The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 | Page 7

and although you may not generally be
written down an ass, you must in your new vocation pay your footing.
It is therefore incumbent upon anyone entering the world of trade for
the first time to keep his wits very much about him.
The local habitation for my Exhibition, which upon the spur of the
moment I was fortunate enough to find in Bond Street, was called for
some inexplicable reason the Gainsborough Gallery, and thereby hangs
a tale. One afternoon there arrived a venerable dowager in a gorgeous

canary-coloured chariot, attended by her two colossal footmen. She
sailed into the gallery, which, fortunately for the old and scant of breath,
was on the ground floor, and slightly raising the pince-nez on her
aristocratic nose, looked about her with an air of bewilderment. Then
going up to my secretary she said, "Surely! these are not by
Gainsborough?"
"No, madam," was the reply. "This is the Gainsborough Gallery, but
the pictures are by Harry Furniss."
Almost fainting on the spot, the old lady called for her salts, her stick,
and her attendants three, and was rapidly driven away from the scene of
her lamentable mistake.
The public attendance at the "The Artistic Joke" was prodigious from
the first. Even upon the private view day, when I introduced a novelty,
and instead of inviting everybody who is somebody to pay a gratuitous
visit to the show, raised the entrance fee to half-a-crown, the
fashionable crowd besieged the doors from an early hour, and made a
very considerable addition to my treasury. Those of my readers,
however, who did not pay a visit to the Gainsborough will be better
able to realise the amount of patronage we received, notwithstanding
the numerous attractions of the "Jubilee" London season, if I relate an
incident which occurred on the Saturday after we opened. It was the
"private view" of the Grosvenor Gallery, and the crowd was immense.
Indeed, many ladies and gentlemen were returning to their carriages
without going through the rooms, not, like my patron the dowager,
because they were disappointed at not finding the work of the old
masters, but because the visitors were too numerous and the
atmosphere too oppressive. As I passed through the people I heard a
lady who was stepping into her carriage say to a friend, "I have just
come from 'The Artistic Joke,' and the crowd is even worse there. They
have had to close the doors because the supply of catalogues was
exhausted." This soon caused me to quicken my pace, and hastening
down the street to my own Exhibition, I found the police standing at the
doors and the people being turned away. The simple explanation of this
was that so great had been the public demand that the stock of

catalogues furnished by the printers was exhausted early in the
afternoon, and as it was quite impossible to understand the caricatures
without a catalogue, there was no alternative but to close the doors until
some more were forthcoming.
Finding the telephone was no use, I was soon in a hansom bound for
the City, intending by hook or by crook to bring back with me the
much-needed catalogues, or the body of the printer dead or alive. Upon
arriving in the City, however, to my chagrin I found his place of
business closed, though the caretaker, with a touch of fiendish
malignity, showed me through a window whole piles of my
non-delivered catalogues. Not to be beaten, I hastened back to the West
End and despatched a very long and explicit telegram to the printer at
his private house (of course he would not be back in the City until
Monday), requiring him, under pain of various severe penalties, to
yield up my catalogues instanter. As I stood in the post office of
Burlington House anxiously penning this message, and harassed into a
state of almost feverish excitement, the sounds of martial music and the
tramp of armed men in the adjacent courtyard fell upon my distracted
ear. With a sickly and sardonic smile upon my face I laid down the pen
and peeped through the door.
"Yes! I see it all now," I muttered. "The whole thing is a plant. The
printer was bribed, and, coûte que coûte, the Academy has decided to
take my body! Hence the presence of the military; and see, those
cooks--what are they doing here in their white caps? My body! Ha!
then nothing short of cannibalism is intended!"
This frightful thought almost precipitated me into the very ranks of the
soldiery, when I discovered that the corps was none other than that of
the Artist Volunteers, which contains several of my friends. Seizing
one of those whom I chanced to recognise, I hurriedly whispered in his
ear the thoughts of