The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 2, Harry Furniss [affordable ebook reader txt] 📗

A word or two may not be out of place here on the practical difficulties which beset an artist who opens an Exhibition on his own account, and is forced by circumstances to become his own "exploiteur." Men may have worked with a more ambitious object, but certainly no man can ever have worked harder than I did at this period. Outside work was pouring in, my current Punch work seemed to be increasing, but I never allowed "Furniss's Folly" (as some good-natured friend called my Exhibition at the moment) to interfere with it. I had only arranged with a "business man" to take the actual "running" of the show off my hands, and he was to have half the profits if there should happen to be any. At the critical moment, when I[Pg 12] was working night and day at my easel, when in fact the "murther was out" and the date actually settled for the "cracking" of my joke—in short, when I fondly imagined that all the arrangements were made, I received a letter from my "business" friend backing out of the affair, "as he doubted its success." Half-an-hour after the receipt of this staggerer (I have never had time to reply to it) I was dashing into Bond Street, where I quickly made all arrangements for the hire of a gallery and the necessary printing, engaged an advertising agent and staff, and myself saw after the thousand and one things indispensable to an undertaking of this kind. And all this extraneous worry continued to hamper my studio work until the Exhibition was actually opened. Of course I had to make hurried engagements at any price, and consequently bad ones for me. Every householder is aware that should he change his abode he is surrounded in his new home by a swarm of local tradespeople and others anxious to get something out of him. Well, my experience upon entering the world of "business," hitherto strange to me, was precisely the same. All sorts of parasites try to fasten themselves on to you. Business houses regard you as an amateur, and consequently you pay dearly for your experience. You are not up to the tricks of the trade, and although you may not generally be written down an ass, you must in your new vocation pay your footing. It is therefore incumbent upon anyone entering the world of trade for the first time to keep his wits very much about him.

The local habitation for my Exhibition, which upon the spur of the moment I was fortunate enough to find in Bond Street, was called for some inexplicable reason the Gainsborough Gallery, and thereby hangs a tale. One afternoon there arrived a venerable dowager in a gorgeous canary-coloured chariot, attended by her two colossal footmen. She sailed into the gallery, which, fortunately for the old and scant of breath, was on the ground floor, and slightly raising the pince-nez on her aristocratic nose, looked about her with an air of bewilderment. Then going up to my secretary she said, "Surely! these are not by Gainsborough?"[Pg 13]

"No, madam," was the reply. "This is the Gainsborough Gallery, but the pictures are by Harry Furniss."

Almost fainting on the spot, the old lady called for her salts, her stick, and her attendants three, and was rapidly driven away from the scene of her lamentable mistake.

The public attendance at the "The Artistic Joke" was prodigious from the first. Even upon the private view day, when I introduced a novelty, and instead of inviting everybody who is somebody to pay a gratuitous visit to the show, raised the entrance fee to half-a-crown, the fashionable crowd besieged the doors from an early hour, and made a very considerable addition to my treasury. Those of my readers, however, who did not pay a visit to the Gainsborough will be better able to realise the amount of patronage we received, notwithstanding the numerous attractions of the "Jubilee" London season, if I relate an incident which occurred on the Saturday after we opened. It was the "private view" of the Grosvenor Gallery, and the crowd was immense. Indeed, many ladies and gentlemen were returning to their carriages without going through the rooms, not, like my patron the dowager, because they were disappointed at not finding the work of the old masters, but because the visitors were too numerous and the atmosphere too oppressive. As I passed through the people I heard a lady who was stepping into her carriage say to a friend, "I have just come from 'The Artistic Joke,' and the crowd is even worse there. They have had to close the doors because the supply of catalogues was exhausted." This soon caused me to quicken my pace, and hastening down the street to my own Exhibition, I found the police standing at the doors and the people being turned away. The simple explanation of this was that so great had been the public demand that the stock of catalogues furnished by the printers was exhausted early in the afternoon, and as it was quite impossible to understand the caricatures without a catalogue, there was no alternative but to close the doors until some more were forthcoming.

Finding the telephone was no use, I was soon in a hansom bound for the City, intending by hook or by crook to bring back with me the much-needed catalogues, or the body of the printer dead or alive. Upon arriving in the City, however, to my[Pg 14] chagrin I found his place of business closed, though the caretaker, with a touch of fiendish malignity, showed me through a window whole piles of my non-delivered catalogues. Not to be beaten, I hastened back to the West End and despatched a very long and explicit telegram to the printer at his private house (of course he would not be back in the City until Monday), requiring him, under pain of various severe penalties, to yield up my catalogues instanter. As I stood in the post office of Burlington House anxiously penning this message, and harassed into a state of almost feverish excitement, the sounds of martial music and the tramp of armed men in the adjacent courtyard fell upon my distracted ear. With a sickly and sardonic smile upon my face I laid down the pen and peeped through the door.

"Yes! I see it all now," I muttered. "The whole thing is a plant. The printer was bribed, and, coûte que coûte, the Academy has decided to take my body! Hence the presence of the military; and see, those cooks—what are they doing here in their white caps? My body! Ha! then nothing short of cannibalism is intended!"

This frightful thought almost precipitated me into the very ranks of the soldiery, when I discovered that the corps was none other than that of the Artist Volunteers, which contains several of my friends. Seizing one of those whom I chanced to recognise, I hurriedly whispered in his ear the thoughts of impending butchery which were passing in my terrified mind. But he only laughed. "You will disturb their digestions, my dear Furniss, some other way," he said, "than by providing them with a pièce de résistance. Make your mind easy, for we are only here to do honour to the guests. This is the banqueting night of the Royal Academy."

From what I heard, some amusing incidents occurred in the house at my "Royal Academy."

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"AN ARTISTIC JOKE." A portion of my parody of the work of Sir Alma Tadema, R.A.

It was no uncommon sight to see the friends and relatives, even the sons and daughters, of certain well-known Academicians standing opposite the parody of a particular picture, and hugely enjoying it at the expense of the parent or friend who had painted the original. Other R.A.'s, who went about pooh-poohing the whole affair, and saying that they intended to[Pg 17] ignore it altogether, turned up nevertheless in due time at the Gainsborough, where, it is true, they did not generally remain very long. They had not come to see the Exhibition, but only their own pictures. One glance was usually enough, and then they vanished. The critics (and their friends) of course remained longer. Even Mr. Sala went in one day and seemed to be immensely tickled by what he saw. Strange to relate, however, when he had passed through about one-third of the show, he was observed to stop abruptly, turn himself round, and flee away incontinently, never to be seen there again. I was much puzzled to discover a reason for this remarkable manœuvre, the more so as at that time I had not wounded his amour propre by indulging in an "Artistic Joke" of much more diminutive proportions at his expense, or, as it subsequently turned out, at my own. Since, however, the world-famous trial of Sala v. Furniss I have looked carefully over all the pictures in my Royal Academy, with a view to throwing some light upon the critic's abrupt departure. I remain, nevertheless, in the dark, for the most rigid scrutiny has failed