The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 by Harry Furniss (ebook reader that looks like a book TXT) 📗

Equal praise must indeed be accorded to the management of the New Gallery and all the other Exhibitions with which I have been brought in contact in the course of my professional duties. Personally, as I have always made my notes at the Royal Academy on the authorised occasion, I have had nothing to fear from those who preside there. But my friend Linley Sambourne, who wished upon one occasion to caricature a picture of Burne-Jones' for a political cartoon in Punch (of course altering the figures and indeed everything else, so as not in any way to trench upon the great artist's copyright) was dogged by a detective, arrested, and finally thrown into the darkest dungeon beneath the Burlington House moat! Protest was useless. What his terror must have been my pen fails to describe. Visions of the thumbscrew, the rack, and all the tortures conceivable rose in the fertile imagination of my colleague, and [Pg 295] beads of perspiration made their appearance upon his massive brow. After weary hours, when lunch-time without the lunch had come and gone, and the pangs of hunger began to be added to his other miseries, when he was reflecting that his week's work for Punch was yet unfinished, that the engravers would be in despair at not having it in time, and that at that moment his editor was probably telegraphing to him all over London and instituting a search for his person all over his club, suddenly the bolts of his prison-chamber were withdrawn and his gaoler, the blood-thirsty tyrant Red Tape, allowed the genial artist to return to the bosom of his wife and family—not, however, without leaving a hostage behind him. The sketch—the guilty sketch—the cause of all his troubles, was detained. In vain the harassed artist explained to his grim Cerberus that the work was wanted for the next week's issue of Punch, and although as a matter of fact it duly appeared at the appointed time, Mr. Sambourne had to trust to his memory instead of to the courtesy and common sense of Burlington House for the reproduction of his skit.

I remember another incident which will serve to illustrate the trials and misfortunes of the caricaturist when pursuing his vocation outside the walls of his studio. It was the opening day of the New Gallery, and as I draw my sketches of the pictures with an ordinary pen and liquid Indian ink direct, and have them afterwards, like all my drawings, photographed on wood and engraved—of late years they are reproduced by process engraving—I was holding my bottle of ink and my sketch-book in one hand, while my pen was busy with the other. Upon arriving very early in the morning I thought I must have made a mistake, and that I had entered a manufactory of hats, for the hall was almost entirely taken up with hat-boxes. Upon enquiry, however, I learned that these merely contained the new hats in which the directors would, later on, receive their visitors. When the hall began to fill, and the fashionable crowd was pouring in, I was standing in the central lobby, sketching away with a will, when my friend Sir William Agnew, always early to arrive on such occasions, happened to come up and soon interested me in conversation about the genius of Millais [Pg 296] and the beauties of Burne-Jones. In my energetic manner I was debating a matter of some little interest when my eye caught that of Mr. Comyns-Carr, who, with his newly-selected hat on, was standing close by and regarding me with an expression of indescribable horror. "What is the matter with Carr?" I observed to Agnew; "surely Sargent should be here and hand down that expression to posterity." But when I followed his eyes as they passed sternly from mine to the floor, my hat nearly sprang off my head at the sight which I beheld! Forgetting that I held the bottle of ink in the hand with which I had been suiting the action to the word in my animated harangue to Sir William, I had splashed the virgin marble on which we were standing in all directions with hideous stains of the blackest of liquids. In my consternation I did not stay to see the incongruous figure of the charwoman and bucket who was immediately introduced amid the �lite of fashionable London, but fled incontinently from the gallery and, rushing in where angels fear to tread, sought sanctuary in my accustomed haunt, the Gallery of the House of Commons. There at least I thought I should be safe. Presently, when I had somewhat recovered from my agitation, I was making my way out of the House when I encountered a friend in the Central Lobby. I was explaining to him the unfortunate contretemps which had occurred at the New Gallery, and utterly forgot that I still held the bottle of ink in my hand, and on the sacred floor we stood upon I had perpetrated the offence again!

My only consolation for this chapter of accidents was that the particular ink in my bottle is different from the ordinary writing fluid, and leaves no stain behind it. It is in fact merely paint, and is innocent of gall. There are inks, as there are other forms of journalism, whose consequences are not so easily effaced or so harmless; but like the caricaturist's work itself, the material with which it is accomplished often looks blacker than it really is.

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