A. E. Johnson

“ When to the recognition of this distinction is added a consideration of his artistic ability, per se, his title to the appreciation of men of taste and sensibility must be conceded.
Frank Reynolds is fortunately a young man. Long may we continue to suffer the good-natured pricks with which his gentle shafts of satire, piercing the cracks in our self-complacent armour, stimulate us; long may we continue, secure in our own self-esteem, rapturously to gloat over the spectacle of our dear friends and neighbours held up, by his whimsical humour, to keen but harmless ridicule. ”

“ It is the possession of just that subtle power of quiet but comprehensive observation which has obtained for Frank Reynolds the unique position which he occupies amongst the humorous artists of to-day.
For unique his position is. Other men are as funny as he, perhaps funnier. For when a determined man sets out with a fixed and unshakeable resolve to tickle your fancy, there is no limit to the means he may adopt to catch you unawares, and it shall go hard with him but he extorts from you a laugh, however tardy. Frank Reynolds makes no such desperate efforts. ”

“ It will be seen that all the essentials are there in a raw state, and a comparison of this rough sketch with the finished reproduction will give some hint of the patient labour and careful thought which has gone to the making of the latter.
To mix as an observer in all ranks of society—especially the lower and more interesting ones—has always been to Frank Reynolds a matter of reflective amusement. The comedy of life affords him never-failing entertainment, for the world can never be dull to the man with the saving grace of humour and a quizzical interest in his fellow men. ”

“ The excellence of his pencil drawings notwithstanding, it is in pen-and-ink that Frank Reynolds appears to me to be at his best. There is a quality about his work in this medium which gives it a peculiar distinction. Always instinct with the most subtle and delicate feeling, there are occasions when his expressive line does more than satisfy. It arrests: revealing in its simple transcription of pose or expression a significance which had previously escaped our shallow observation, but of which the truth is forced upon us. ”

“ It is not uncommon to hear modern black-and-white art in this country decried by some persons—mostly of that shallow critical class which can praise nothing in the present, and has encomiums only for that which is past. But while English art can point to such work in black-and-white as Frank Reynolds (to say nothing of others, with whom this volume is not concerned) produces, he must have dull senses who deplores the present and must hark back to the days, let us say, of Charles Keene to find satisfaction for his artistic cravings. ”

“ On the vital importance of drawing, the latter was especially insistent: this was the dominant note of his teaching, markedly made manifest in the work of his pupil. In the matter of draughtsmanship, few men have so sure a hand, an instinct so unerring.
Leaving Heatherley's, Frank Reynolds set out, armed with a sharp pencil, and a yet sharper sense of humour, to make a living out of black-and-white illustration. His work quickly obtained recognition, and his drawings were soon appearing with regularity in the illustrated press. ”

“ For sheer power in the art of drawing, Frank Reynolds has few equals and no betters. As a draughtsman pure and simple, he seems to me well-nigh perfect, whether he has pen, pencil, or stump of charcoal in his hand. ”

“ The misty impression materialises as he works, and there grows under his hand a portrait which draws from us an instant smile of recognition, broadening as we perceive the veiled humour and satire that lurk beneath the skilful emphasis which has been laid upon the subject's salient characteristics. ”

“ Other drawings in the same series, depicting other examples of the strange freaks of humanity by whom the British public delights to be entertained, afford good examples of the innate humour of Frank Reynolds' art. There is often little that is actually comic in the situations depicted, yet each is instinct with humour. It is the triumph of Reynolds' comic art that he can snare, on the wing as it were, humour that is too elusive and nimble for one of slower perception and heavier hand. ”

“ On a tale of mere incident his talent is wasted: but into the spirit of a writer who takes human nature for his text, the artist enters with the keenest sympathy. One is tempted to think that the author who is so fortunate as to have Frank Reynolds for a collaborator, must on occasion be startled at the clear vision with which the artist materialises the private conceptions of his mind. It would hardly be possible to find a more sympathetic series of illustrations than those which Frank Reynolds drew for Keble Howard's idyll of Suburbia, entitled "The Smiths of Surbiton." ”

“ So with the artist. The man born with the gift to draw finds as irresistible a fascination in pencil or brush as the man with the power of narrative discovers in ink and paper. Whether he serves before the mast as an A.B., or cattle-ranches out west, sooner or later he is certain to drift into his proper sphere of activity. It may take long to get there, but eventually he is bound to arrive.
In the case of Frank Reynolds the period of bondage was comparatively brief. Entering at first upon a business career, he had originally no prospect, nor intention, of developing his artistic impulses. ”

“ As examples of what a humorous drawing should be they are well-nigh perfect. To Reynolds it is not enough merely to depict a laughable situation or superficially comic types. The humour of his drawings is inherent, not extraneous; his pictorial jests are self-contained, so to speak, and the printed legend beneath them is incidental only. Frank Reynolds produces a comedy where other men succeed only in perpetrating a farce. ”

“ The process is not dissimilar, one imagines, from that by which the artist evolves a character sketch: with this difference, that whereas a solitary trait, accidentally revealed, was to Dickens sufficient foundation upon which to construct his fanciful portrait, such studies of types as Frank Reynolds excels in must be the outcome, not of one "thing seen," but of reiterated observation of the same thing in identical or closely similar guise. ”

“ By comparison, one feels that, despite the fine finish of his pencil work, in the latter medium he loses, to a certain extent, the opportunities for that incisive sureness—so suited to his own unerring vision—which pure line affords him. Consider the drawing (on page 32) of the girl singing in a Paris café. There is no dependence on aught extraneous for the achievement of the effect sought. Yet here, if ever, a human soul is laid bare in all its naked tragedy. ”

“ It is an unfortunate circumstance of the conditions which affect the modern artist who chooses black and white for his principal medium, that as a general rule his work—or, at all events, the reproduction of it—is ephemeral only. In respect of much that appears in the illustrated Press this is small matter for regret; but there is good reason to believe that opportunities of obtaining in permanent form some record of the work of the leading men amongst those artists who work for the Press would be welcomed. ”

“ The portrait of a type must be the presentment of an abstract personality—a print, as it were, from a composite negative comprising the likenesses of many individuals, so welded together as to reproduce only that which is common to all: a collective portrait which is like all but resembles none. ”

“ As a discerning critic can guess Frank Reynolds is slow and careful in his method, and though the central idea of a drawing is frequently the inspiration of the moment, its elaboration is a matter which occupies time, and the picture passes through many stages before attaining in the artist's mind completion. To lay readers it may be of interest to be initiated into the mystery of the gradual development from germ to finished drawing. ”

“ Sketched in a Paris Café Allusion has already been made to the progressive method by which Frank Reynolds evolves a finished drawing, step by step, from an initial idea roughly jotted down with a few strokes of the pencil. His draughtsmanship depends, as must of course all draughtsmanship, very largely upon memory. But it is his practice, whenever possible, to obtain notes on the spot for later use. This was especially the case with his work in Paris, where a pocket sketch-book was his inseparable companion. ”

“ FRANK REYNOLDS. IV. Of Reynolds' exquisite refinement in the art of character drawing, his pictures of life in Paris afford excellent examples. Impressions of Paris through English eyes are familiar enough; but too often they are distortions. The artist is too concerned with the obtaining of an "effect" to be troubled by a strict adherence to truth. No such charge can be levelled against "Pictures of Paris and Some Parisians," as the series of drawings which Frank Reynolds contributed to the Sketch in 1904 was entitled. He viewed Paris through eyes which magnified, perhaps, but never distorted ”

“ In the making of the genuine humorist the faculty of observation is the first necessity. Consider the great pictorial humorists, whether dead or living, whose names are familiar in the mouth as household words. That they gained acknowledgment by masterly handling of the medium in which they chose to work is not to be denied. It is by the peculiar distinction of his technique, indeed, that the work of each, in a general way, is called to mind. ”

“ The author constructed out of the petty doings and humdrum habits of suburban life a charming little story of simple people, and with equal cleverness the artist built up, out of these slight materials, a series of exquisitely natural pictures, which revealed the almost incredible fact that semi-detached villadom is not all dulness. ”

“ One might say, indeed, that he makes no effort at all. His simple method is to set down—with the most refined and delicate art—just one of those little scenes or incidents which everyone may every day everywhere witness. ”

“ As a result, when he essays to portray a type, there rises before his mental vision, not the figure of this individual or that, but a hazy recollection of all its representatives that he has ever come into contact with. ”

“ But though portraits of actual individuals, the models from which they were made are in every case so characteristic, so closely in keeping with their surroundings, that they serve nevertheless as types, and the drawings in consequence make as direct an appeal to the stranger as to one who might happen to be familiar with the originals of them. ”

“ The process is unconscious, or at least but semi-conscious; for your professed observer has never that keen insight which, being native, is not to be acquired by even the most assiduous practice, and alone permits of truthful analysis. ”

“ A certain drawing in the series depicts "The Equilibrist"—an individual with an anxious eye, who is poised upon a slack wire above the head of an admiring assistant, balancing sundry cigar-boxes and wine-glasses on one toe, while supporting on his head a lighted lamp, and discoursing sweet music from a mandoline. ”

“ Illustrators of Charles Dickens are legion, but when one thinks of the opportunities for character-study, without that exaggeration into which previous illustrators have been too prone to indulge, which the works of the great novelist afford, one is inclined to think that until we see that wonderful gallery of fanciful personalities which began with Mr. ”