Marion Harry Alexander Spielmann

“ It is hard to say in which field Tenniel most excels—whether in those ingenious parables in which the British Lion and the Russian Bear, John Chinaman, Jacques Bonhomme and Uncle Sam play their part—or in the ever-changing scenes of the great parliamentary Comedy—or in sombre dramas of Anarchy, Famine or Crime—or in those London extravaganzas in which the symbolic personalities of Gog and Magog, Father Thames and the Fog Fiend, the duke of Mudford and Mr Punch himself, have become familiar. ”

“ He was not alone in his efforts; but there are not many such as he—still fewer who regarded their art as a noble and inspired thing. He despised the showy and pretentious products of the shops which in these days suffer so greatly from the paralysing conditions of the ordinary silversmith's workshop and from the fatal repression of the trade union— which are stamped by machinery, cast by the score, reproduced to order by electrotype, without more pride taken in the manufacture of them than attends the production of an American desk. ”

“ During the middle ages a vast mass of grotesque material was accumulated, but selection becomes even more difficult than with the scarce relics of antiquity. With the building of the cathedrals originated a new style of art; a strange mixture of memories of paganism and Christian imaginings was called into being for the adornment of those great strongholds of urban Catholicism, and in this the coarse and brutal materialism of the popular humour found its largest and freest expression. ”

“ His pieces are not the mere vessels of silver that are annually set before the public of to-day, but works of art which in their beauty of design and handling repay the torment and the love of the craftsman. ”

“ The Persians, the Etruscans and the Greeks carried on the art to the highest perfection, alike in sculpture and architectural ornament, and they applied it to gem sculpture, as in the case of “cameo.” Similarly, the inverse treatment of relief—that is, sunk below the surface, in order that when used for seals a true relief is obtained—was early brought to great completeness; this form of engraving is called “intaglio.” The degree of projection in relief, broadly speaking, has varied greatly with the periods of art. Thus, in Byzantine and Romanesque art the relief was low. ”

“ Though he wears the cap and bells, he is alive to the pity of things; he sees the pathos no less than the humour of his street-boys and “gutter-snipes.” He is, however, a jester primarily: an artist, too, of high achievement. Two others stand out as masters of the art of social caricature—Frederick Barnard and Mr J. F. Sullivan. Barnard’s illustrations to Dickens, like his original sketches, have a lively humour—the humour of irrepressible high spirits—and endless invention. High spirits and invention are characteristics also of Mr Sullivan. ”

“ He was chosen member of many artistic societies in England and other countries, including the American Water-Colour Society of New York (elected 1876) and the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours (London) (elected 1883 and resigned in 1893) . In 1895, when he became one of the original incorporators of the American Academy at Rome, he was elected associate of the Royal Water-Colour Society. In 1901 he was made an associate and in 1902 a member of the (American) Academy of Design; and he was an original member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. ”

“ The mystery that surrounds much in the life and work of Shakespeare extends also to his portraiture. The fact that the only two likenesses of the poet that can be regarded as carrying the authority of his co-workers, his friends, and relations—yet neither of them a life-portrait—differ in certain essential points, has opened the door to controversy and encouraged the advance and acceptance of numerous wholly different types. ”

“ The silver-lover who is something more than a worshipper of the hall-mark must recognize the beauty and power that lay in the hammer, the raising tools and tracers of a repoussé worker such as Marks; and appreciate the apparent ease with which he could work the yielding metal, play with his pattern and his ornament, and bring it up to accents of sharpness or caress it into liquid meltingness. ”

“ Violent as the action of his figures frequently is, it is always convincing. Such triumphs as the tragedy of the kind-hearted man and the ungrateful bull-calf; the spinster’s cat that ate rat poison, and many others, force the most serious to laughter by their amazing velocity of action and their unctuousness of expression. Frost is to American caricature what “Artemus Ward” has been to American humour, and his field of publication has been chiefly the monthly magazine. ”

“ Thus while Keene takes things dispassionately as they come, seeing only the humorous side of them, we find Du Maurier ever and anon attacking some new phase of snobbishness or philistinism or cant. For all his kindliness in depicting congenial scenes, he is at times as unrelenting a satirist as Rowlandson. The other Punch artists, whose work is in the same field, resemble Keene in this respect rather than Du Maurier. Mr Leonard Raven-Hill recalls Charles Keene not merely in temperament but in technique; like Keene, too, he finds his subjects principally in bourgeois life. ”

“ It is to this paper that America owes the discovery and encouragement of its most remarkable artist humorist, Charles Dana Gibson, whose technique has developed through many interesting phases from exceeding delicacy to a sculpturesque boldness of line without losing its rich texture, and without becoming monotonous. Mr Gibson is chiefly beloved by his public for his almost idolatrous realizations of the beautiful American woman of various types, ages and environments. ”

“ The popularity of the last is evidenced by the fact that no fewer than forty-three towns in England, France and Germany are enumerated as possessing sets of the Dance of Death, that grandiose all-levelling series of caprices in the contemplation of which the middle ages found so much consolation. ”

“ Busch stands alone among the caricaturists of his nation, inasmuch as he is both the author and the illustrator of these works, his witty doggerel supplying Germany with household words. The drawings that accompany the text are amazing for the skill and directness with which he hits the vital mark. A flourish or two and a few touches are enough to set before us figures of intensely comical aspect. This distinguishes Busch from Adolf Oberländer (1845) , who became the chief draughtsman on Fliegende Blätter. Busch’s drawings would have no meaning apart from the humorous words. ”

“ During the 16th century, caricature can hardly be said to have existed at all,—a grotesque of Mary Stuart as a mermaid, a pen and ink sketch of which is yet to be seen in the Rolls Office, being the only example of it known. ”

“ The spelling of Shakespeare’s name—which in succeeding ages has been governed by contemporary fashion—has a distinct bearing on the authenticity of the panel. At the first appearance of the “Felton portrait” in a London sale-room it was bought by Samuel Felton of Drayton, Shropshire, for five pounds, along with a pedigree which carried its refutation along with it. Nevertheless, it bears evidence of being an honest painting done from life, and is probably not a make-up in the sense that most of the others are. ”

“ Mr Punch’s outlook upon life has not changed much since the ’seventies of the last century. His influence upon the tone of caricature made itself felt most appreciably in the days of John Leech and Richard Doyle. Their successors but follow in their steps. In their work, says a clever German critic, is to be found no vestige of the “sour bilious temper of John Bull” that pervaded the pictures of Hogarth and Rowlandson. Charles Keene (1823–1891) and Du Maurier (1834–1896) , he declares, are not caricaturists or satirists, but amiable and tenderly grave observers of life, friendly optimists. ”

“ The pupil, too, is much more genial than the master, and he is content if his pencil evokes the comment, “How ridiculously like!” Caricature of this kind is merely an entertainment. Here we are concerned rather with those branches of caricature which, merrily or mordantly, reflect and comment upon the actual life we live. In treating of recent caricature of this kind, we must give the first place to Punch. ”

“ The satirical grotesque of the 18th century had been characterized by a sort of grandiose brutality, by a certain vigorous obscenity, by a violence of expression and intention, that appear monstrous in these days of reserve and restraint, but that doubtless sorted well enough with the strong party feelings and fierce political passions of the age. ”

“ The bust is believed to have been commissioned by the poet’s son-in-law, Dr John Hall, and, like the Droeshout print, must have been seen by and likely enough had the approval of Mrs Shakespeare, who did not die until August 1623. It is thought to have been modelled from either a life or death mask, and inartistic as it is has the marks of facial individuality; that is to say, it is a portrait and not a generalization such as was common in funereal sculpture. According to the practice of the day, especially at the hands of Flemish sculptors of memorial figures, the bust was coloured ”

“ One of the cleverest imitations, if such it be, of an old picture is the “Buttery” or “Ellis portrait,” acquired by an American collector in 1902. This small picture, on panel, is very poor judged as a work of art, but it has all the appearance of age. In this case the perspective of the dress has been corrected, and Shakespeare’s shield is shown on the background. The head is that of a middle-aged man; the moustache, contrary to the usual type, is drooping. It is curious that the “Thurston miniature” done from the Droeshout print gives the moustache of the “proof.” ”

“ On the disappearance of the Chandos likeness under the action of the spirit another portrait of Shakespeare was found beneath, irretrievably damaged but obviously painted in the 17th century. At the time of the “fake” only portraits of the Chandos type were saleable, and this would account for the wanton destruction of an interesting work which was probably executed for a publisher—likely enough for Jacob Tonson—but not used. Early as it is in date it can make no claim to be a life-portrait. ”

“ His drawings must always lie very close to the affections of the large audience that welcomed them. American also by adoption is Henry Mayer, a German by birth, who has contributed to many of the chief comic papers of France, England, Germany and America.
Entirely native in every way is the art of A. B. Frost (b. 1851) , a prominent humorist who deals with the life of the common people. His caricature (he is also an illustrator of versatility and importance) is distinguished by its anatomical knowledge, or, rather, anatomical imagination. ”

“ Men, animals, trees, objects, are endowed by him with a mysterious life of their own. Without the help of any verbal joke, he achieves the funniest results simply by seeing and accentuating the comical side of everything. His drawings are caricature in the strict sense of the word, its principle being the exaggeration of some natural characteristic. The new generation of contributors to Fliegende Blätter do not work on these lines. ”

“ In Germany caricature did not exist. Only in Spain was there to be found an artist capable of entering into competition with the masters of the satirical grotesque of whom England could boast. The works of Francesco Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) are described by Théophile Gautier as “a mixture of those of Rembrandt, Watteau, and the comical dreams of Rabelais,” and Champfleury discovers analogies between him and Honoré Daumier, the greatest caricaturist of modern France. ”

“ The vogue which, through Nast, Harper’s Weekly gave to caricature, prepared the way for the first purely comic weekly paper, Puck, founded by two Germans, and for long published in a German as well as an English edition—a journal which has cast its influence generally in favour of the Democratic party. It is worth noting that not only the founders but the spirit of American caricature have been rather German than English, the American comic papers more closely resembling Fliegende Blätter, for example, than Punch. ”

“ When in the possession of George Rippon the picture was so superbly chromo-lithographed by Vincent Brooks that copies of it, mounted on old panel or canvas, and varnished, have often changed hands as original paintings. It is clear that if the picture was indeed in possession of John, Lord Lumley, we have here a contemporary portrait of Shakespeare, and the fact that it is an amateur performance would in no way invalidate the claim. It is thinly painted and scarcely looks the age that is claimed for it ”

“ He returned to America known only as an illustrator. The Civil War did not awaken his latent genius till 1864, when he published a cartoon of fierce irony against the political party which opposed Lincoln’s re-election and advocated peace measures with the Southern confederacy. This cartoon not only made Nast famous, but may be said to contain the germ of American caricature; for all that had gone before was too crude in technique to pass muster even as good caricature. ”

“ America possesses some well-known statues. That by J. Q. A. Ward is in Central Park, New York (1872) . In 1886 William Ordway Partridge modelled and carved the seated marble figure for Lincoln Park, Chicago; and later, Frederick MacMonnies produced his very original statue for the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. This is in some measure based on the Droeshout engraving. William R. O'Donovan also sculptured a portrait of Shakespeare in 1874. Great consideration is given by some to the bust made by William Page of New York in preparation for a picture of the poet he was about to paint. ”