Caricatures and cartoons -- Great Britain; Cruikshank, George, 1792-1878; English wit and humor, Pictorial
We must not forget to mention "Oliver Twist," and Mr.
Cruikshank's famous designs to that work.* The sausage
scene at Fagin's, Nancy seizing the boy; that capital piece
of humor, Mr. Bumble's courtship, which is even better in
Cruikshank's version than in Boz's exquisite account of the
interview; Sykes's farewell to the dog; and the Jew,--the
dreadful Jew--that Cruikshank drew! What a fine touching
picture of melancholy desolation is that of Sykes and the
dog! The poor cur is not too well drawn, the landscape is
stiff and formal; but in this case the faults, if faults
they be, of execution rather add to than diminish the effect
of the picture: it has a strange, wild, dreary, broken
-hearted look; we fancy we see the landscape as it must have
appeared to Sykes, when ghastly and with bloodshot eyes he
looked at it. As for the Jew in the dungeon, let us say
nothing of it--what can we say to describe it? What a fine
homely poet is the man who can produce this little world of
mirth or woe for us! Does he elaborate his effects by slow
process of thought, or do they come to him by instinct?
Does the painter ever arrange in his brain an image so
complete, that he afterwards can copy it exactly on the
canvas, or does the hand work in spite of him?
* Or his new work, "The Tower of London," which promises
even to surpass Mr. Cruikshank's former productions.
A great deal of this random work of course every artist has done in his
time; many men produce effects of which they never dreamed, and strike
off excellences, haphazard, which gain for them reputation; but a fine
quality in Mr. Cruikshank, the quality of his success, as we have said
before, is the extraordinary earnestness and good faith with which
he executes all he attempts--the ludicrous, the polite, the low, the
terrible. In the second of these he often, in our fancy, fails, his
figures lacking elegance and descending to caricature; but there is
something fine in this too: it is good that he SHOULD fail, that he
should have these honest naive notions regarding the beau monde, the
characteristics of which a namby-pamby tea-party painter could hit
off far better than he. He is a great deal too downright and manly to
appreciate the flimsy delicacies of small society--you cannot expect a
lion to roar you like any sucking dove, or frisk about a drawing-room
like a lady's little spaniel.
If then, in the course of his life and business, he has been
occasionally obliged to imitate the ways of such small animals, he has
done so, let us say it at once, clumsily, and like as a lion should.
Many artists, we hear, hold his works rather cheap; they prate about bad
drawing, want of scientific knowledge:--they would have something vastly
more neat, regular, anatomical.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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