The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 by Harry Furniss (best ebook reader for chromebook txt) 📖
- Author: Harry Furniss
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Avoids the fires of justice.
"'You, Mr. Furniss, must disburse
Two bob costs to my till,
And promise me to try no more
Primrose babes to kill.
"'And all in Court, take warning by
The furious Canterer's fate,
And go not up the Primrose path
At such an awful rate.
"'But if your sluggish livers you
Must vigorously shake,
"Vigor's Horse Exercise at Home"
(Vide Prospectus) take.'"
As a matter of fact, the magistrate did not look at the charge-sheet, or know me, or catch my name, or he might have made his usual joke at my expense in another way.
[Pg 285]
MY PORTRAIT, BY F. C. BURNAND.
Mr. Burnand and I rode a great deal together. Avoiding the Row, my editor preferred to ride to Hampstead, Harrow, or Mill Hill, calling for me on the way. Once, when I could not ride, he wrote: "Very sorry to hear of your being laid up with a cold; it shows what even the Wisest and Best amongst us are liable to. The idea is monstrous of a Cold Furniss. A coal'd furniss is satisfactory. Don't take too much out of yourself with riding. 'He speaks to thee who hath not got a horse'—Shakespeare." Then follows later a specimen of his irrepressible good humour:
22 Nov.
"Alas and alack!
I've got a hack,
But the weather's been such,
I've not got on his back.
"I got no jog
Because of the fog,
And up to twelve,
In breeches and boots,
Which I had to shelve
And recover my foots.
I lunched at the 'G'
(So there was, you see,
One Gee for me).
"Then I came back
And wrote some play
But oh, good lack!
No riding to-day.
If foggy here,
At Ramsgate 'twas clear.
"Alas and alack!
I'll sell my hack,
Much to my sorrow.
I'll ride to-morrow,
[Pg 286] That is, if fine,
But not at nine.
I shall not start, if I'm alive
And have the heart, till ten forty-five.
"Away to parks I'll trot
To get a little hot,
Also to get a little dirty,
And with you be 11.30.
"Till one,
Then done.
Back to Lunch,
Then to Office of Punch.
This my plan, you'll be happy to learn, is
At your disposal, Mr. Furniss."
But excursions in search of material my editor and I had to do on foot, and were not so pleasing; still, Mr. Burnand always managed to have his little joke in all circumstances.
One day he and I were "doing" the picture shows in the interests of Mr. Punch. At one o'clock, feeling jaded and tired, a retreat to the Garrick Club to lunch was suggested. "Happy thought!" said my editor. "Better still, here is an invitation for two to the Exhibition of French Cookery at Willis's Rooms. Capital lunch there, I should think." So off we went, anticipating a recherch� lunch. Fancy our chagrin on arrival to find cooks galore, discussing their art, but, alas! their art, like the high art of the Masters of the Brush in our National Gallery, was all under glass! Aggravatingly appetising, but absolutely uninteresting to the two hungry art critics. We soon were in a cab and at the Garrick. As we pulled up, the greatest gourmet of the Club, that clever actor, Arthur Cecil, greeted us:
"Hallo, Frank, where have you two come from?"
"Oh, Arthur, such luck! Furniss and I have just had the most recherch� lunch you could imagine."
[Pg 287]
"H'm—hullo—h'm—where? The deuce you have! Lucky dogs! Eh, what was it like?"
"Oh, you can see it for yourself; it's going on now at the French Cookery Exhibition in Willis's Rooms. Special invitation—ah, here's a ticket."
"Thanks, old chap! what a treat! I'm off there! No, no; you fellows mustn't pay the cab—I'll do that. Here, driver—Willis's Rooms—look sharp!"
Arthur Cecil undoubtedly was a quaint fellow and a clever actor, but he had an insatiable appetite. One would never have thought so, judging from appearance: his clever, clean-cut face, his small, thin figure, together with the little hand-bag he always carried, rather suggested a lawyer or a clergyman. His eccentricity was a combination of absent-mindedness and irritability. The latter failing, he told me, would at times take complete control of him: for instance, he had to leave a train before his journey was completed, as he felt it impossible to sit in the carriage and look at the alarm bell without pulling it. I have watched him seated in the smoking-room of the club we both attended, in which the star-light in the centre of the ceiling was shaded by a rather primitive screen of stretched tissue paper, gazing at it for half-an-hour at a time, and eventually taking all the coins out of his pocket to throw them one after another at the immediate object of his irritation. He frequently succeeded in penetrating the screen, the coins remaining on the top of it, to the delight of the astonished waiters.
His eccentricity—perhaps I ought to say in this case his absent-mindedness—is illustrated by an incident which happened on the morning of the funeral of a great friend of his. As Cecil (his real name was Blount) was having his bath, he was suddenly inspired with some idea for a song; so, pulling his sponge-bath into the adjoining sitting-room closer to the piano, he placed a chair in it, and sat down to try it over. A friend, rushing in to fetch him to the funeral, found him so seated, singing and playing, balancing the dripping sponge on the top of his head.
[Pg 288]
THE CARICATURING OF PICTURES.
THE PICTURE SHOWS.Design from "Punch."
To feed upon one's own kind is a custom which, like so many other vestiges of a previous civilisation, seems in the present day to have a fair chance of revival. We have long had with us the City Cannibal, the Fleet Street Cannibal, the Dramatic, Literary and Musical Cannibals. Latterly the Society Cannibal has come more distinctly to the front. Then why, I long ago asked myself, should there not be the Cannibal of the etching pen and the brush? Especially as the writhing victims of those mighty instruments appear to be so enamoured of their fate as to besiege that comic slaughter-house, the studio of the caricaturist, and with persistent cries of "Eat us! eat us! Our turn next!" [Pg 289] solicit the "favour of not being forgotten" in his next batch of "subjects."
It may be a revelation to many of my readers, but I can assure them it is a fact, that it is only in very exceptional cases that artists object to having their pictures caricatured. Indeed, many of the leading painters have given me to understand that the omission of their work from my sketches would be anything but agreeable to them, although, when the desired travesties of their pictures appear, they may pretend to be highly indignant. There is one Royal Academician of my acquaintance who has so keen an appreciation of humour that he never loses an opportunity of giving me a hint when his magnifying glass has detected the slightest element of the grotesque in a fellow artist's work. And that most amiable of men, the late Frank Holl, could never refrain, when occasion offered, from directing my attention to the humorous points of his sitters, although I need hardly add that no trace of his having perceived them was ever apparent in any of his works. Do artists object? Well, in Punch, May, 1889, du Maurier touches this point:
"What our artist (the awfully funny one) has to put up with: Brown: 'I say, look here! What the deuce do you mean by caricaturing my pictures—hay?' Jones: 'Yes, confound you! and not caricaturing mine!'"
I have even known artists so anxious to be parodied that, if [Pg 290] they happened to have a vein of humour in their pencils, they would actually send me caricatures of their own pictures. Even poor Fred Barnard once sent me an admirable sketch, caricaturing an excellent portrait of his three children which he had painted for the Royal Academy, where it duly appeared. Others less humorously imaginative perhaps have written to me assuring me of the great pleasure which would have been theirs had they themselves conceived the idea which my caricature of their work supplied.
Although, however, there are so few artists who object to having their pictures caricatured, there is, of course, another side to the question. It is indeed most true that nothing kills like ridicule, and in the course of my experience I have found it is just as easy unconsciously to inflict an injury with my pen and Indian ink as it is to do good. Let us suppose, for instance, that a great painter has just finished a very sentimental work—a picture so brimful of beauty and pathos that it appeals to everybody, myself included. As I stand before it, and admire, it is impossible perhaps for me to restrain a sympathetic tear from making its appearance in, at all events, one of my eyes. But how about the other? Ah! with regard to that other eye, I must confess it is very differently employed, and, superior to my control, is searching the canvas high and low for that "something ridiculous" which, except in the case of the very greatest masters, is always there. Now what ensues? The purchaser of that picture, who, mark you, unlike myself, regarded it and admired it with both of his eyes, congratulates himself upon its acquisition. I have known it for a fact, however—to my regret—that after the publication of the caricature the purchaser was never able to look at his picture again through his own glasses, and bitterly regretted his outlay.
[Pg 291]
THE GREAT BACCARAT CASE. MY SKETCH IN PENCIL MADE IN COURT, AND CONGRATULATORY NOTE FROM THE EDITOR OF PUNCH.
[Pg 292]
[Pg 293]
An art publisher with whom I was acquainted agreed to pay a heavy sum for the copyright of a work of a well-known and popular painter, and after the caricature had appeared in Punch he resolved to forego the publication of the engraving from it by which he had hoped to recoup his expenditure, because he considered that the sobriety of the work was so completely destroyed as to preclude the possibility of sale; and an eminent sculptor, who was responsible for a well-known statue which I caricatured some years ago when it appeared in the Royal Academy, has told me, since it was put up in the Metropolis, that he has actually meditated replacing it by another piece, owing to the ludicrous suggestion affixed to it.
On the other hand, the caricature of an important work is sometimes received in the proper spirit. Here is a letter from Professor Herkomer, with reference to my caricature of the work of our greatest art genius, Alfred Gilbert, R.A.:
Of course, the caricaturing of pictures has its seamy as well as its smooth side. Among the annoyances to which an artist engaged on this description of work is exposed I am inclined to give a prominent place to the fussy and vexatious regulations imposed upon him by the authorities at Burlington House. One would have supposed, for instance, that anyone like myself, who is well-known as merely taking notes for caricature, would have been allowed to consult his own convenience to some extent in making his sketches. But not a bit of it. The [Pg 294] penalty is something too dreadful if you are found making the slightest note of a picture at the Royal Academy at any
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