I went into the British Museum the other afternoon to see the exhibition of European caricatures which has just been opened. As usual I lost myself, and as usual I wondered why I do not oftener visit this vast enthralling storehouse of the arts and learning of all ages. I nearly forgot the original object of my visit, first in the collection of early European printing, and next in thë Assyrian rooms. However, I got to the carib catures at last, and they are worth all the time one can give them. As they are to be on show for a year, anyone coming home on leave might afternoon, well make a note of them for a spare
The word caricature, which nowadays suggests something political, has been used in its broadest sense. For example Michel Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci (there are no caricatures by the lattem; but several by his pupils) amused themselves in light moments by drawing comic heads. Those by Michel Angelo give one a new insight into his austere mature, continually outraged by the world's frivolity. But what incomparable drawing. The delicacy and precision of his pencil might be the despair of any artist today, The earliest caricaturists chose such stock subjects as the rich old woman buying a young husband, and the wealthy dotard with a young wife. "Avarice" is the subject of a spirited 17th century/Dutch drawing full of figures—a lady selling her charms for a shower of gold, a man on a roof rifling the stork's nest for eggs, greedy merchants and uncouth creatures delving in gutters. But the Dutch caricaturists could be politicians too, as shown by their savage attacks on Cromwell Early carib nature like early journalism, used a ferocity which makes us moderns gasp. Plainly there was no law of libel then. Another thing that strikes one is the peculiar ugliness and repulsiveness. of the faces. Cruikshank in this respect was typical of a long line of predecessors. I cannot remember one really agreeable face by him and even when he was stipposed to draw a pretty one, as in his illustrations of Dickens, Ko made it unutferably silly and simpering. Cartoonists have grown kinder, or have moments of kindness since then. One can easily see at the British Museum the ancestry of Belcher's charwoman, but none of his predecessors would have made them so human and lovable as he does.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.