THREE " PUNCH " AR !ISIS.*
IT is to be noted that of three Punch artists who are now pub- lishing collections of drawings, only Mr. Morrow's book is without an introduction by a well-known writer. Mr. Stampa is appro- priately introduced by Mr. Pett Ridge and Mr. Bateman by Mr. Chesterton, but Mr. Morrow's wine needs no bush. His drawings I are infinitely delightful in their humour and their variety ; he has an endless store of unrecorded historical inci- dents, and he shows us King John on his return from Runnymede being waylaid by a flapper who demands his autograph ; also Sir Bedevere, with a strong resemblance to Mr. Asquith, as Minister of Munitions trying to explain away the disappearance of Excalibur. A forgotten act of kindness is brilliantly recorded, and shows Romulus taking out Mother Wolf in her old age for an airing in an early Roman Bath chair. The charm of Mr. Morrow is that his drawings are as humorous :as his ideas. Take, for instance, the picture of the burglary being committed at the Natural History Museum. What could be more absurd than the appearance of the stuffed giraffe being lowered by a rope from an upper window in the dusk ? But no description in words can give an idea of the masterly drawing which can seize the heart of a humorous situation and make it apparent.
Mr. Bateman's2 style is quite different. He deals in the exaggeration of caricature, and is happiest in long series which develop some absurd situation to its crisis. Perhaps the beat of these is the struggle to unfold properly a deck chair, if the best is not the man who filled his pen with hotel ink. In this latter series the whimsical distortion of the drawing could not be better done ; there is a delicious appropriateness of the black figure to the darkness of the crime and also to the ink. Mr. Bateman is a satirist, as shown by his drawing of "The Watch' on the Rhine," where the Germans, as they promenade by their river, look anxiously rip into the silly.
Mr. Stampa's work 3 is quite different, again, from that of the other two. His drawings continue the tradition of the robust humour of thestreert, and descend lineally from the master work of Charles Keene. That Mr. Stampa has played the " sedulous ape" to the great original is apparent in several of the drawings. In some figures, notably one of an old gentleman talking to an • (1) More Morrow. Drawings by G. Morrow. London : sietbuen. Os. net.] --(2) A Book of Drawings. By H. 31. Bateman. Same publisher. ROL 8d. 114.1--18) Hunioare of the Sired. By G. k Stamps. Same publisher. Les.
artist as he is removing his rejected picture from the Academy, the resemblance is not only one of features but of pen-strokes. But Mr. Stampa is an accomplished draughtsman. He has a deep knowledge of the people of the London streets, especially of the small boys, and his humour, like his drawing, is direct and human.
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