The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 | Page 3

Took It--How a Critic Took It--Curious Offers--Mr. Sambourne
as a Company Promoter--A One-man Show--Punch's Mistake--A Joke
within a Joke--My Offer to the Nation.
"In the year 1887 he startled the town and made a Society sensation by
means of an exceedingly original enterprise which any man of less
audacious and prodigious power of work would have shrunk from in its
very inception. For years this Titanic task was in hand. This was his
celebrated 'artistic joke,' the name given by the 'Times' to a bold
parody on a large scale of an average Royal Academy Exhibition. This
great show was held at the Gainsborough Gallery, New Bond Street,
and consisted of some eighty-seven pictures of considerable size,
executed in monochrome, and presenting to a marvelling public
travesties--some excruciatingly humorous and daringly satirical, others
really exquisite in their rendering of physical traits and landscape
features--of the styles, techniques, and peculiar choice of subjects of a

number of the leading artists, R.A.'s and others, who annually exhibit at
Burlington House. It was a surprise, even to his intimate friends, who,
with one or two exceptions, knew nothing about it until the
announcement that Mr. Furniss had his own private Royal Academy
appeared in the 'Times.' He worked in secret at intervals, under a
heavy strain, to get the Exhibition ready, particularly as he had to
manage the whole of the business part; for the show at the
Gainsborough Gallery was entirely his own speculation. Granted that
the experiment was daring, yet the audacity of the artist fascinated
people. Nor did the Academicians, whom some thought would have
been annoyed at the fun, as a body resent it. They were not so silly,
though a minority muttered. Most of them saw that Mr. Furniss was not
animated by any desire to hold them up to contempt, but his parodies
were perfectly good-natured, that he had served all alike, and that he
had only sought the advancement of English art. During the whole
season the gallery was crushed to overflowing, the coldest critics were
dazzled, the public charmed, and literally all London laughed. It
furnished the journalistic critics of the country with material for reams
of descriptive articles and showers of personal paragraphs, and
whether relished or disrelished by particular members of the artistic
profession, at least proved to them, as to the world at large, the varied
powers (in some phases hitherto unsuspected) and exuberant energies
of the Harry Furniss whose name was now on the tongue and whose
bold signature was familiar to the eyes of that not easily impressed
entity, the General Public.
"In fact, London had never seen anything so original as Harry
Furniss's Royal Academy. The work of one man, and that man one of
the busiest professional men in town. Indeed it might be thought that at
the age of thirty, with all the foremost magazines and journals waiting
on his leisure, with a handsome income and an enviable social position
assured, ambition could hardly live in the bosom of an artist in black
and white. Unlike Alexander, our hero did not sit down and weep that
no kingdom remained to conquer, but set quietly to work to create a
new realm all his own. His Royal Academy, although presented by
himself to the public as an 'artistic joke,' showed that he could not only
use the brush on a large scale, but that he could compose to perfection,

and after the exuberant humour of the show, nothing delighted and
surprised the public more than the artistic quality and finished
technique in much of the work, a finish far and away above the work of
any caricaturist of our time."
[Illustration]
The idea first occurred to me at a friend's house, when my host after
dinner took me into the picture gallery to show me a portrait of his wife
just completed by Mr. Slapdash, R.A. It stood at the end of the gallery,
the massive frame draped with artistic care, while attendants stood
obsequiously round, holding lights so as to display the chef d'[oe]uvre
to the utmost advantage. As I beheld the picture for the first time I was
simply struck dumb by the excessively bad work which it contained.
The dictates of courtesy of course required that I should say all the civil
things I could about it, but I could hardly repress a smile when I heard
someone else pronounce the portrait to be charming. However, as my
host seemed to think that perhaps I was too near, and that the work
might gain in enchantment if I gave it a little distance, we moved
towards the other end of the gallery and, at his suggestion, looked into
an antiquated mirror, where I got in the half light what seemed a
reflection of it. The improvement was