
other modern developments towards abstraction are of great use
to the caricaturist: in work such as Kapp's lies one of its most
valuable and least impertinent functions.
This exhibition was followed by others at the Leicester
Galleries and elsewhere, and many of Kapp's drawings have
been reproduced in book form. He has a great variety of method,
is more of an artist in the " serious ", profound, portentous sense
than Max, though much less of a wit. In his caricatures of in-
dividuals he is more comprehensive than the best of caricaturists
who are nothing else: he tries to say more at one and the same
time, and often succeeds. He mentions, as it were, even if he
does not comment on, more sides of a man's character than
Max does : but he is inclined to make guesses where Max knows.
Of his methods, the favourite is by the use of chalk, though
he has also been very successful with a clean, very fine pen line :
no
ENGLAND AND AMERICA TO-DAY
and in one brilliant instance he built up the curves of a face with
minute straight pencil lines. He is not conventional; he adapts
his methods to his subject; and if he lacks experience of human
nature and ripe judgment, which is to be gained only from that
experience, time will surely provide it. He makes no use at all
of written descriptions, and, like Max Beerbohm, he is a more
eager student of potentialities than of accomplished facts.
Kapp may have " derived " a little from Max in his earliest
days, but he has long ago cut those apron-strings, and stands alone.
The caricature reproduced in this book of Mr. George
Graves is an excellent example of Kapp's personal and charac-
teristic use of chalk, the interpenetrating lines and planes are
effective without being affected. Apart from its obvious merits
as a drawing, " The Buffoon " is an instance of a good caricature
which is not a first-rate physical likeness. " North American
High-brow ", reprinted in Personalities after being exhibited at
the Leicester Galleries in 1923, is the drawing, already referred
to, made up of innumerable minute lines. If it is not a personal
caricature it is a very fine typification. The contours of the face,
the innocent seriousness are represented, and, even without
the use of colour, the sallow complexion is somehow suggested :
or rather the observer supplies the tint involuntarily, because the
face is so perfectly characteristic. The " Yone Noguchi ", the
Japanese poet, manifests just as much of the Japanese manner as
is appropriate. Sir Henry Wood has been caricatured very often
by Kapp, but the drawing of him reproduced in Reflections is the
most successful from the point of view of design : the hair, the
fine tapering fingers are beautifully rendered. A later drawing,
not nearly so pleasing as a design and contradicting certain
details of the previous one, is far better as a portrait-caricature.
In " Sir Landon Ronald " (Kapp's interest in musicians has
been explicit from the outset of his career) the figure, the clothes,
and the most prominent feature are strongly exaggerated. But
exaggeration in this case is neither wilfulness nor satire : it justly
illustrates both a characteristic attitude and a peculiar and
emotional force of personality.
in
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
Of the politicians, the knuckles of an enormous hand obtrude
beyond the coat of Mr. C. F. G. Masterman, whose face in this
drawing is a mine of curious information : for one thing, you see
the sophisticated politician jesting with the simple person. Will
the simple person recognize that fact, here or elsewhere ? Not he.
To the Law Journal of 1924, Kapp contributed a series in
coloured chalk of legal notabilities. The best of these is " Mr.
Justice Avory ". The caricature is a triumph of characterization,
it is redolent of learning, precision, and the acidity of high
human justice. " Sir Edward Marshall Hall, K.C." is not so suc-
cessful: the drawing shows that learned counsel in a reflective
mood which may be characteristic, but is hardly typical. It
seems as though Kapp had wilfully determined to show his
subject in an unexpected way. That is well enough, but in his
effort to avoid the obvious or expected, the artist has missed
some essential quality. The outlines of this drawing are made
with a fine pen line. " Sir Thomas Willes Chitty, Bt." is a really
beautiful drawing in which the facial exaggeration is slight, and
in which the use of chalk both for fine black lines and for broad
effects is extremely cunning. It is a curious fact, which finds its
parallel in other cases, that Kapp is quite unable to make a
satisfactory caricature either physical or otherwise of Max
Beerbohm. He has made several attempts: all of them are bad.
The subject is a difficult one and has only once been attempted
with real success. That was the caricature in Vanity Fair made
by Mr. Walter Sickert in 1897, and that, not unnaturally, bears
but a mitigated resemblance to the subject as he is nearly thirty
years later. The best caricatures of Max Beerbohm have been
made by himself, and of these oddly enough by no means the
least considerable in physical fidelity is that which is used as a
frontispiece to this book. Here the caricaturist is seen drawing
at a desk on the Italian shore, while Kapp, Quiz, and another
" wonder how long the veteran exile will go doddering on ". He
has added half a century or so to his age and has given himself
a long white beard: but the actual likeness is a good one, the
potential likeness a wonderful adumbration.
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ENGLAND AND AMERICA TO-DAY
Out of a comparatively small collection for the normal
working years of the artist's life are fortunately before him
perhaps the most interesting drawing of all is that of Dr. Einstein.
There is in it only a faint breath of caricature. Regarding this
drawing Mr. Laurence Binyon said that its subject appeared to
be " intoxicated by the conception of incredible velocities, and
tinged with innocent bewilderment at the world's helpless in-
capacity to follow him ".
Apart from his work in caricature, his portraits in oil or in
chalk, his various drawings of still-life, Kapp has also invented
what is something rather more than an amusing game. This is a
scribbling with pen and ink which he calls Minims and a selection
of which he has published in a book of that name. These are,
as it were, portraits of emotions and moods. If there is any point
in trying to draw abstractions, he has put his finger on it. These
scribbles are not the result of deliberation or conscious clever-
ness : they result from the impulse of a moment. Quick how do
you draw toothache? Instantly it goes down on the paper, an
odd little pattern which really does suggest that particular form
of torture. " Indecision " is more obvious intersecting lines
forming a cross, the points of which are turned at right angles.
Which way? We don't know: we can't think: we wobble.
There are many people who regard Minims as a singular
waste of time, as an arrant form of fatuity. They are people who
would regard you as a harmless imbecile if you told them that
Monday is white, Wednesday blue and Saturday a sort of old-
gold (which they are), and who would like to kick you from here
to Jericho for associating, with child-like sincerity and absolute
lack of pose, as some people do associate, two ideas which in sober
and commonplace fact are entirely independent and irrelative.
Some men such as Max Beerbohm are caricaturists by nature ;
some, such as Kapp, by chance. With him indeed caricature
seems to be a phase through which he and other artists must
pass in the course of their long apprenticeship. He may for a
long time and possibly always remain faithful to this art, but
his deepest impulse seems to urge him towards normal por-
113 i
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
traiture. He is first and foremost a beautiful draughtsman, who
loves drawing for its own sake. Picturesqueness and other forms
of false sentiment, as such, he ruthlessly abjures. A fine draughts-
man can make a common cistern and a couple of lead pipes
interesting and this is, in fact, exactly what before now Kapp
has done. But as a caricaturist he has shown us all sorts of new
possibilities and new interests. He is the first caricaturist to
employ abstractions appropriately and fertile with suggestions.
He is a perfectly serious artist, whose drawings, quite apart from
their merits as satiric portraits and commentaries on his con-
temporaries, have a definite aesthetic interest; and can be judged
therefore by quite different standards from those in which satire, or
humour, or devilry, or revelation alone are the dominant quality.
Neatness, slickness, novelty in technique are always interest-
ing, but the better they are the more they tend to obscure the
artist's essential demerits as a caricaturist. Mr. Powys Evans'
first exhibition (1922) was of a series of pen and ink caricatures
of persons in the Beggar's Opera as performed at the Lyric
Theatre, Hammersmith. His manner of drawing is peculiarly
suited to caricature, a clean but not very spontaneous use of a
pen line, with a certain ingenuous fondness for detail the sort
of detail that interests a child, and which is warmly regarded only
by child-like vision. In the Beggar's Opera drawings Mr. Evans
suggested the character of a part mainly by drawing attention
to costumes with which everyone who had seen the play or
pictures of the performers was familiar. Some of his physical
likenesses of the actors and actresses were extremely poor : he is
indeed very variable in this respect. It was evident that, so far
as this play was concerned, the costume was what mainly
interested him rather than the individuals. Variable in success
too have been the actual portraits he has made and published
in the London Mercury.
Not long after this exhibition, Mr. Evans, signing himself
Quiz, became the regular caricaturist week by week in the
Saturday Review. Here his success has again been variable, so
far as physical likeness is concerned and, like the small boy in
114
ENGLAND AND AMERICA TO-DAY
the rhyme, when he was good he was very, very good and when
he was bad he was horrid. Like Kapp, like others he has failed
to interpret Max Beerbohm : he has failed more dismally, for he
has not perceived in this subject the importance of fidelity to
certain facts in regard to costume. Mr. Beerbohm is a dandy
and his dandyism without calling any undue attention to itself
is of a personal and original kind: it is all-of-a-piece with his
work both written and drawn, with himself. He is an artist in
life and everything that life connotes : his individual preferences
are observable. To make a caricature then of this subject with the
collar and tie of a respectable but inelegant clerk indicates a most
deplorable lack of vision. This may be called a very small point,
but in the case under review it has its peculiar importance and
indicates possible lapses in other caricatures, of other individuals
the reality of which it is impossible for any one person to gauge.
But there is very little liberty that can be taken with impunity
in using a pen and ink as Mr. Beerbohm pointed out on one
occasion with regard to Quiz's exhibited work. The failures, the
incompetences, the faults in drawing, the mistakes in perception
are not easily disguised: black and white is so devastatingly
definite. Not by such a medium will the incompetent artist gloss
over hard facts or successfully disguise his infirmities. What he
does, whether good or bad, is there, patent and palpable; and
Quiz's successes have been sufficiently numerous to be re-
membered with great satisfaction above and long after his
failures.
His caricature of Mr. Edmund Blunden, the poet, is repro-
duced here. The likeness is life-like, with just that amount and
quality of over-statement which reveals without ridicule. There
is here nothing to ridicule, as the good caricaturist perceives.
The second-rate comic artist, on the other hand, seizes a physical
peculiarity and in order to be funny adds grossness without any
point to his exaggeration ; just as he misses the lurking vulgarity
in a face which, judged by mere measurements, is classically
beautiful. Apart from its other qualities the caricature of Mr.
Blunden gives pleasure to the beholder as a design.
"5
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
Mr. Edmund Dulac, a Proven9al by birth, though a natural-
ized Englishman, is an illustrator who makes caricatures from
time to time with exuberance and boldness. He has an admirable
certainty of line, a fine faculty for composition and a keen sense
of humour, which sometimes outruns his sense of proportion. In
physical fact that is just what a sense of humour should do, but
in that kind of proportion concerned with motives and character
it should not. Mr. Dulac's caricature reproduced here was one
of a series which appeared in the Outlook in 1919 and 1920. It
is called " Monsieur Clemenceau as ' Le Grand Poilu'". France
is stitching his first wound-stripe upon his sleeve, commemor-
ating the attempt upon his life. It is to be observed that the
artist has described with great simplicity the combined expres-
sions of old age and sublime indifference. M. Georges Eugene
Clemenceau had several hatreds, but only one love France.
Once the invader had been driven off French soil, and crippled,
nothing else greatly mattered. That, at any rate, is what this
caricature seems to say.
With vigour and malevolence, Mr. Dulac made Lord Fisher
tower over Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square : and in all his
published work there is an appreciation of design which makes
the lover of caricature ask for more than Mr. Dulac has hitherto
thought fit to offer him.
We have glanced at the work of ninety and nine just persons,
or thereabouts ; the apodosis, calling for respectful attention, is
an Australian artist called David Low. Without undue prejudice
it may be said that of all the terrible facetiousness of which the
current and popular " cartoonist " in the press is guilty Mr.
Low's work was symptomatic. In all matters of political and
social comment, his drawings had but one redeeming feature,
their technical skill. Their content was feeble, their banalities
abysmal. But it was evident that he could draw, that he could,
moreover, very skilfully " catch " a likeness. There was, however,
no smallest hint in the work daily exhibited to the public of the
great possibilities which he has since made manifest in his series
of caricatures in the New Statesman. Of these the drawing of
116
ENGLAND AND AMERICA TO-DAY
Mr. Hilaire Belloc, hands on knees, would alone be sufficient to
make a reputation in a really civilized community. The likeness
is a " speaking " one, the frown of intolerance, the exuberance,
the vitality, the generosity, the humour, all are there. His " Lord
Beaverbrook " too a little man lost in the depths of a big arm-
chair is treated in a most perceiving way. At the time of writing
Mr. Low holds a distinguished though recent place in the ranks
of true caricaturists. Much is to be expected of him.
Of other living caricaturists, Mr. W. K. Haselden best known
as a humorous artist engaged in the most lamb-like form of
satire, illustrates week by week Mr. Punch's dramatic criticism
with little, revealing drawings of actors and actresses, in which
a likeness is deftly captured and some comment on the manner
of performance and the character of the part are adroitly con-
veyed. His exaggerations of faces and figures is of the slightest;
the result in the most unassuming guise is very admirable
indeed.
Mr. H. M. Bateman is the most widely known and deservedly
popular comic artist of the day, who generally provokes loud
laughter, but who knows also how to initiate a sly, malicious grin.
He seldom caricatures individuals in the true sense, but on the
rare occasions that he does so, we are duly grateful. His early
work was very obviously influenced by that of Caran D'Ache, but
he has since become quite independent, and as a black and white
humorist in a general way he has indeed outstripped that master.
His caricatures of types, such as his " Colonels " carry exag-
geration of expression and action to the limit of imagination and
are uproariously funny: his little book Suburbia (by which is
intended a figurative rather than a topographical location) pins
all manner of petty snobberies and facetiousnesses to the pillory
by the ear. In the realm of personal satire his drawing of Jack
Johnson, the pugilist, is wholly malign and wholly admirable.
Other artists in England play with caricature, spasmodically,
and success treats them capriciously. Mr. Aubrey Hammond
primarily a theatrical designer of original and amusing talent,
does from time to time record a physical likeness with a great
117
A HISTORY OF CARICATURE
simplicity, but without going any deeper. He is inclined to
subordinate the necessities of caricature to the personal manner-
ism by which he expresses it.
In the United States of America the most prolific carica-
turist, who has done much to revive the art, is Mr. Ralph
Barton. His group of a number of English novelists given to
lecturing in the United States some years ago was very success-
ful, and was the cause of his abandoning comic draughtsman-
ship of a more general kind and of his transforming into regular
work what he had until then regarded merely as a recreation and
amusement. He once said that he had drawn so many caricatures
that he must now wait for new subjects to be born. He had " gone
through " the American theatre and figures in " La Vie New-
Yorkaise ". He admits falling before now into the bad habit, when
haste called him, of drawing from photographs ; once even from
the description of an eye-witness! Mr. Barton does not, then,
pretend to be a virtuoso, and he believes in drawing from life
rather than from memory.
A new use for caricature was found by him when he made
a curtain for the Chauve-Souris, which showed M. Balieff
dominating a hundred and fifty actual as well as typical first-
nighters. Surely no caricaturist ever enjoyed before so generous
an exhibition ! This curtain was received both in New York and
in the provinces with great enthusiasm.
Mr. Barton's self-caricature, which, with great kindness, he
made specially for this book, is accompanied by an ominous
figure, who is the Celebrity-at-large, who in life always comes
sooner or later to Mr. Barton to inform him that while everyone
else in a group of caricatures has been well perceived, he has
been missed. The mingled resignation and innocence in the
artist's own face during the interview is delightfully caught.
Mr. Barton's wide popularity in America has demanded
from him far more work for publication than is salutary for the
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ENGLAND AND AMERICA TO-DAY
hand and eye of any one artist. In conversation once, Sem de-
clared him to be une esptce de Ford.
It was largely owing to the unselfish kindness of Mr. Barton
and to the admiration of Mr. Carl van Vechten, the well-known
American writer, that the first chance, brilliantly and success-
fully seized upon, was given to a young Mexican, Miguel
Covarrubias, who was born but ten years before the war. He
too believes in drawing from the life : he combines some of the
tricks of modern simplification with a distinguished facility for
recording likenesses. His caricatures are wildly exaggerated,
savagely cruel sometimes, but nearly always in a physical
respect almost marvellously successful. His method varies from
a clean, almost mechanically accurate pen line to elaborate
designs in pencil and wash. In his book The Prince of Wales and
other Famous Americans, the title-subject is handled both in the
frontispiece and in various manifestations upon the wrapper
with great skill. Upwards of fifty Americans are caricatured and
a number of foreigners, including Mr. William Somerset
Maugham, with spirit and invention. Nor does he exclude women
from the onslaughts of his strong pen-line. Miss Lilian Gish is
observed with a certain relentlessness, which will not be unwel-
come to those who remember the type of film in which that
gifted lady is called upon to act, rather than her personal beauty.
The caricature is sob-stuff incarnate. " Miss Mary Pickford ",
all eyelashes and brightness, will also fail to be popular with those
who take their pictures seriously. The assertive incorruptibility
of Mr. H. L. Mencken, the almost horrible vigour of Jack
Dempsey are personified with an agreeable devilry. There is as
yet little subtlety in Mr. Covarrubias' work: but a caricaturist
who begins as he has done ought to be welcomed with open
arms.
END
" Will you not/* asks a child of about five as described in
certain works of an hundred years ago, " will you not relate to us,
dear Papa, some History or Account of one of the Arts, which
will improve our minds and elevate our thoughts? "
" Indeed, my dear children (for such it is my privilege to
call you), I deem it both a pleasure, and a duty which I owe to
you, to endeavour from time to time to mingle instruction with
what I may term entertainment, for your benefit. . . . "
The preceding pages are, then, to represent both that
pleasure and that endeavour.
The Earl of Lonsdale
By the Author
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bayard, E.: La Caricature et Les Caricaturistes, Paris 1901.
Beerbohm, Max: Caricatures of Twenty-five Gentlemen (Leonard
Smithers), 1896.
The Poets' Corner (Heinemann), 1904.
A Book of Caricatures (Methuen), iQoy.
Cartoons : The Second Childhood of John Bull (Stephen Swift), 1911.
Fifty Caricatures (Heinemann), 1913.
A Survey (Heinemann), 1921.
Rosetti and His Circle (Heinemann), 1922.
Things New and Old (Heinemann), 1923.
Observations (Heinemann), 1925.
[These are collections of Mr. Beerbohm 's exhibited work, including a few cari-
catures not previously shown. Other caricatures by the same hand are scattered in
various periodical publications and in books by other people.]
Bergson, Henri: Laughter: An Essay on the meaning of the Comic.
Authorized Translation by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred
Rothwell (Macmillan), 1911.
Bourgeois, Emile: Modern France: 1815-1913 (Cambridge University
Press), 1919.
Brisson, Adolphe: Nos Humoristes (Soci6t6 d 'edition artistique), Paris,
1900.
Gary, Elizabeth Luther: Honor 4 Daumier (Putnam), 1907.
Champfleury, Jules Fleury: Histoire de la Caricature Antique, 1865.
Histoire de la Caricature au Moyen Age, 1871.
Histoire de la Caricature sous la Rfyublique, 1874.
Histoire de la Caricature la Rtforme et la Ligue, 1880.
Histoire de la Caricature Moderne, 1865.
(Libraire de la Soci6t6 des gens de lettres), Paris.
[Champfleury's works embrace all caricature in its widest possible sense, are
full of scholarly appreciation, and are sufficiently illustrated with small line draw-
ings. These books are indispensable to the student of the subject.]
Chatto, W.: Treatise on Wood-Engraving. With illustrations engraved on
wood by John Jackson (Charles Knight), 1839.
Cloud, Yvonne : Pastiche : a Music-Roam Book. With twenty-eight draw-
ings by Edmond X. Kapp (Faber and Gwyer), 1926.
Covarrubias, Miguel : The Prince of Wales and other Famous Americans
(Alfred A. Knopf, London), 1926.
121
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dayot, Armand: Les Maitres de la Caricature Franfaise au ig'**' sifale,
Paris, 1888.
Evans, Powys: The Beggar's Opera: Caricatures (Cecil Palmer), 1922.
*Everitt, Graham: English Caricaturists of the Nineteenth Century (Swan,
Sonnenschein), 1886.
[A misleading title, the author being a first-rate authority on comic art, ex-
clusive of caricature.]
Fry, Roger: Vision and Design (Chatto and Windus), 1920.
[An indispensable book for the general student of art.]
Fuchs, Eduard: Die Karikatur der Europdischen Volker. 2 vols. (A.
Langen), Munich, 1901 and 1921.
[A comprehensive survey of caricature and satiric art, profusely and finely
illustrated ; learned, but not well arranged in chronological order. An invaluable
work of reference.]
Gautier, Paul : Le Rire et la Caricature. Preface par Sully Prudhomme
(Hachette), Paris, 1906.
[A scientifically arranged book, sparsely but intelligently illustrated.]
Goncourt, de, Edmund et Jules: Gavarni: UHomme et Vceuvre.
Gourmont de, Remy (see Rouveyre, Andr6).
Grego, Joseph : Rowlandson, The Caricaturist (Chatto and Windus), 1880.
Grose, Francis, F.S.A. : Rules for Drawing Caricaturas. With an Essay on
Comic Painting, 1788.
[The copy of this work in the British Museum is bound up with The Analysis
of Beauty, by William Hogarth, " written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas
of Taste ". A curious and admirable little work.]
Kapp, Edmond Xavier: Personalities: Twenty -four Drawings (Martin
Seeker), 1919.
Reflections (Jonathan Cape), 1922.
(See also Cloud, Yvonne.)
[Selections from the artist's exhibited work, not all caricatures.]
Lacroix, Paul (see Rabelais, Fran?ois).
Larwood, Jacob, and Hotten, J.C.: History of Signboards, 1867.
Lynch, Bohun: Max Beerbohm in Perspective (Heinemann), 1921.
(With a Prefatory letter by Max Beerbohm.)
Malcolm, James Peller, F.S.A.: Historical Sketch of the Art of Carica-
turing, 1813.
" [One of the earliest books on the subject, well illustrated by the author's own
engravings, which, especially in the case of drawings in the Harleian MSS., very
closely and accurately follow the originals. The work is badly arranged, and is often
more amusing than the author intended; but.it is extremely useful and is the
foundation of most of the later works on Caricature written in English.]
* Pseudonym for William Rodgers Richardson.
122
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Onions, Oliver : The Art of Henry Ospovat, with an Appreciation by Oliver
Onions (St. Catherine Press), 1911.
Parton, James : Caricature and other Comic Art in all times and many
lands (Harper Brothers), 1877.
[A concise chronological study of the subject, lucidly arranged and copiously
illustrated.]
Paston, George (pseudonym) : Social Caricature in the Eighteenth Century
(Methuen), 1905.
[Finely illustrated, amusing, and admirably arranged.]
Pike, Luke Owen: History of Crime in England, 1873.
Rabelais, Fran$ois (attributed to): Songes Drolatiques de Pantagruel.
Edited by Paul Lacroix. 1868.
Rasi, Luigi: La Caricatura e i Comici italiani. 1907.
[The letterpress is negligible and gives very little information. There are, how-
ever, many excellent illustrations.]
Rouveyre, Andr6: Visages des Contemporains. Preface par Remy de
Gourmont (Mercure de France). 1913.
Ward, Leslie (Sir): Forty Years of" Spy " (Chatto and Windus). 1915.
Wright, Thomas, F.S.A. : History of Caricature and Grotesque in Litera-
ture and Art. Illustrated by F. W. Fairholt, F.S.A. (Virtue
Brothers), 1865.
England Under the House of Hanover (Richard Bentley), 1848.
[Admirable, exhaustive, and invaluable works, which include researches into all
satiric art from the earliest times. The illustrations, judged from a pictorial point
of view, are poor, being for the most part mere notes in line copied from various
originals and engravings : but they are extremely useful in helping the student to
identify these originals in collections elsewhere.]
123
INDEX
A o (see le Strange, Roland)
Academy, Royal, 57
Aigrefeuille, Marquis d', 80
Alexander VI, Pope, 28, 34, 35
America, Caricature in, 118, 119
Ape (see Carlo Pellegrini)
BALLI I, 30
Balzac, 85, 86
Bar res, Maurice, 69
Barton, Ralph, 98, 118, 119
Bate man, H. M., 117
Baudelaire, Charles, 85
Beardsley, Aubrey, 28, 101
Beerbohm, Max, vii, 17, 53, 64, 71, 97-
[112
Beggar's Opera, The, 114
Bella, Stefano della, 47
Belloc, Hilaire, 117
Benjamin, 81
Bergson, Henri, 5
Binyon, Laurence, 113
Blunden, Edmund, 115
Boldrini, 25
Book of Caricatures, A, 101
Bourgeois, Emile, 83
Bowles, Thomas Gibson, 70, 73
Boxing Match, A, 58
Browne, Hablot Knight (Phiz), 4
Browne, Sir Thomas, 3
Brueghel Pieter, the elder, 28, 29
Bubble companies, 48, 49
Bull, John, 54, 61, 64, 104
Bunbury, Henry William, 51
CALLOT, Jacques, vii, 10, 29, 30, 31, 47,
Calvin, 38, 39, 43 [59
Cambacres, 80
Canta Gallina, 30, 47
Capricd di Varie Figure, 30
Caran D'Ache (Emmanuel Poiree), 88, 89,
Caricature, La, 80, 81 [117
Caricature and other Comic Art, 17
Caricature Magazine, 63
Cartoons : The Second Childhood of John
Caruso, 95 [Bull, 101
Cavaliers, 41
Cham (Am6dee de No6), 24, 86, 88
Champfleury, Jules Henri, 12, 16-19, 27,
28,81
Characters and Caricaturas, 47, 78
Charivari, Le, 82, 83, 85
Charles I, 41
Charles II, 43
Charles X, 56, 86, 87
Chataigner, 79
Christie's, 62
City trained bands, 53
Clarke, Mrs. Mary Anne, 58
Clemenceau, M., 89, 107, 116
Clement VII, Pope, 37
Conrad, Joseph, i
Continental caricature, 76-92
Covarrubias, Miguel, 92, 96, 119
Cranach, Hans, 33
Cranach, Lucas, 33
Cromwell, Oliver, 42
Cruikshanks, the, 4, 62
Cruikshank, George, 7, 55, 65-67, 77, 78
DANDIES, 64
Dandizettes, 64
Dantan, 88
Daumier, Honor6, vii, 80-86
Dead, Book of the, 1 1
Debussy, Claude, 108
Decamps, Alexandra, 80, 87
Degas, 73
Derby, Lord, 62
Devil in caricature, the, 14, 17-19, 39, 44
Dighton, Robert and Richard, 9, 20, 67,
Disraeli, 71 [68, 78, 105
Doddington, George Bubb, 46
Don Pirlone, II, 88
Dor6, Gustave, 86, 87
Doyle, John and Richard, 4, 68
Dreyfus, 89
Dulac, Edmund, 116
Dusart, Cornelis, 43
EDICT of Nantes, Revocation of, 43
Egyptian caricature, 1 1
Erasmus, 32, 33
124
INDEX
Evans, Powys (Quiz), 112, 114, 115
Everitt, Graham, 4, 6, 8, 55, 86
FARREN, Miss, 62
Fashion-Caricature, 31
Forain, 89
Fox, Charles James, 63,
Fraser, Claude Lovat, 95
French caricature, 19, 27, 76-91
French revolution, 78, 79
Fry, Roger, 7
Fuchs, Eduard, 6, 26
Furniss, Harry, 96
GAMBETTA, 89
Gaudissart, 80
Gaultier, Paul, 6
Gauthier, Thtophile, 85
Gavarni (S. P. Chevalier), 80, 82, 85-87
George III, 61
German caricature, 26, 27, 91, 92
Ghezzi, Pier Leone, 79
Gill, Andr6 (Gosset de Guine), 89
Gillray, James, 9, 24, 51, 54, 55, 57, 59-62,
Giraldus, Cambrensis, 23 [65, 105
Gladstone, Mr., 71
Gobbi, L, 30
Gourmont, Remy de, 6, 90, 91
Goursat, Georges (see Sem)
G6z, 78
Grandville, 80
Greek caricature, 12
Grego, Joseph, 55, 57
Grose, Francis, 3, 65
Grossmith, George, 94
Gulbransson, Olaf, 20, 91, 101
HAMERTON, Philip Gilbert, 67
Hammond, Aubrey, viii, 117
Hanlon, William, 50
Harleian collection, 21, 24
Haselden, W. K., 117
Heath, William, 63
Historical Sketch of the Art of Carica-
Hobby-horse, 64 [turing, 13
Hogarth, William, 47, 48, 52, 53, 78
Holbein, 19, 32
Hooghe, Romeyn de, 47
Horace, 2
Hubert, 78
Humphreys, 51, 59, 60
INCROYABLES, Les, 80, 87
Indian caricature, 12
Irish warriors, 23, 24
Isaac of Norwich, 20, 21
Isabey, the elder, 24, 79
Italian opera, 50
JAMES II, 43
Jehu junior, 73
Jews in caricature, the, 20-21
Johnson, Dr., 1,4, 53
Journal Pour Rire, 87
Jugend, 91
Julius II, Pope, 28
KAPP, Edmond Xavier, 109-114
Karikatur der Europdischen Vdlker, Die, 6
Kenyon, Lord, 62
Keppel, Admiral Sir Harry, 75
Kladderadatsch, 91
LAOCOON, the, 25, 26
Laud, Archbishop, 41
Law, John, 48, 49
L6andre, Charles, 88, 89
Leech, John, 4, 68
Leonardo da Vinci, 25, 47
Le Strange, Roland, 74, 75
Liszt, AbW, 73, 74
London Mercury, The, 114
Louis XIV, 43-45, 49
Louvre, Mus6e de, 12
Lovat, Simon Lord, 48
Low, David, 116, 117
MACAIRE, Robert, 82, 85, 88
Macaulay, Lord, i
Maintenon, Madame de, 44
Malcolm, James Peller, 13-16, 21, 40, 53,
Marks, Arthur J., 73 [54, 76
Marlborough, Sarah Duchess of, 46
Marriott, Charles, 9, 10
Mary, Queen, 16
Maugham, W. S., 92, 119
Maurier, George du, vii, 68
May, Phil, 96
Mayeux, 82, 85
Melanchthon, Philip, 33, 35, 36
Mencken, H. L., 119
Mercure de France, 90
Merveilleuses, les, 80
Minims, 113
Monnier, 80, 82, 83
NAPOLEON I, 54, 60, 63, 79, 85, 90, 104,
Napoleon III, 77 [105
New Statesman, The, 116-117
125
INDEX
Newton, Richard, 63,
Nicholson, William, 72
Old and the Young Self, The, 104
Onions, Oliver, 8, 93, 94
Ospovat, Henry, 8, 93-95
Outlook, The,n6
Owen, Professor, 73
PAPACY, caricatures of the, 33-41, 44, 88
Parton, James, 17, 40, 42, 86, 87
Pellegrini, Carlo, 9, 24, 55, 70-73, 99, 100,
Perier, Casimir, 81 [109
Personalities, in
Philipon, Charles, 56, 80-85
Philippe, Louis, 81-84
Pick-me-up, 101
Pike, L. p., 21
Pinon, Bishop of, 18
Pitt, William, 63
Pliny, 12
Poets 9 Corner, The, 101
Poirfe, Emmanuel (see Caran d'Ache)
Pompeii, 12
Popish plot, 1 6
Presbyterians, 41, 42
Prudhomme, Joseph, 82, 83
Prudhomme, Sully, 6
Pry, P. (see Heath, William)
Psst! 89
Punch, 11,53,68,77,88
Puritans, 42, 43
Quiz (see Powys Evans)
RABELAIS, Frai^ois, 27, 28
Ratalanga, 88
Ratapoil, 85
R6camier, Madame, 79
Record Office, 20, 23
Reflections, in
Reformation, the, 32
Rheims, 15
Ribera, Giuseppe, 26
Rire, Le, 89
Rire et la Caricature, Le, 6
Roman comic art, 12, 13, 17
Rouveyre, Andr6, 6, 69, 90, 91, 108
Rowlandson, Thomas, 16, 55, 57-60, 63,
Rupert, Prince, 42 [105
SACHETTI, Enrico, 92
Sacheverell, Dr., 46
St. Nilus, 17
Saturday Review, The, 86, 114
Savoy, The, 101
Sayer, James, 63
Scarpelli, Filiberto, 92
Sem (George Goursat), 90, 101
Seven Men, 108
Seymour, Robert, 4, 68
Sickert, Walter, 112
Simplicissimus, 91, 92, 101
Songes Drolatiques de Pantagruel, 27
Spain, H.M. the King of, 90, 105
Spectator, The, 3, 53
Spencer, Lord, 64
Spy (see Ward, Sir Leslie)
Stimmer, Tobias, 37
Strachey, Lytton, 72, 102
Strand Magazine, The, 100
Suburbia, 117
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 72, 101,
Symons, Arthur, 101 [102, 107
TALES of Three Nations, 104
Talleyrand, 80
Thackeray, W. M., 7, 44, 77, 85
Thiers, Adolphe, 89
Titian, 25, 26
Travtes, 80, 82, 85, 87
Trollope, Anthony, 73
Vanity Fair, 9, 55, 70-75, 112
Vernet, Carle, 79
Victoria, Queen, 14, 89
Villevielle, de la, 80
Viollet-le-Duc, 14
Vireloque, Thomas, 82
Visages des Contemporains, 6, 90
Voltaire, 78
WAGNER, Richard, 89
Walpole, Sir Robert, 50
Wanley, Humphrey, 21
Ward, Sir Leslie (Spy), 70, 73, 74, 100
Ward, Samuel, 40, 41
Wattier, 82
Wilhelm, ex-Emperor, 63
Wilkes, John, 48
Winter Owl, The, 72
Wood, Derwent, R.A., 95
Wood, Sir Henry, 109
Woodward, George Moutard, 63
Wright, Thomas, 23, 87
Yellow Book, The, 101
York, Duke of, 51, 58, 64
ZOLA, Emile, 89
126
PLATES
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5?
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X)
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'"
Leonardo da Vinci.
(Plate III}
Department of Prints and Drawings,
British Museum.
A sheet of caricatures
(Plate /F")
From " Z?/V Karikatur der Europdischen
Volker*\ by Edztard Fuchs.
THE MONK-CALF OF FREIBERG
(After a German wood-engraving. First half
of the sixteenth century)
(Plate V} From "A Treatise on Wood Engraving",
by IV. Chatto and John Jackson.
A reputed caricature of Martin Luther
(After a German wood-engraving. First half
of the sixteenth century)
3cf)Gmjted)tctn?einfd>lau<&
Jdr mi
t)nb nw0 writ fern y eg wol gcladjco
intbomirfcbwcft
tDcn mit mem groffer ivamfl tfealt
"Dnt) i|l alld bmd) tcit Tlroflcfaren
J ic^ w^yncn in alun 3arcn.
F7)
" Die Karikatur der Europaischen
Volker", by Eduard Fucks.
THE TOPER
(After a German wood-engraving of 1510)
O
BILLYS FQLOTC4L HAYXHI J&
Richard Newton.
(Plate VIII}
Department of Prints and Drawings,
British Museum.
William Pitt and Charles James Fox
(After a coloured print of 1796)
Mtris turjbe, e^rftore
,-?^^^^^
James Gillray.
(Plate X)
Department of Prints and Drawings,
British Museum.
The Tsar Paul I of Russia
AV!E\V" froinMAGOAI. EN 1 1 ALL, OXFORD,
Robert Di%hton.
(Plate XI)
Captain Desmond Coke.
An Oxford Don
Honort Daumier.
(Plate XII]
Department of Prints and Drawings,
British Museum.
ACTUALIT&S : IRLANDE ET JAMAIQUE
". . . . Patience! . . ."
(After a coloured lithograph)
IVtllictm
ALGERNON CHARLKS SWI3MBURNE
(A study on blotting-paper for the caricature
in Vanity J****^ 1874)
Krom T*?ie IVinfer Owt^ 1923
^^^m&''-'
Vm
Max Beerbohm.
(Plate XIV)
Philip Guedalla, Esq.
"MR. SWINBURNE, JUNE 1899"
Roland le Strange (A-o)
(Plate XV)
From ^Vanity Fair*\ 1903.
"94"
(Admiral of the Fleet the Honourable Sir Henry Keppel)
Henry Ospovat.
(Plate XVI}
Captain Desmond Coke.
MR. GEORGE GROSSMITH
Edmund Dulac.
(Plate XVII)
From " The Outlook", 1919.
4t HIS FIRST WOUND-STRIPE"
(Monsieur Clemenceau)
Edmond Xavier Kapp.
(Plate XVIII}
The Artist.
BUFFOON
(George Graves enlarging our vocabulary)
Powys Evans (Quiz).
(Plate XIX)
From " The Saturday Re*view*\ 1923.
MR. EDMUND BLUNDEN
Ralph Barton.
(Plate XX)
AS OTHERS SEE US
(A celebrity-at-large and, on the right, a self-caricature)
OD<
IS
100 172
