The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1, Harry Furniss [digital book reader txt] 📗

Leaving Wexford before the railway there was opened, my parents removed to the metropolis of Ireland, and I went to school in Dublin at the age of twelve. It was at the Wesleyan Connexional School, now known as the Wesleyan College, St. Stephen's Green, that I struggled through my first pages of C�sar and stumbled over the "pons asinorum," and here I must mention that although the Wesleyan College bears the name of the great religious reformer, a considerable number of the boys who studied there—myself included—were in no way connected with the Wesleyan body. I merely say this because I have seen it stated more than once that I am a Wesleyan, and as this little sketch professes to be an authentic account of myself, I wish it to be correct, however trivial my remarks may seem to the general reader. It is in the same spirit that I have disclaimed the honour of being an Irishman.

Once upon a time, when I was a very little boy, I remember being very much impressed by a heading in my copybook which [Pg 7] ran: "He who can learn to write, can learn to draw." Now this was putting the cart before the horse, so far as my experience had gone, for I could most certainly draw before I could write, and had not only become an editor long before I was fit to be a contributor, but was also a publisher before I had even seen a printing press. In fact, I was but a little urchin in knickerbockers when I brought out a periodical—in MS. it is true—of which the ambitious title was "The Schoolboys' Punch." The ingenuous simplicity with which I am universally credited by all who know me now had not then, I fancy, obtained complete possession of me. I must have been artful, designing, diplomatic, almost Machiavellian; for anxious to curry favour with the head master of my school, I resolved to use the columns of "The Schoolboys' Punch" not so much in the interest of the schoolboy world as to attract the head master's favourable notice to the editor.

Accordingly, the first cartoon I drew for the paper was specially designed with this purpose in view, and I need scarcely say it was highly complimentary to the head master. He was represented in a Poole-made suit of perfectly-fitting evening dress, and the trousers, I remember, were particularly free from the slightest wrinkle, and must have been extremely uncomfortable to the wearer. This tailorish impossibility was matched by the tiny patent boots which encased the great man's small and exquisitely moulded feet. I furnished him with a pair of dollish light eyes, with long eyelashes carefully drawn in, and as a masterstroke threw in the most taper-shaped waist.

The subject of the picture, I flattered myself, was selected with no little cleverness and originality. A celebrated conjuror who had recently exposed the frauds of the Davenport Brothers was at the moment creating a sensation in the town where the school was situated, and from that incident I determined to draw my inspiration. The magnitude of the design and the importance of the occasion seemed to demand a double-paged cartoon. On one side I depicted a hopelessly scared little schoolboy, not unlike myself at the time, tightly corded in a cabinet, which represented the school, with trailing Latin roots, [Pg 8] heavy Greek exercises, and chains of figures. The door, supposed to be closed on this distressing but necessary situation, is observed in the opposite cartoon to be majestically thrown open by the beaming and consciously successful head master, in order to allow a young college student, the pink of scholastic perfection, to step out, loaded with learning and academical honours.

"Great events from little causes spring!"—great, at least, to me. So well was my juvenile effort received, that it is not too much to say it decided my future career. Had my subtle flattery taken the shape of a written panegyric upon the head master in lieu of a cartoon, it is possible that I might, had I met with equal success, have devoted myself to journalism and literature; but from that day forward I clung to the pencil, and in a few years was regularly contributing "cartoons" to public journals, and practising the profession I have ever since pursued.

Drawing, in fact, seemed to come to me naturally and intuitively. This was well for me, for small indeed was the instruction I received. I recollect that a German governess, who professed, among other things, to teach drawing, undertook to cultivate my genius; but I derived little benefit from her unique system, as it consisted in placing over the paper the drawing to be copied, and pricking the leading points with a pin, after which, the copy being removed, the lines were drawn from one point to another. The copies were of course soon perforated beyond recognition, and, although I warmly protested against this sacrilege of art, she explained that it was by that system that Albert D�rer had been taught. This, of course, accounts for our having infant prodigies in art, as well as music and the drama. The rapidity with which Master Hoffmann was followed by infantile Lizsts and little Otto Hegner as soon as it became apparent that there was a demand for such phenomena, seems to indicate that in music at all events supply will follow demand as a matter of course, and if the infant artist can only be "crammed" in daubing on canvas as youthful musicians are in playing on the piano, then perhaps a new sensation is in store for the artistic world, and we shall see babies executing replicas of the old masters, and the Infant [Pg 9] Slapdash painter painting the portraits of Society beauties. As a welcome relief to Chopin's Nocturne in D flat, played by Baby Hegner at St. James's Hall, we shall step across to Bond Street and behold "Le Petit Américain" dashing off his "Nocturne" on canvas. I sometimes wonder if I might have been made such an infant art prodigy, but when I was a lad public taste was not in its second childhood in matters of art patronage, nor was the forcing of children practised in the same manner as it is nowadays.

Naturally enough I did not altogether escape the thraldom of the drawing-master, and as years went on I made a really serious effort to study at an art school under the Kensington system, which I must confess I believe to be positively prejudicial to a young artist possessing imagination and originality. The late Lord Beaconsfield made one of his characters in "Lothair" declare that "critics are those who have failed in literature and art." Whether this is true as to the art critics, or that the dramatic critic is generally a disappointed playwright, it must in truth be said that drawing-masters are nearly always those who have failed in art. I can remember one gentleman who was the especial terror of my youth. I can see him now going his rounds along the chilly corridor, where, perhaps, one had been placed to draw something "from the flat." After years and years of practice at this rubbish, he would halt beside you, look at your work in a perfunctory manner, and with a dexterity which appalled you until you reflected that he had been doing the same thing exactly, and nothing else, for perhaps a decade, he would draw in a section of a leaf, and if, as in my case, you happened to have a pretty sister attending the ladies' class in the school, he would add leaf to leaf until your whole paper was covered with his mechanical handiwork, in order to have a little extra conversation with you, although, I need scarcely add, it was not exclusively confined to the subject of art.

This sort of thing was called "instruction in freehand drawing," and had to be endured and persisted in for months and months. Freehand! Shade of Apelles! What is there free in squinting and measuring, and feebly touching in and fiercely [Pg 10] rubbing out a collection of straggling mechanical pencil lines on a piece of paper pinned on to a hard board, which after a few weeks becomes nothing but a confused jumble of fingermarks?

Had I an Art School I would treat my students according to their individual requirements, just as a doctor treats his patients. I am led here to repeat what I have already observed in one of my lectures, that for the young the pill of knowledge should be silver-coated, and that while they are being instructed they should also be amused. In other words, interest your pupils, do not depress them. Giotto did not begin by rigidly elaborating a drawing of the crook of his shepherd's staff for weeks together; his drawings upon the sand and upon the flat stones which he found on the hillsides are said to have been of the picturesque sheep he tended, and all the interesting and fascinating objects that met his eye. Then, when his hand had gained practice, he was able to draw that perfect circle which he sent to the Pope as a proof of his command of hand. But the truth is that we begin at the wrong end, and try to make our boys draw a perfect circle before they are in love with drawing at all. For my part, I had to endure some weeks of weary struggling with a cone and ball and other chilly objects, the effect of which was to fill my mind with an overwhelming sense of the dreariness of art education under the Kensington system. A short time, therefore, sufficed to disgust me with the Art School, and I preferred to stay at home caricaturing my relatives, educating myself, and practising alone the rudiments of my art.

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A CARICATURE, MADE WHEN A BOY (NEVER PUBLISHED). DUBLIN EXHIBITION. PORTRAIT OF SIR A. GUINNESS
(NOW LORD IVEAGH) IN CENTRE.

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Early in my teens, however, I was invited to join the Life School of the Hibernian Academy, as there happened to be a paucity of students at that institution, and in order to secure the Government grant it was necessary to bring them up to the required number. But here also there was no idea of proper teaching. Some fossilised member of the Academy would stand about roasting his toes over the stove. A recollection of a fair specimen of the body still haunts me. He used to roll round the easels, and you became conscious of his approaching presence by an aroma of onions. I believe he was a landscape painter, and saw no more beauty in the female form divine than in a haystack. It was his custom to take up a huge piece of charcoal and come down upon one of your delicately drawn pencil lines of a figure with a terrible stroke about an inch wide.

"There, me boy," he would exclaim, "that's what it wants," and walk on, leaving you in doubt upon which side of the line you had drawn he intended his alteration to come.

I soon decided to have my own models and study for myself, and this practice I have maintained to the present day. I really don't know what Mrs. Grundy