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CHAPTER VIII.

GEORGE CRUIKSHANK AT HIS PRIME.

THOSE who have studied the work of George Cruikshank from its commencement to its close (and those only can be said to have done so who are familiar with the satires described in the previous chapter), cannot fail to be struck with the alterations which took place in his style at different periods of the career we have already been considering. George Cruikshank's peculiar style and manner, which enable us to recognise his work at a glance, was the outcome of a very slow and gradual process of development. In the first instance he closely copied Gillray, but soon acquired a manner of his own, blending the two styles after a fashion which is both interesting and amusing to follow. Soon, however, the style of the master was discontinued, and gradually the artist began to discover that the bent of his genius lay in altogether another direction. Unlike Thomas Rowlandson, the moment Cruikshank became an illustrator of books, he realized the fact that the style adapted to graphic satire was unsuitable for the purposes of this branch of art, and thenceforth he adopted a style differing from anything which had gone before. The revolution thus accomplished (a singular proof of the genius of the man) was effected without effort, and is strikingly manifest in an early book illustration representing the execution of Madame Tiquet and her accomplice, in 1699. The design to which we refer, which we believe is rare and little known, was engraved by H. R. Cook, from a design by the artist for the frontispiece to a collection of narratives by Cecil, "printed for Hone," in 1819, and stands by virtue of its force and character apart from most of the book illustrations of the period. From the

ALTERATIONS IN CRUIKSHANK'S STYLE.

GEORGE'S IDEAS OF
FEMALE BEAUTY.

moment that the new style was adopted, the artist's services were brought into requisition for the purposes of book illustration; and from the time work of this kind began to come in, he relaxed and afterwards discontinued the practice of caricature. It is as an etcher and designer of book illustrations we shall henceforth have to consider him, and in this character one of his famous illustrations to "Greenwich Hospital" will be found superior to the whole series of Rowlandson's careless overdrawn designs to the three "Tours" of Syntax put together.

This alteration in the man's style after he took to book illustra tion is known only to those familiar with his early caricatures. If you take, for instance, the etching of St. Swithin's Chapel, of the "Sketch Book," or The Gin Shop in the "Scraps and Sketches "* (we are speaking of course of the early coloured impressions), and show them together with any two of the caricatures we have named to a person who had never before seen either, we will venture to say that he would pronounce them without hesitation to be executed by entirely different hands.

After Lockhart's statement that George Cruikshank was capable of designing an Annunciation, a Beatification, or an Apotheosis, we must accept his assertion that he "understood the [human] figure completely" with a certain amount of reservation. Perhaps he did; and if he did, he certainly played some extraordinary tricks with the "figure" aforesaid. The truth is, that we forget the artist's weaknesses, many and glaring as they are, in the lustre of his unexampled genius. The Times, in an otherwise laudatory article which it published after his death, remarked that "there was not a single beautiful face or figure probably in the whole range of Cruikshank's work." Now, although this is not entirely true, there is at least so much of truth in it that we may admit that the cases in which he has produced a pretty face or figure are very few and far between, and even those cases seem rather to have been the result of accident than of design.

The "Sketch Book" and "Scraps and Sketches" have recently been republished; but the impressions from the sadly worn plates give but little idea of the exquisite originals,

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There is no getting over the fact that George's ideas of female beauty were, to say the least of them, peculiar: his women are fearfully and wonderfully made; they are horse-faced; their eyebrows are black and strongly marked; their hair is plastered to the sides of their faces, and meet bobs of hair at the back of their heads; their waists are as thin as their necks; and they all bear a strong family likeness to one another. The Times assertion is happily, however, so broad that it is easy to traverse and contradict it. George's handsome women are so few, that it is difficult at the moment to say where any of them may be found. I know at least of one amazingly handsome one-the London Barrow Woman in Hone's "Every-Day Book." Some pretty servant girls will be found in the etching of The Sergeant Introducing his Dutch Wife to his Friends in "St. James's, or the Court of Queen Anne," and I will undertake to point out at least half a dozen pretty faces in the course of illustrations to "The Miser's Daughter "; but after all, these are only exceptions to the general rule; and it may be safely conceded that as a delineator of female beauty, George could not hold a candle to John Leech, to John Tenniel, or even to his own brother, Isaac Robert.

As for the celebrated Cruikshankian steed, I give him up at once as an utterly irreclaimable and unmanageable brute. Thackeray, writing in 1840, said, that "though our artist does not draw horses very scientifically, to use the phrase of the atelier; he feels them very keenly, and his queer animals, after one is used to them, answer quite as well as better." Even on this subject, however, the ablest critics have contradicted each other. George Augustus Sala tells us that the artist "could draw the ordinary nag of real life well enough," and cites by way of example the very horses of the celebrated Deaf Postilion, in "Three Courses and a Dessert," which Thackeray had previously held up to well-merited execration. He goes on to tell us that when George "essayed to portray a charger or a hunter, or a lady's hack, or even a pair of carriage horses, the result was the most grotesque of failures. The noble animal has, I apprehend, forty-four points,' technically

THE CRUIKSHANKIAN STEED.

speaking, and from the muzzle to the spavin-place, from the crest to the withers, from the root of the dock to the fetlock, George was wrong in them all. His fiery steed bore an equal resemblance to a Suffolk punch with the head of a griffin and the legs of an antelope, and that traditionary cockhorse on which the lady was supposed to ride to Banbury Cross with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes." * His peculiarities notwithstanding, George himself was in no wise conscious of them, and never hesitated to introduce "the fiery untamed" into any scene-battle or otherwise-in which the services of the eccentric animal might be turned to account. We find him assisting Washington in his triumphal journey to the capitol; astonishing the French squares in the character of a Mameluke charger at the Battle of the Pyramids; and leaping into the lake along with "Herne the Hunter," that peculiar creation of the late Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, on which supernatural occasion he comes out, as might have been expected, with peculiar force and vigour.

Thackeray, moreover, says of his trees, that they were decidedly original, "being decidedly of his own make and composition, not imitated from any master;" another and a minor difficulty with the artist was a boot, which he invariably drew half a foot too long. George lived in the days of straps, and being strictly conservative in principle, when he met with a pair of trousers, his idea of the "fitness of things" was not satisfied until he pinned them to the wearer's feet with a pair of these most uncomfortable appendages.

Against these shortcomings, which are a sufficient answer to those who would give him credit for possessing the faculty of designing "Annunciations, Beatifications, Apotheoses," and the like, we must set his excellencies, the power and brilliancy of his imaginative faculties, his extraordinary talents of conception and realization, the delicacy of his manipulation and execution: in a word, the strong original "genius" with which Lockhart credited him from the moment he had seen his "Points of Humour." Examples of this

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