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The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 2
Paperback
Art HistoryDrawing InstructionIndividual Artists
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Publisher: Millers Print
Pages: 230
Weight: 0.69
Height: 0.48 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
THE ARTISTIC JOKE.
T
he First Idea-How itwasMade-Fire!-I am a Somnambulist-MyWorkshop-
My Business Partner-Not by Gainsborough-Lord Leighton-The Pri-
vateView-The Catalogue-Sold Out-How the R.A.'sTook It-How a Critic
Took It-Curious Offers-Mr. Sambourne as a Company Promoter-A One-
man Show-Punch's Mistake-A Joke within a Joke-My Offer to the Nation.
In the year 1887 he startled the town and made a Society sensation by means
of an exceedingly original enterprise which any man of less audacious and
prodigious power of work would have shrunk from in its very inception. For
years this Titanic task was in hand. This was his celebrated 'artistic joke, '
the name given by the 'Times' to a bold parody on a large scale of an average
Royal Academy Exhibition. This great show was held at the Gainsborough
Gallery, New Bond Street, and consisted of some eighty-seven pictures of con-
siderable size, executed in monochrome, and presenting to a marvelling public
travesties-some excruciatingly humorous and daringly satirical, others really
exquisite in their rendering of physical traits and landscape features-of the
styles, techniques, and peculiar choice of subjects of a number of the lead-
3 HARRY FURNISS
ing artists, R.A.'s and others, who annually exhibit at Burlington House. It
was a surprise, even to his intimate friends, who, with one or two exceptions,
knew nothing about it until the announcement that Mr. Furniss had his own
private Royal Academy appeared in the 'Times.' He worked in secret at in-
tervals, under a heavy strain, to get the Exhibition ready, particularly as he
had to manage the whole of the business part; for the show at the Gainsbor-
ough Gallery was entirely his own speculation. Granted that the experiment
was daring, yet the audacity of the artist fascinated people. Nor did the Aca-
demicians, whom some thought would have been annoyed at the fun, as a
body resent it. They were not so silly, though a minority muttered. Most of
them saw that Mr. Furniss was not animated by any desire to hold them
up to contempt, but his parodies were perfectly good-natured, that he had
served all alike, and that he had only sought the advancement of English art.
During the whole season the gallery was crushed to overflowing, the coldest
critics were dazzled, the public charmed, and literally all London laughed.
It furnished the journalistic critics of the country with material for reams of
descriptive articles and showers of personal paragraphs, and whether relished
or disrelished by particular members of the artistic profession, at least proved
to them, as to the world at large, the varied powers (in some phases hitherto
unsuspected) and exuberant energies of the Harry Furniss whose name was
now on the tongue and whose bold signature was familiar to the eyes of that
not easily impressed entity, the General Public.
In fact, London had never seen anything so original as Harry Furniss's Royal
Academy. The work of one man, and that man one of the busiest professional
men in town. Indeed it might be thought that at the age of thirty, with all
the foremost magazines and journals waiting on his leisure, with
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