Frank Reynolds, R.I. | Page 3

Consider the
drawing (on page 32) of the girl singing in a Paris café. There is no
dependence on aught extraneous for the achievement of the effect
sought. Yet here, if ever, a human soul is laid bare in all its naked
tragedy.
[Illustration: WORKING PARIS AT LUNCHEON. From "Paris and
some Parisians"]

For sheer power in the art of drawing, Frank Reynolds has few equals
and no betters. As a draughtsman pure and simple, he seems to me
well-nigh perfect, whether he has pen, pencil, or stump of charcoal in
his hand. It is the great merit of his work, as it appears to me, that it
depends for the achievement of its intention solely on its own intrinsic
qualities. It has no tricks, no mannerisms, no "fakements" to distract the
attention and conceal weaknesses. It is straightforward, direct in its
appeal, self-reliant in its challenge.
[Illustration]
To quote the words of a critic of discernment, as he passed from
drawing to drawing, "Frank Reynolds is right, right--right every time."
This is praise to which one can hardly add.
[Illustration: THE DARE-DEVILS. From "Social Pests."]

FRANK REYNOLDS. II.
Frank Reynolds is yet another in the long list of artists who have
arrived at their true vocation by devious routes. There are certain
tendencies of mind which, when a man has them, refuse to be
suppressed. The journalistic instinct is one of them. Do what you will
with the man in whom it is planted, he can never keep his fingers from
the pen. Make him a doctor and you will find him scribbling columns
for the press on hygiene in the house and the benefits of breathing
through the nose. Send him into the army and he will fill his leisure by
writing tales of tiger-shoots and essays on the art of pig-sticking. So
with the artist. The man born with the gift to draw finds as irresistible a
fascination in pencil or brush as the man with the power of narrative
discovers in ink and paper. Whether he serves before the mast as an
A.B., or cattle-ranches out west, sooner or later he is certain to drift into
his proper sphere of activity. It may take long to get there, but
eventually he is bound to arrive.
In the case of Frank Reynolds the period of bondage was comparatively

brief. Entering at first upon a business career, he had originally no
prospect, nor intention, of developing his artistic impulses. He had
scarcely, indeed, a suspicion of his own powers--certainly no proper
knowledge of their latent possibilities. But commerce had little interest
for him, and circumstances which offered an opportunity of escape
combining with a happy chance which suggested a higher artistic (and
monetary) value for that faculty for drawing which previously he had
regarded in the light of a mere hobby, caused him to throw up his
earlier plans and devote himself entirely to black-and-white illustration.
[Illustration]
There had been preparation for this, however. The son of an artist,
Frank Reynolds inherited his native talent, and this was developed in
no small measure during boyhood under his father's guidance. It was
the chief delight of Reynolds junior to "mess about" (as he himself
succinctly puts it) with the palette and tools of Reynolds senior, and the
licence thus permitted enabled him to discover for himself much of the
rudiments of the craft of the draughtsman and painter. More was
learned from long and absorbed contemplation of his father at work.
[Illustration: "CHACUN" WITH HIS "CHACUNE". From "Paris and
some Parisians"]
If early inclinations were of more lasting duration than is their wont, it
is likely that Frank Reynolds would now be known to fame as a painter
of martial types and gory battlefields. With him the fascination which
soldiers and all things military have for the boyish mind took the form
of an intense eagerness to reproduce in colour and line the gay pageant
of the march. The skirl of the fife and the tattoo of the drum inspired
him with a desire, not to shoulder a gun, but to seize a pencil. There
was a shop in Piccadilly where water-colour sketches of military types
might frequently be seen displayed to view, and to Reynolds junior a
tramp thither of several miles from the far west of London was as
nothing, could he but have the ecstatic joy of gazing, with nose
flattened against the window-pane, upon these transcendent works of
art, for an hour or more on end.

[Illustration]
This early training, to be regarded as the sure foundation upon which
the artist's later education was to rest, owed not a little, perhaps, of its
effectiveness to its casual and desultory nature. The natural bent was
allowed to reveal itself: development was gradual, and (as it were)
automatic. Individuality