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CARICATURE
statuettes, and has a facial dexterity which sometimes does scant justice to his very original wit. M. Steinlen, born at Lausanne in 1859, came to Paris in 1881. He should be studied in his illustrations to Bruant. He knows the inmost core of the Butte-Montmartre, and depicts it with realistic and brutal relish. M. Bobida, born at Compiegne in 1848, collaborated with Decaux in 1871 to found La Caricature ; he is a paradoxical seer of the possible future and a curiosity-hunter of the past. Old Paris has no secrets from him ; he knows all the old stones and costumes of the Middle Ages, and has illustrated Rabelais; and for fertility of fancy he reminds us of Gustave Dore. “Bac,” born at Vienna, 15th August 1859, has infused a strain of the Austrian woman into the Parisienne; representing her merely as a pleasure- and love-seeking creature, as the toy of an evening, he has recorded her peccadilloes, her witcheries, and her vices. Others who have shot folly as it flies are M. Albert Guillaume, who illustrated the Exhibition of 1900 in a series of remarkable silhouettes ; “ Mars ” ; “ Henri Somm ” ; Gerbault; and Griin. M. Huard is a sort of Holbein of provincial life, depicting to perfection the country townsfolk in their elementary psychology. M. Hermann-Paul, M. Forain’s not unworthy successor on the Figaro, is a cruel satirist, who in a single face can epitomize a whole class of society, and could catalogue the actors of the comedie humaine in a series of drawings. M. Jean Veber loves fantastic subjects, the gnomes of fairy-tales and myths ; but he has a biting irony for contemporary history, as in the Butcher's Shop, where Bismarck is the blood-stained butcher. M. Abel Faivre, a refined and charming painter, is a whimsical humorist with the pencil. He shows us monstrous women, fabulously hideous, drawing them with a sort of realism which is droll by sheer ugliness. ToulouseLautrec startles us by extraordinary dislocations, scrawled limbs, and inexplicable anatomy ; he has left an inimitable series of sketches of Mme. Yvette Guilbert when she was at her thinnest. M. Valotton reproduces crows in blots of black with a Japanese use of the brush. M. Jeanniot, a notable illustrator, sometimes amuses himself by contributing to Le Hire, Le Sourire, Le Pompon, L'Assiette au Beurre, etc., drawing the two types he most affects : the fashionable world, and soldiers. M. Ibels, Capiello, and many more might be enumerated, but it is impossible to chronicle all the clever humorous artists of the illustrated papers. It is the frequent habit of French caricaturists to employ a norn-de-guerre. We therefore give here a list of the genuine names represented by the pseudonyms given above :— Comte Amedee de Noe. ‘Cham ” “Randon ” Gilbert. “Andre Gill” L. A. Gosset de Guine. “ Marcelin ” Emile Planat. “Stop ” L. P. Morel-Retz. “Nadar” Felix Tournachon. “Gavarni ” S. G. Chevallier. “Draner ” Jules Renard. Henri Maigrot. “ Henriot ” “ Caran d’Achjg ” E. Poire. “Bac ” Ferdinand Bach. H. Sommier. “ Henri Somm ” Maurice Bonvoisin. “Mars ” Authorities.—Champfleury. Histoire de la Caricature en France.—Armand Dayot. Les Maitres de la Caricature franggise en XIXe Siecle.—Arsine Alexandre. L'Art du Hire.— Emile Bayard. Le Caricature en France.—J. Grand-Carteret. Les Moeurs et la Caricature en France.—Ad. Brisson. Nos Humoristes. (a. Da.) Germany.—During the last quarter of the 19th century German caricature flourished principally in the comic papers Kladderadatsch and Fliegende Blatter, the former a political paper with little artistic value, in which the ideas alone are clever, whilst the illustrations are merely
a more or less clumsy adjunct to the text, while the Fliegende Blatter, on the contrary, has artistic merit as well as wit. Wilhelm Busch, the most brilliant German draughtsman of the last generation, made his debut with anillustrated poem “The Peasant and the Miller,” and won a world-wide reputation with the following works : Pater Filucius, Die Fromme Helene, Max und Moritz, Der heilige Antonius, Maler Kleksel, Balduin Bdhlamm, Die Erlebnisse Knopps des Junggesellen. Busch stands alone among caricaturists, inasmuch as he is both the author and the illustrator of these works, his witty doggerel supplying Germany with household words. The drawings that accompany the text are amazing for the skill with which he hits the vital mark; the essential point is seized with the least possible elaboration. A flourish or two and a few touches are enough to set before us figures of intensely comical aspect. This distinguishes Busch from Adolf Oberlander, who became the chief draughtsman on Fliegende Blatter. Busch’s drawings would have no meaning apart from the humorous words. Oberlander works with the pencil only. Men, lions, tigers, hares, dogs, trees, houses, plants, are endowed by him with a mysterious life of their own. Without the help of any verbal joke, he achieves the funniest results simply by seeing and accentuating the comical side of everything. His drawings are caricature in the strict sense of the word, its principle being the exaggeration of some natural characteristic. The new generation of contributors to Fliegende Blatter do not work on these lines. Busch and Oberlander were both offshoots of the romantic school; they made fun of modern novelties. Hermann Schlittgen, Rene Reinicke, Adolf Hengeler, and Fritz Wehle are the sons of a self-satisfied time, triumphing in its own chic, elegance, and grace ; hence they do not parody what they see, but simply depict it. The wit lies exclusively in the text; the illustrations aim merely at a direct representation of street or drawing-room scenes. It is this which gives to Fliegende Blatter its value as a pictorial record of the history of German manners. Its pages are a permanent authority on the subject for those who desire to see the social aspects of Germany during the last quarter of the 19th century. At the same time a falling-off in the brilliancy of this periodical has been perceptible. Its fun has become domestic and homely ; it has faithfully adhered to the old technique of wood-engraving, and has made no effort to keep pace with the modern methods of reproduction. These have, in fact, undergone a completerevolution in two different ways : on the one hand, woodprinting, engraving, and lithography in colour have been developed to a high degree of perfection, and the improvement in the mechanical technique of engraving allows of a reproduction in facsimile of the most delicate shades of colour; on the other hand, the art of the poster has aroused a previously dormant feeling for decorative design and the expressive value of pure lines. Toulouse-Lautrec, Steinlen, and Grasset have, in France, worked out to its utmost finality a technique derived from the style of Hokusai and Utarnaro. German caricature, to live and flourish, must keep pace with this development; it had to take into its service the gay effects of colour, and derive fresh inspiration from the sweeping lines of the ornamental draughtsman. This led to the appearance of three new weekly papers: Jugend, Das Narrenschiff, and Simphcissimus. Jugend, started in 1896 by Georg Hirth in Munich, collected from the first a group of gifted young artists, more especially Bernhard Pankok and Julius Diez, who based their style on old German wood - engraving; Fidus, who lavished the utmost beauty of line in unshaded pen-and-ink work ; Rudolf Wilke, whose grotesques have much in common with Forain’s clever drawings; Angelo
