ART.
ENGLISH HUMORISTS IN ART: THE OLDER HUMORISTS.
THE present exhibition can hardly fail to prove interesting, the director, Mr. Joseph Grego, having provided food for all tastes. Here one can well compare the respective merits of the robust, often coarse humour of our forefathers, with the more delicate, and occasionally finical productions of our own time.
The series is very complete, commencing with our great English master Hogarth, and his successors, Rowlandson, Harry Bunbury, and Gillray. Here Cruikshank exhibits all his quaint fancy, and the series is carried down by John Leech, on whom undeniably descended the mantle of these fathers of the art ; he combining a great. deal of their honest vigour and simplicity with a power of representing the fresh, unaffected beauty, which is the peculiar property of English womanhood, and having always shown himself capable of a many-sided representative of the most salient as well as pleasantest points of British character. Leech, more than any one else, has mastered the great secret of humour without caricature, and will for that reason always occupy a high position in the ranks of humorists. It is perhaps rather unfortunate for his reputa- tion that he is so largely represented here by the oil sketches enlarged by process and coloured by himself; for he was but very imperfectly acquainted with the method of using oil-colour, and this fact is strongly evident here,—the ink or crayon marks showing through the thin coating of paint, and the colour in itself being disagreeable and garish. His talent displays itself to best advantage where a few pencil-lines are skilfully used to an end, and of these there is not a sufficient number brought together for purposes of comparison in the present show. The later artists of Punch and other comic periodicals are well represented ; there is also much clever work by Messrs. Fred. Barnard, Fildes, Greene, and others, though some of it does not, in our estimation, quite come under the head of "humorous."
Rowlandson, in our opinion, is the hero of the present exhibi- tion, the work shown of his far more illustrious predecessor, Hog,arth, being small and unimportant. It is true there is one small engraving after the inimitable "March of the Guards from Finchley " (5) ; but it is hung so high, and is on so small a scale, that it hardly does justice to the wealth of humour in the original picture, which we have always felt (from the very low-comedy view taken of the Guards) did, in fact, rather justify our drill-serjeant King George II. in his strictures on a "painter daring to burlesque a soldier." The small pen-and-ink sketch for the caricature of the demagogue, John Wilkes (3), with all its incisive satire, should not be passed over, nor the interesting series of original sketches from the Windsor col- lection, which also contributes other interesting works, in the front rank of which we should place Rowlandson's two water- colours of English and French reviews (10 and 11). No student of history can fail to be interested in these two drawings, which, to judge by the costume, were done some time between 1780 and 1790, when the feeling of bitterness occasioned by the French participation in the American War was still at its height. The old time-honoured joke on the leanness of the French and stoutness of the beef-and-beer- fed English, is the key-note of the satire. In the "English Review" (10), the Horse Grenadiers, at full gallop and with their standards flying, pass at some distance from the spectator ; some dragoons are keeping the very good-humoured and somewhat boisterous crowd in order, and an elegant damsel is being assisted from a dangerously high-hung phaeton on the right of the picture; evidently severe police regulations were not the order of the day, and the common crowd of spectators are having a right merry time. In the "French Review," every one (excepting some monks) is lean; the gentleman at the saluting-point in whose honour the review is taking place, on the white horse, attended by Gardes du Corps, who, we take it, is intended for his most Christian Majesty Louis XVI., even shares slightly in this peculiarity, which we should have thought was the last thing he could be reproached with. The troops, who have just received the command, "Eyes right!" are saluting as they pass close in slow time. Both men and officers are veterans, and with their moustaches have a look of Germans, and may perhaps repre- sent that very regiment "Royal Allemand," so celebrated later on in the Revolution. Notice, as little sly touches of humour, the petit abbe, and the English youth doing the grand tour whose advances to a very pretty damsel his reverend tutor is doing his best to restrain. It is curious to us, who have grown so accustomed to see even a Speaker or Lord Chancellor bearded, to notice that most of the joke evidently hangs on the moustachioed appearance of the French, now such a necessary military appendage.
The two beautiful drawings of "Skating on the Serpentine" (35 and 51) can hardly fail to interest everyone, and well show the artist's facile, graceful handling of his medium ; he appears to equal advantage in landscape, figure, animal, and archi- tectural subjects, and has besides a considerable power of representing a type of female loveliness which, though not highly intellectual, is richly endowed with beaute du diable. The drawings are mainly water-colour, slightly but firmly out- lined with a reed-pen, and their characteristic is extreme versa- tility. How delightful is the delicacy of execution of the little sketches illustrating a journey in a post-chaise made by the artist and a Mr. Wigstead to the wreck of the Royal George' in 17821 We believe this series has not been exhibited in the original before. "Between Decks on the Hector,' 74 guns," is not delicate in choice of subject, but it is a curious record of the license allowed in certain directions in the powerful Navy which carried England so gloriously through the Great War. There are many drawings of places in London now so changed, and several versions of the well-known "Old Vaux- hall Gardens" with Mrs. Billington singing. The views of Oxford are interesting, especially for the figures in the north view of "Friar Bacon's Study" (194). It is irresistibly comic to see the undergraduates pulling a heavy barge, in full academical costume of cap and gown ; and particularly good is "The Oxford Jockey ; or, the Landlord in Qualms for his Cattle" (23), a picture of some undergraduates, also in cap and gown, and armed with tremendous cudgels, who are evidently going to take it out of their unfortunate mounts.
Rowlandson, here represented by about three hundred drawings, with his mixture of roistering, boisterous humour and pretty damsels, has left us perhaps the most characteristic illustrations of life in the last century, and certainly would make one believe in Merry England. His fun, though some- times coarse, is always good-humoured.
Not so Gillray, whose satire is of a much more pungent character. He is well represented, both in the exhibition and in the illustrations to the catalogue. His humour is apt to be somewhat coarse, especially to modern rather over-refined palates. The peculiarities and frugality of George III. were never-failing subjects for his caustic wit ; the father and son at their respective meals are good examples (284, 285), as well as "Fatigues of the Campaign in Flanders" (289), in which we see the young Duke of York making a most riotous repast, waited on by the wasted grenadiers, who have already experienced the only practical result of his most inglorious expedition,—namely, Walcheren fever. He is very great on Bony, the Corsican Ogre ; and in spite of the original's Grecian profile, makes him look a veritable loup-garou. "Tiddy Doll, the Great French Ginger- Bread Baker, bringing a Brand-New Batch of Kings out of the European Oven" (301), is a particularly good specimen.
Henry Bunbury is chiefly represented by engravings ; his work, though amateurish, has a good deal of frolicsome humour and grace. "Symptoms of Eating and Drinking" (324), with the pretty girl taking wine with an ugly old man, and the rest of the guests busily engaged, makes one think of the Thrales' dinner-parties at Streatham. His plates to Gamba,do's "Academy for Grown Horsemen," a skit on the Marquis of Newcastle's book, are broadly comic,. and have a certain dash and go. The Queen sends four original caricatures in one frame, by R. Dighton, one of the artists taking in the last century the place of the late Carlo Pellegrini ; these are very good, especially " A Great Coat "—the Marquess of Wellesley,—(340). An amusing drawing is Woodward's "He would be a Soldier," William Pitt in regimentals as a. private of Volunteers.
Isaac, and his more celebrated sons, Bob and George Crnik- shank, are well represented in the second room ; George Cruikshank's life covers so long a span, that whilst his earlier work links him with Gillray and Rowlandson, he lived to. assist materially the dawning popularity of Charles Dickens by his illustrations to "Pickwick," Sze. He, as a humorist,. with all his merits, is essentially a caricaturist, and finds a. great deal of his fun in grotesque exaggeration. Of his later period, the elaborately finished water-colours for "Oliver Twist" and the sketches for " Boz " are good examples ; and of his earlier, more truculent method, the Royal Aquarium Society exhibits a most extensive collection. When he tries to be natural and beautiful, as in the drawing of the first appearance of William Shakespeare at the Globe in 1564, we confess we like him less than in his more comic moods ; his: colour is disagreeable, and his faces are apt to be mannered_ Altogether, we should fancy that Cruikshank, as well as Rowlandson, is more fully represented here than at any former exhibition. We would conclude our notice of the elder humorists with Count D'Orsay's interesting though rather feeble sketch of Tha,ckeray at the time he was writing "Vanity Fair" (535). The author is represented in a most unaffected action, with a churchwarden-pipe in one hand, and a rummer of spirits-and-water in the other.
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