litre Sart.
Mn. Joni( TENNIEL, the second on our list of Punch draughtsmen, devoted himself in his earlier days to "high art." His cartoons at the exhibitions in Westminster-hall will be remembered by many, and his fresco of "Saint Cecilia" may be seen any day in the New Houses of Parliament. Possessed of a very retentive memory of the form and mechanism of the human figure, and the movements of animals, and having acquired the power of precise and accurate draughtsman- ship at an early age, the ambition of shining as an historical painter appears suddenly to have deserted him, and in the year 1850 he joined the Punch staff. In looking over the volumes which contain Mr. Tenniel's work, one is struck by the peculiarity that, of all the Punch artists, he is the only one that has remained, as it were, sta- tionary. His drawing is as clean and definite in his earlier illustra- tions as in those of to-day. With the exception that his hand has gained somewhat in freedom, there is no evidence of his having altered or modified his style in any way. The faces of Mr. Tenniel's figures (excepting always those of his political personages) have a sameness and want of individuality about them that seem to imply that he trusts rather to his extraordinary memory than to hints taken direct from nature. In the illustrations to Esop's Fables (published in 1818), the earliest of Mr. Tenniel's wood drawings, I believe, many of the figures bear a strong family resemblance to those in Punch, and the present type of some of his faces may be discovered even in his Westminster cartoons. Nature, in its broad, simple sense has received only partial study from Mr. Tenniel. The stage, the drawing academy, and the costume book, have always intervened between him and the outer world. His sympathies are less with the present than the past. Modem dress is awkward and uncouth, and our lives deficient in romantic and picturesque incident, according to Mr. Tenniel's way of thinking. No wonder, therefore, that he seldom aims at a "social," or that in modern subjects he is least successful. In every species of costume Ile is a great and reliable authority ; he portrays Greek, Assyrian, Egyptian, and North American Indian with equal fidelity. With fourteenth-century hood and liripipe, Elizabethan doublet and hose, the wig and jack-boots of Queen Anne's time, and all the manifold changes that dress has undergone in this Country from the earliest to the latest times, he is perfectly acquainted. And who has drawn armour so well as Mr. Tenniel? Not a joint or rivet escapes his watchful eye. He loves to accompany the steel-clad blight when "pricking o'er the plain," encountering the scaly
rescuing beauty in distress, or challenging all corners to a trial of skill. He revives the sports of hunting and hawking, tilting at the ring or quintain, and the joust and tournament, where the "queen of beauty and love" sits smiling amid the clash of arms and the fan- fare of trumpets, ready to reward the victor with &laurel wreath. In a quainter vein he shows the knight ascending the tower of his " ladye love" by a ladder of ropes, while a hand holding an enormous pair of shears issues from an arrow-slit, severs the rope, and cats offal! chance of retreat ; or when attacking a Moorish castle the Moor pushes the scaling-ladder from the wall, and the knight, to save himself from falling, catches hold of the pagan's beard, leaving one in doubt whether one or both will kiss their mother earth. One of the drollest of Mr. Tenniel's medireval subjects is that in which two Norman soldiers are wrestling together. Fragments of swords, maces, and battle-axes strew the ground ; so having exhausted their stock of weapons, nothing is left for the knights but to take each other by the throat and struggle grimly for the fall. Droll, too, is the courier, who blows a French hornwith such violence, that the blast takes him off his feet and sends his hat flying. The theatrical supernumerary-- the stage ruffian who "delights in crime," and whose costume consists chiefly of a broad-brimmed hat, boots, and a buckle—and actors generally, are great favourites of Mr. Tenniel's. At one period he was perpetually drawing Mr. Charles Kean, and wickedly giving un- due prominence to that gentleman's nose. Mr. Tenniel must be as deeply acquainted with the equestrian play of Mareppa as any of the hoarse-voiced actors who perform in that somewhat depressing drama, and no one can have a more lively appreciation of the "points" of a Roman-nosed, piebald circus horse. His clowns, pantaloons, sprites, and acrobats are capital. Many are the clown's tricks that he has recorded in his initial letters : clown ramming the dummy policeman in a mortar, while Pantaloon stands ready with a red-hot poker to set fire to the charge and blow the unfortunate "Peeler" to atoms ; Clown walking daintily with a hen-coop for a crinoline, to the dis- comfiture of the feathered brood ; or carefully painting large black diagrams on the newly-washed shirts hung up to dry ; and numberless others. There is humour in the notion of the cabman driven to in- sanity by the reduction of cab fares to the uniform rate of sixpence a mile. He has harnessed a chair, and hails imaginary passengers. He wears straws in his hair, and the walls of his cell are covered with the objectionable "sixes," one of which hangs in a gallows. Equally good is the howling puppy whose body is encased in a large pie, labelled "Mutton, 2d."
Mr. Tenniel's classic and academic feeling is well exemplified in a series of caricatures of Flaxinan's outlines which illustrate a parody on the "Ancient Mariner". and the "Epsom Marbles," a sort of travestie of those which bear the name of Elgin. Punch rides gallantly along surrounded by his staff, literary and artistic ; acrobats, gipsies, donkey-carts, and four-in-hands follow, and the procession is closed by jockeys mounted on horses of the Phidian rather than the racer type. In the title-page to Vol. XXIV. (1853), Punch is throned as Supiter, surrounded by the lesser gods. He grasps pen and pencil as his thunderbolts. His eagle (Louis Napoleon) sits at his right. Sir James Graham is Neptune, and Colonel Sibthorp Mars. The Earl of Derby turns his back, dressed as an acrobat ; in the pose of the Famese Hercules he reposes on his club labelled "Carlton." Disraeli appears as Mercury, the speech of Thiers in his pocket, and Britannia, with helmet-shaped bonnet, large umbrella, and owl, is disguised as Minerva. In his "Dream in the British Museum," where the stuffed giraffe and hippopotamus jostle with the skeleton of the mammoth and the pashts and scarabrei of the Egyptian sculptors, or in a "Reverie in the Crystal Palace," where the gigantic figures from the tomb of Abou Simbel keep watch over the sphinxes and the Assyrian winged bull, Mr. Tenniel gives ample proof of his powers of fancy and imagination. Nor must his admirable drawings
of animals be overlooked. I have alluded above to the circus horses, but the British lion is under great obligations to Mr. Tenniel for the skill with which that gentleman has drawn his portrait on numerous occasions. "Keep Watch !"—a double-page engraving, in which the lion of England having conquered the tiger of Lidia, reposes on the body of his foe, and, looking up into the sky, watches the con- test between the eagles of France and Austria—was not only good in political significancy, but is a grand and powerful rendering of brute form.
A word concerning Mr. Tenniel as a humorist. Occasionally he hits the right nail on the head, as in the political drawings, the title. pages of the almanacks, &c., but as a rule his fun is laboured, while he relies too much for effect on his antiquarian lore, forgetting that the general public have a limited acquaintance with metiiteval manners and customs. But I must bid adieu to Mr. Tenniel, and only stay- ing to assure him that I hope the day is far distant when we shall cease to see his quaint and neatly-drawn figures in the pages of Punch, pass on to review the drawings of Mr. Keene.
Mr. Charles Keene has not been connected with Punch for more than seven or eight years, but in that time he has made visible pro-
gress. Many of his earlier drawings are black and heavy through over-elaboration; those of to-day, while equally careful, are brilliant, free, and life-like. The two chief characteristics of his style are in- dividuality and conscientiousness. His heads all look like portraits, the minutest details of character are never omitted, and every part of his drawing has nature for its basis. Mr. Keene delights in
setting himself tasks of artistic difficulty requiring much time and
patience in their accomplishment. Whatever he does, he determines shall be done thoroughly. Thus, to take a common instance, in drawing a cab or cart wheel (a foreshortened one pleases him best), Mr. Keene will take care that it shall be as exactly like a wheel as he can make it, that it shall be so true in its formation that no coach- maker shall be able to find fault with it. It may not be a matter of vital importance, perhaps, to draw wheels in this careful manner in an ordinary woodcut, and Mr. Leech, whose wheels are not even round, shows that they may be drawn with the greatest recklessness. But the pleasure is the same in amount, though of a different kind, that an artist feels in looking at Mr. Leech's dashing resemblance to a wheel and Mr. Keene's actual portraiture of one. This incident of the wheel may appear trivial to some readers, but it is not really so. In
the first place, a wheel is by no means an easy object to draw truly, and then, if we find an artist so faithful in his inanimate objects, we may generally rely upon his truthfulness in higher things, such as the features and expressions of men and women. Accord- ingly, when Mr. Keene introduces us to Baffles, of the Blankshire Volunteers, he gives not only the proper number of buttons to his coat, and a faithful delineation of all his equipments, but he stamps the character of the face and figure of Baffles with such force that the truth of the portrait is at once recognisable. Mr. Keene's love of out-door nature is as strongly pronounced as Mr. Leech's. His landscape backgrounds are charmingly real. He has not that exten- sive knowledge of the world that Mr. Leech possesses, nor is Ms range of character so varied. He chiefly reproduces the dining-room waiter, the cab or omnibus driver, and the rifle volunteer. Some- times he portrays the " swell ;" but his chief pet is the artist. Mr. Keene has depicted him under a variety of aspects—taking in the milk for his tea, writhing under the remarks of lay critics, getting enthusiastic over Macaulay's "Ivry," talking "shop" in a railway carriage, aud shocking an old lady by the indifference with which he talks of knocking off little girls' heads, or moving his "properties," and having a dispute with the cabman about the lay figure, which cabby wants to charge for as a "hextra person, 'cos I see she wos a hinwalid." I hear of much complaint against Mr. Keene amongst the more "select" artists, for what they consider such "libels on the professioja." With such very thin-skinned gentlemen it would be idle to remonstrate, but a more tangible objection to Mr. Keene's artist drawings is that he only presents us with one type of the glass —a being who can afford to be well, though sometimes eccentrically, clad, but who prefers to paint, seated on a penitential trestle in a studio, picturesque, perhaps, bat scarcely comfortable—a sort of carpenter's cast-off shed, which admits the wind through many a chink, and the temperature of which is scarcely rendered endurable by a stove with a perpetually smoking chimney. Mr. Keene might now and then favour us with the "lavender-kid artist," whose clothes make so capital an advertisement for his tailor, and who has a painting- room in the neighbourhood of Regent-street or Piccadilly ; the" man of the day," whose talk is of dukes and countesses; or the drawling pre-Raphaelite, who finds everything painted by his clique "awfully jolly,' and everything else "awful rot ; ' or the artist who attributes his want of success to ill-luck instead of to his bad painting, and considers that the Royal Academicians, unanimous for once in their lives, have leagued themselves into a conspiracy to crush him. These and others must be more familiar to Mr. Keene than to the present writer, and I hope that in his next artist cut we may behold the results of his experience.
Political caricature is never attempted by Mr. Keene. He con- fines himself to conversational subjects, initial letters, and headings to the prefaces and indexes. His jokes are laboured and not always obvious. Judging from other illustrations by Mr. Keene, such as the admirable series of the "Good Fight" in Once a Week, I should say his genius is rather grave than gay. But as no man can be con- stantly aiming at a target without frequently "making a bull's eye," so Mr. Keene cannot fail of being humorous sometimes. As an early example of intensified fun, I should mention "Mr. Popplewit," an inexperienced sportsman, who, having returned home from a day's shooting, allows Ins gun to go off in the hall while in a perpendicular position. The charge passes through three floors, blowing up the pet spaniel, and shivering the chandelier to atoms in the first—smash- ing a looking-glass in the second—scattering the children's toys in the nursery on the third floor, and finally, scaring the cats on the roof of the house. There is much grotesque drollery in the group of Gorillas which heads the preface to the last volume, and others might be mentioned did space permit. Mr. Keene's present style is large, broad, and energetic. He draws with firmness and power. He improves gradually, but surely, though sometimes his progress is marked by leaps. One of these leaps took place two weeks ago, in a drawing of two artists sketching on stilts, which, regarded from an artistic point of view, is, perhaps, the best Mr. Keene has achieved. Sea, beach, boats, and figures, are drawn with a light but certain hand, while the brilliant sunny effect deserves the highest praise. I have never seen a picture bearing Mr. Keene's name, and hear that he does not paint. It is a great pity, for he is evidently the owner of high pictorial powers. The demands on his time are doubtless great, but he surely does not lack the inclination to paint, and if he has the inclination, can he not contrive to shape the opportunity? It is out of no disrespect to Mr. Keene's Punch drawings, but be- cause I think so highly of them, that I believe him to be capable of finer and more durable art, and, in common with many others, I should be glad to find the name of Charles Keene in the Royal Aca- demy Catalogue for 1862.
Respecting Mr. Howard's ornithological and other illustrations, I have little to say in praise. They are not without humour of a certain kind, but have nothing else to recommend them. In exe- cution they are small and hesitating, and look like the work of a man who is perfectly satisfied with his own performances. Mr. Julian Portch draws with a pretty touch and dainty pencil. Mr.G.du Manner has not, perhaps, been sufficiently long before the public to enable one to estimate -him truly; yet his drawings have a pleasant silvery look, and exhibit traces of refinement and gentlemanly feeling. If he continues to improve as he has lately, PuJeck will find in Mr.
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