23 DECEMBER 1871, Page 10

TWO AMERICAN CARICATURISTS.

WE mentioned last week that much of the sudden success of the attack on the New York Ring is attributed in New York to some caricatures furnished by Mr. T. H. Nast to Hamper's Weekly, and believed to have roused thousands whom no editorials in the journals would either have touched or reached. We had not then seen them, but two small collections of the drawings have since been placed in our hands, and are well deserv- ing of attention. The first wo encountered disappointed us. It is a caricature of the Tammany leaders, done in a style with which Englishmen have become unfamiliar, though it lingers still in France, a style which seeks , its effect iu the monstrous exag- geration of some personal peculiarity, whether of dress, physique, or manner. Mr. Hall, for example; the Mayor, wears the kind of eye-glass called a pinee-nex, and in this caricature nothing else about him is distinguishable ; his whole face, expres- sion, personality, is eye-glass, and that alone. This to Englishmen seems poor caricature, and the effect is not improved by careless drawing, smudgy printing, and paper much too heavily pressed in the machine. It is a misfortune for Mr. Nast that his sketches should appear in a journal so cheap and of such large cir- culation that they must be treated like letter-press ; and that he must work under somewhat unfavourable conditions of haste, both in execution and printing ; and we should advise him, if ever he seeks a European reputation, to retouch and reprint his blocks. The first disappointment, however, vanished with careful study of many sketches. Hasty as he is, and, as we imagine, badly trained as he has been in the mechan- ism of his art, there is something of Hogarth's power about Mr. Nast, a wonderful faculty of suggesting action not yet begun, ability for portraiture equal to H. B.'s," and many signs of an imagination which can grow hot with righteous wrath. The sketch, for instance, of the Ring published on September 10 would be, but for one defect, a most effective bit of portraiture. We never saw one of the models ; but nobody can doubt that the face of the fat man in front, with its genial cunning and eager shrewdness and zeal for all the pleasant things of the flesh, is a portrait of Mr. Tweed ; or that the Irishman who is counselliug him carries the brains of the party ; or that the portly man behind, with his O'Connell face slightly lowered by want of culture, is Mr. Conolly, the pet of the New York Irish ; or that the Mayor is, among his colleagues, rather a feeble tool, who does not know any more than he need, and would have same difficulty in knowing it if he tried. The defect is that the Mayor's expres- sion is so lost iu that of his eyeglass as to produce an impression of incomplete work, as if the artist had never perceived that eyes have meaning oven when spectacles are worn. Mr. Tweed appears over and over again in these drawings, and it is curious to note that as his fall became more and more certain his expression in Harper's grew worse, till in the picture of his arrest courage has become brutal defiance, shrewdness the lowest of cunning, and genial sensuousness animal sensuality. There is a perfect lesson in the art of caricature in the gradual degradation of this single face, in obedience to the change iu the public con- ception of the character. In another engraving (September 23) Mr. Nast attempts and succeeds in a much higher flight. Gus- tave Dore would not disdain the composition of the scene in which the members of the Ring squat as a group of vultures on the rock to which they have borne their prey—Liberty, Justice, &c.—and cowering amidst skulls picked to the bone, and labelled "Treasury," "Taxpayer," and " New York," await in malignant patience and fear the " passing " of a storm which as it passes is hurling rocks upon their heads, which for the very blaze they can neither see nor avoid. Only the Collector looks up with an uneasy gaze. There is a power of hate in that design, which might have been suggested by Edgar Poe, if the Ring had been composed of benefactors to

whom he owed cash. Hate, too, comes out in an almost ferocious attack on the Catholic Clergy, to whom the Ring was supposed to vote large sums. The prelates, with their mitres easily changed into alligators' heads, are swimming towards the shore, where the Catholic members of the Ring have seized heaps of children, and are swinging them ready to throw to the reptiles, while Tweed, a Protestant, looks idly on, contemptuous alike of the children and the priests. Two other engravings, one of Horace Greeley as Diogenes flashing his lantern on the Mayor and pronouncing him an honest man—as he was believed to have done, but did not do, in the Tribune—and another of the Ring paying obeis- ance to the gallows, are in the style of " H. B.," and but for their defects of execution, arising evidently from haste, would be well worthy of his pencil. Another, again (November 25), is full of Hogarthian suggestion. Tammany Hall has fallen, and crushed all the Ring but Sweeny, who is represented running away with all the brains of the party in a satchel, Mr. Tweed, whom the Irish are fanning and dosing and nursing into convalescence, and Mayor Hall, who, far aloft, eagerly clutches at a beam still unbroken, but supported only by a party wall, cracked in the middle, and visibly caving in. The fuel' in this drawing are wonderful in their vigour, while Mr. Nast has the art, like some actors, of throwing character into mere articles of dress, hats, boots, and ancle-coverings, so that, although in a sketch intended to compliment the Germans—the good ship Germania throwing the Ring overboard—you see only the Collector, you know that the Mayor has sunk—for that eyeglass can only be his —and that Tweed is swimming half-drowned for the dear life.

On the whole, we doubt whether our first comparison to Hogarth was a just one ; whether Mr. Nast, like the Italian draughtsman of Vanity Fair, does not require the stimulus of a little hatred to bring out his fullest powers. His merely humorous designs are compara- tively weak in idea, though full of spirited portraiture ; his sketches of animals are atrociously bad, quite devoid of the semi-human sentiment Tenniel can give them, and his sentimentalities are uu- pardonably feeble; the triumph of decent men at the elections being, for instance, displayed in the shape of a woman intended to per- sonify the Republic, who advises Kings and Popes to crush their minions as she has crushed hers. Nothing is good in this picture except the looks of the members of the Ring as they listen to their destroyer in the attitude of squelched toads. It is only when ho gives the gloomy side of his imagination its swing, only when ho is angry with the anger of one who hates, that Mr. Nast rises to his full power, and becomes among American artists almost what Edgar Poe was among American authors. Even then wo are not sure that he is not surpassed by a rival draughtsman in liarper's , Weekly, who signs himself "Bellow," and contributes to the campaign against the Ring a drawing which is a perfect marvel of suggestiveness. It was rumoured when the exposures first commenced that Mr. Tweed had threatened to excite an Irish in- surrection, and the story greatly irritated both Americans and Germans. Mr. Bellew has seized the occasion, and drawn the Mayor with thin, malignant lips, pointing out to the Chairman of the Committee of Investigation the fate which awaits his party, while Tweed and Sweeny await watchfully the operation of the menace. The artist has thrown into their faces a touch of diabolism wanting in Mr. Nast's sketches, but his triumph is in the attitude of the Chairman. The figure, exactly like that of the late Lord Clyde, is in perfect repose, only the right hand clutching the left lapel ; but in every limb, in the strong pres- sure of the foot upon the ground, in the rigidity of the mouth, in the glance of the deep eyes, in the very set of the head, you read that the sight has but confirmed his resolution ; that the Ring has not merely failed, but has roused that fierce moral indignation which, among men of the English blood, means war with the wrong-doer to the death. if Mr. Bellew thought as well as drew that sketch, New York has an artist who may compete with Mat. Morgan as he was when the Tomahawk first started.