An Appreciation

The following is from the NY Times of 7th. December 1901. Copyright held by the NY Times. The transcript copyright held by Nick Furniss. To continue: . . .

The coarser methods of the caricaturists of the Georges were in time eliminated. Even in the English cartoons of the present we are less inclined to find the virulence than in our American caricatures. Take for example the lifelong work of John Tenniel. He has given us the history of the world for the last half century. The culminating event he has never overlooked, and yet he has so managed it that the lesson he imparted never was coarsely conveyed. We might say, as with literature, as far as Tenniel is concerned, "le style fait l'homme." A caricaturist who does not know how to draw appeals to the ignorant, and there are many heavy and coarse and ignorant ones whose prints are published daily in the United States.

Mr. Harry Furniss was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1854. His father was English, his mother Scotch. The journalistic and artistic talent in him seem to have been hereditary. Drawing came to him naturally. The author of the "Confessions of a Caricaturist" rather sniffs at his early training in an art school, and expresses his disgust. Perhaps it was the personal element of the teachers which tired him. Anyhow, Mr Furniss, knowing how a proper conception of the human form alone can give, decided to have his own models, and to study for himself, which methods he writes, "I have maintained to the present day." His first work was published in a Dublin comic paper, The Zomimus, a kind of Irish Punch. The time when this paper was issued The Nation also appeared. The Nation was an all powerful organ of the Irish party, and a very wonderful publication was it.

When he was only seventeen, Mr Furniss had his hands full. Already his ability was marked. It was his versatility which was so remarkable. He furnished pictures for religious books, indifferent as to whether they were Catholic or Protestant. He even made drawings of surgeons. The author tells amusingly his disgust when he had finished a realistic study of what was supposedly a human kidney. Next Mr. Furniss took the graving tools, the block wood in hand, and worked at engaving. Certainly this was a great help to him when the artist had to draw on the block. To-day modern methods have entirely changed, The photograph facilitating the business. After a short time Mr. Furniss put aside his graving tools, and has found them only useful to-day when a lock had to be picked or a box of sardines to be opened. In 1873 the young aspirant left for London. Just before leaving Ireland he had made the acquaintance of Tom Taylor, who was then "the presiding genius of the Punch table." Taylor had promised to give him some help. He advised Furniss to make a series of sketches illustrating Irish life in the "trackless wastes of Western country." scenes of squalor and filth were visited by him and were sketched.

In London it was Miss Florence Marryat, the editress of London Society, who gave him his first commission. In an amusing way the author tells how utterly useless are letters of introduction when presented in London. It was Mr. Furniss's ambition to draw for Punch. That, however, took time to achieve. His first work was accepted by The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News. When this publication was bought by the proprietor of the Illustrated London News, then the artist found pleny to do for both papers. If the writer of the text for a pictorial journal has his trials, so has the artist. Sketches of important events are not always readily obtainable. It is not exactly convenient to make a sketch without an umbrella in a rainstorm, or a hustling crowd. Sometimes imagination goes for a great deal. For instance the London public were touched by the stories of the poor, homeless creatures who found refuge at night in the public parks. Intent on showing the precise character of these unfortunates, Mr. Furniss and "a colleague of the pen" went one night to St. James's Park. The benches were examined. There was not a single occupant.

We arrived about 2 A. M. It was a beautiful moonlight night. My companion said, "It's a bad business; we cannot do anything with this." I replied, "we must not go away without something to show; now, if you will lie down I will make a sketch of you, and then I will lie down and you can describe me."

Unquestionably the sketch and description were fully up to the situation. The very general character of Mr.Furniss's work may be better understood in this way. He made for the Society Church paper a series of portraits of the leading clergy. In the volume there is printed a fine portrait of Canon Liddon as drawn by the artist.

What is of exceeding interest in the work under notice are the business relationships between Mr. Furniss and many of the leading authors of the last twenty years. Walter Besant was writing "All in a Garden Green." Sir Walter was always most particular as to the description of his surroundings. There was "an idyllic village." It had to be seen so that the pictures should fit the text. Mr. Furniss was to find the precise village. Up and down the artist sought for that village. There were some few and meagre indications as to its whereabouts. But the actual village never was found. There was this consolation: the little place had had once an actuality but in mediaeval times. Mr. Furniss writes:

Besides being a wit and delightful conversationist, Sir Walter was the most practical and businesslike of authors. It was a treat to meet him, as I frequently did, walking into Town, and enjoying his vivacious humor. I recollect one morning speaking of illustrators, mentioning the fact that Cruikshank always imagined that Dickens had taken "Oliver Twist" merely endowing it with literary merit here and there, and palming it off as his own. "Ah," said Besant, "so funny. Do you know I overheard two of my little girls talking a few mornings ago and one said to the other: "Papa does not write all his stories, you know: Charles Green helps him." (Green was at the time illustrating Besant's "Chaplain of the Fleet.")

James Payn was writing a serial story, Mr. Furniss who was to illustrate the story, called on the author, so as to obtain the necessary indications. Mr. Payn laid great stress on "a jetty." Mr. Furniss thus describes the incident:

My notes were: "Jetty - Lover's meeting - Ancient Church - Old House." But the jetty was the important object - I must get that. I therefore started for the south coast. Again I was forced to bow down before my author's wonderful powers of imagination, for once more in company with my wife, with a hireling to carry my sketching stool and materials, I walked a great distance in search of the jetty. Vain! Vain! Not a ghost of a jetty was to be seen. . . .At last we unearthed the "oldest inhabitant," who took us back to where a few sticks in the water alone marked where it stood many years ago, . . . and I succeeded in "evolving a jetty from the green remains of four wooden posts."

Capital is the sketch (Page 100, Vol. 1) of the lover and the maiden as illustrators so often construct them. We leave to lady critics the looking over of the fair girls as to toilette, but the men! As often as not they are anthropological monstrosities. How lovers sprawl all over the print. Some of the experiences of the artist struggling with lovers Mr. Furniss dwells on.

Many authors give you every facility and hamper you with no impossibilities, but then steps in the editor of the "goody" magazine. Novels will be novels, and love and lovers will find their way even into the immaculate pages of our monthly elevators. I once found it so,and certainly I thought that there was plain sailing. A tender interview at the garden gate. She "sighed and looked down as Charles Thorndike took her hand" - unavoidable and not unacceptable subject. Lovers are all commonplace young men, with large eyes, long legs, and small mustaches, (villains mustaches grow apace:) moreover, lovers I believe, generally take care to avoid observation; but no, it appears that "our subscribers have a stern code which may not be lightly infringed. A letter to the editor rebukes my worldly ways: "Dear Sir - Will you kindly give Charles Thorndike a beard and show an aunt or uncle or some chaperon in the distance; the subject and treatment is hardly otherwise suitable to our young readers." . . . It is equally difficult to comply with an editorial request such as this: "The story is as dull as ditch-water: do please read it over and illustrate it with lively pictures."

It will surprise many to learn that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, ("Lewis Carroll")the famed author of "Alices Adventures in Wonderland," was the most exacting of writers. Mr. Furniss would make us believe that he resembled in some ways Hans Andersen, who shed tears when, "the cake at tea was handed to any one before he chose the largest slice." Lewis Carroll must have been very troublesome. Nothing suited him. He had his own ideals, often unexplainable, and these the artist he insisted must follow. Mr Furniss writes: "Carroll was not selfish, but a liberal minded philanthropist, but his egotism was all but second childhood." The author also even hints that Lewis Carroll so completely tired out John Tenniel that the artist refused to illustrate (after "Alice") any other of the Carroll books. Fancy a man cutting his manuscript into long shreds so that no one could make it out, unless the mutilated copy were accompanied by a key! The story "Sylvie and Bruno" was the one Mr. Furniss was to fight with.

He informed my wife that she was the most privileged woman in the world, for she knew the man who knew his [Lewis Carroll's] ideas - that ought to content her. She must not see a picture or a line of the manuscript: it was sufficient for her to gaze at me outside my studio with admiration and respect, as the only man besides Lewis Carroll himself with a knowledge of Lewis Carroll's forthcoming work. Furthermore he sent me an elaborate document to sign. "My word was as good as my bond," I said, and striking an attitude I hinted that I would "strike," in as much as I would not work for years isolated from my wife and friends. I was no doubt looked upon by him as a lunatic. That is what I wanted. I was allowed to show my drawings to my wife, and he wrote: "For my own part, I have shown none of the manuscript to anybody, and although I have let some special friends see the pictures, I have uniformly declined to explain them." But his egoism carried him still further. He was determined no one should read his manuscript, but he and I. So in the dead of the night (he sometimes wrote up to 4 A. M.) he cut his manuscript into horizontal strips of four or five lines, then placed them in a sack and shook it up: taking out piece by piece, he pasted the strips down as they happened to come. The result in such a manuscript, dealing with nonsense on one page and theology on another, was audacious in the extreme, if not absolutely profane. For example:

"And I found myself repeating, as I left the church, 
 the words of Jacob when he awakened out of his sleep,' ...
'Surely the Lord is in this.'
 And once more those shrill discordant tones rang out:
		 He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
		  Descending from a bus;
		 He looked again, and found it was
		  A Hippopotamus"

It took Mr. Furniss not less than seven years to carry out Lewis Carroll's pictorial ideas, and finally a difficult problem was solved. For his work Mr. Furniss had the sincerest admiration. Had Lewis Carroll lived, the artist would still be making pictures for him. The conclusion of the reminiscences of the author of "Alice" is: "he remunerated me liberally for my work; still his gratitude was overwhelming"

Mr. Furniss joined the Punch staff in 1880. As to his contributions to that noted publication, Mr. Furniss says:

I open a number of Punch published only eighteen months after my first contribution appeared, and two years previous to my joining the staff, and find no fewer than thirty-three separate subjects from my pencil and I may say that up to the last I probably contributed more work to Punch than any other artist ever contributed in the same number of years, Leech not excepted.

Of the political cartoons, wherein Mr. Gladstone played a conspicuous part, the question arises were the shirt collars used by the statesman of that enormous size usually depicted? Mr. Furniss is the authority for the fact that the Gladstonian collar was of normal size, and its amplitude only the fancy of the caricaturist. At the same time we are told that Mr. Gladstone had lost a finger. In exceeding good taste this maimed hand was never shown in the pictures.

The material served by Mr. Furniss is of many kinds. He tells of his travels in the United States and Australia. Of his lectures; of some of his plans. One was the exhibition of the leading artists in England painted by himself in black and white. English artists are certainly better natured than their American brothers. Mr. Furniss had the good manners not to ridicule anything. In his "Confessions" he writes, "I have even known artists so anxious to be parodied that, if they happenned to have a vein of humor in their pencils, they would actually send me caricatures of their own pictures."

In the "Confessions of a Caricaturist" there is an infinity of topics and all pleasantly told. Artistic life is well treated, and there is honest criticism. Mr. Furniss's powers of description are remarkable, and he shows the fine quality know as tact. The pencil line and the written one are light, graceful, and all the better on that account.

As to the make up of the two volumes it is as good as can be. There are many reproductions in the prints made by the author; in fact you have something akin to the history of England, political and social, during the last quarter of the past century.