The Illustrators of MontmartreEmanuel, Frank L. (Frank Lewis)
General
The Illustrators of Montmartre
Emanuel, Frank L. (Frank Lewis)
Illustrators -- France -- Biography; Montmartre (Paris, France) -- Biography
Next we are taken to some dull, superstitious Breton hamlet; a blind
and crippled tramp has arrived, hobbling through on crutches. We feel
that his infirmities have hardly saved him from a career of violence.
We can almost hear his raucous appeal for alms, as it falls on the
ears of a group of simple village children, pitying, yet more than
half-fearing, the uncanny stranger--just as they did the chained
bear that passed through a week before.
Less gruesome is a great healthy farmer’s lass, surrounded by cocks
and hens and clattering her wooden shoon across the cobbled farmyard;
or the two fresh little laundry girls, swinging along laden with three
great baskets of clean linen. “Look out! there’s another of those
beastly bicycles,” says one of them; “and on Sunday too,” comments the
other.
Then again there are idyllic scenes on the sordid Paris fortifications,
or yet further afield. _Trompe la Mort_ shows us a crowd of humble
folk scandal-mongering in hushed tones, their tittle-tattle provoked
to its utmost by the climax indicated in the background by a sombre
hearse. Another drawing transports us to the midst of a crowd in
quite a different frame of mind. A hue and cry has been raised, and
an infuriated mob is tearing down the street at the heels of its
hapless prey. Next we see one of the many drawings dealing with a side
of life which in less safe hands might be offensive. An unctuous old
harpy waylays two fresh little workgirls, and insidiously lays the
seeds which, to her profit, shall lead to their downfall. Steinlen
occasionally, if rarely, makes drawings of which humour is the motive
power. Among these I recall a café-concert study of his. Yvette
Guilbert, at that time as thin as a lath, holds the stage, and among
the audience is a great, porpoise-like woman who says, threateningly
to her poor, inoffensive little wisp of a husband--“Perhaps that’s your
style.... Satyr.”
One of his most charming drawings reproduced in colour in _Le Rire_ is
called “le bon Gîte.” The hapless Krüger, all war stained, is seated in
some peaceful Dutch cottage, where Queen Wilhelmina, as an awe-struck
peasant lassie, fills for him the pipe of peace, the while her martial
German husband eagerly engages the old man in fighting his battles over
again.
Nor can we forget the splendid double-page drawing that appeared in
_L’Assiette au Beurre_ for May 23, 1901. Here we see a big boy’s
seminary, representing the French army of the future, the hope of
the country, going out for its daily walk in charge of a number of
priests--every one of them a monument of craftiness, superstition or
bigoted intolerance, thus representing the power that poisoned a great
nation’s sense of justice during the hateful period of the Dreyfus
trials.
Then again in the same paper for June 27, 1901, appears among others
one of his most notable drawing, a veritable _tour de force_,
representing the harrowing scene of the identification of corpses after
the dynamite explosion at Issy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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