The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 by Harry Furniss (new books to read TXT) 📕

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"Smoketown!" I said, "Smoketown!" (Truth to tell, at the moment I had quite forgotten all about my letter to Toole; then it dawned upon me.) "Oh, yes—well," I said; "I had one night there, and some frightful friends of Toole's bored my life out. He had invited them, I believe, to stop with him in London, and they—"

"Just the people I want. What's their name?"

"I forget that entirely."

"Can you read this?" he said, producing my letter.

"No," I said; "I can't read that signature."

"Do you know where they are likely to put up in town?"

"Not the slightest idea."

"I've tried every hotel in London."

"Temperance?" I asked.

"No, not one. Happy thought!—of course that is where they'll be."

"Try them all," I said, as I waved my hand. And off the cab rushed to visit the various temperance hotels in London.

The next day I returned to Hastings, and went straight to Mr. Toole's hotel. Getting the hall porter into my confidence, he sent up a message to Mr. Toole that a gentleman with a large family had arrived to see him; and the porter and I made the noise of ten up the stairs, and eventually the gentleman and family were announced at Toole's door. I shall never forget poor Toole, standing in an attitude so familiar to the British public, with his eye-glass in his hand and his eyes cast on the ground—he was afraid to raise them. As soon as he did, however, his other hand caught the first book that was handy, and it was flung at my head.

Bohemianism, when I arrived in London, was emigrating from the tavern of sanded floors and clay pipes into Clubland. Artists, authors, actors, and journalists were starting clubs of their own, simply to continue the same pot-house life without restraint; in place of turning the public-house into a club, they turned the club into a public-house. If journalists in Grub Street were at their worst in those days, artists were at their best. The great boom in trade which followed the Franco-German War produced [Pg 50] a wave of extraordinary prosperity, which landed many a tramp struggling in troubled waters safely on the beach of fortune. Working men in the North were drinking champagne; some of them rose to be masters and millionaires. They tired of drinking champagne, they could not play the pianos they had bought, or enjoy the mansions they had built; but they could rival each other in covering their walls with pictures, so the poorest "pot-boiler" found a ready sale. The most indifferent daubs were sold as quickly as they could be framed. Artists then built their mansions, drank champagne, and played on their grand pianos. When I, still in my teens, first met these good fellows, I might have been tempted, seeing what wretched work satisfied the picture-dealer, to abandon black and white for colour; but already the boom was over. Artists, like their patrons, had found out their mistake. They had either to let or sell their costly houses, and have, with few exceptions, little to show now for those wonderful days of prosperity in the early seventies—which they still talk over in their clubs in Bohemia.

The few exceptions are the survival of the fittest. But the best of artists have never seen such a boom in art as that I saw in my early days in London. It cannot be denied that, from a fashionable point of view, picture shows are going down. Artists have had to stand on one side as popular Society favourites: the actors have taken their place. One has only to visit the studios on "Show Sundays" to see what a falling off there is. "Show Sunday" was, some years ago, one of the events of the year. From Kensington to St. John's Wood, and up to Hampstead, the studios of the mighty attracted hosts of fashionable people to these annual gatherings.

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A familiar figure at these for many years was the genial Sir Spencer Wells, the well-known surgeon. He lived monarch of all he surveyed at Golder's Hill, Hampstead, and many a morning I met him when riding, and we jogged into town together. He was a capital raconteur, a happy wit, and told one incident I always recall to mind as I pass a house on the top of Fitzjohn's Avenue, where a few years ago lived, painted and "received" that Wilson Barrett of the brush, Edwin Long, R.A., a hard-working, self-made artist who amassed a fortune by successfully gauging the taste of the large middle-class English public in mixing religion with voluptuous melodrama. On the annual "Show Sunday" no studio was more popular than Long's. His subjects perhaps had something to do with it. They were in keeping with the Sabbath. The work too was as smooth and as highly finished as the most orthodox sermon. Ars longa est. Yes, said some cynic, but art is not Long. But anyway Long's art was commercially successful, and he was what is known as "a good business man."

As haberdashers in the days of crude advertising used to place men in costume at the shop door—a fireman when they were selling off a damaged salvage stock, or a sailor or, if a very enterprising tradesman, a diver, helmet and all, when selling off goods damaged from a wreck—so did this Academician, when exhibiting Biblical subjects on "Show Sunday," engage a Nubian model to stand at the door of his shop. This man had also to announce the names of the guests, and when the small, spectacled, simple man with the large smile gave his name, Sir Spencer Wells, the model pulled himself up to his full height and in his best [Pg 52] English proudly and loudly announced to the crowd in the studio—

"The Prince of Wales!"

The effect was magical: all fell in line, ladies curtseyed, men bowed, when the Prince of Hampstead Heath entered. The artist looked as black as his model, and the visitors laughed.

At the other end of Fitzjohn's Avenue once lived that ever popular Academician, the late Mr. John Pettie. Mr. Pettie was a vigorous draughtsman and a beautiful colourist, and many of his portraits are very fine. He seemed to revel in painting a red coat—an object to many painters as maddening as it is to the infuriated bull. On one "Show Sunday" before the sending-in day of the Royal Academy, at which he exhibited, I recollect admiring a portrait of Mr. Lamb, the celebrated golfer, in his red coat, when the original of the portrait came into the studio. Not feeling very well, Mr. Pettie had to avoid the crowd of his admirers seeing him. There were a few exceptions, of which I was one. I had just left him when I saw Mr. Lamb before his picture. In this portrait the "bulger" golf club—which Mr. Lamb, I believe, invented, to the delight of the golfing world—is introduced. I ran back to Mr. Pettie and told him that there was a stupid man in the studio wanting to know why artists always draw golf clubs wrongly; that as a Scotchman he must protest against such a club, which was out of shape, like a club foot. "Tell him, mon, it's a bulger—Lamb's invention!" I returned. "He wants to know who Mr. Lamb is, and what is a bulger?—perhaps it's a new kind of hunting-crop and not a golf club at all?" In rushed Mr. Pettie, like an enraged lion, to slay the ignorant visitor, but in reality to shake hands with Mr. Lamb and explain my childish joke.

Leaving Pettie, I called at a studio near Hampstead occupied by a very clever Irish artist, who was very much depressed when I entered. Gazing in bewilderment at his picture for the Academy, representing Milton with his daughters in his garden at Chalfont St. Giles, he said—

"Furniss, I'm in an awful state entoirely over this picture. One of those critic fellows has been in here, and he tells me this [Pg 53] picture won't do at all at all. I've painted in Milton's garden as I've seen it, but the critic tells me that these are all modern flowers and weren't known in the country in the poet's time. Now, what on earth am Oi to do?"

"Oh, don't bother about those critics," I said. "They know nothing. Milton was blind, don't you know, so how could he tell whether the flowers were correct or not?"

"Begorrah, Furniss, you're right. Oi never thought of that. It's just like those ignorant critic chaps to upset a fellow in this way."

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