ROYALTY AND ART

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 26, 30 July 1937, Page 17

ROYALTY AND ART

A FAMOUS INCIDENT

MAX BEERBOHM ATTACKED

"A LAPSE OF TASTE"

The placid, not to say smug and I "society" atmosphere which usually surrounds the annual exhibition of British art by the Eoyal Academy was disturbed recently, says a writer in the Melbourne "Age." The privateview day of this exhibition marks the opening of the social season in London, and it usually brings together in the galleries of 'Burlington House in Piccadilly most of the men in England who are prominent in the arts, professions and sciences, statesmen and members of the diplomatic corps, peers and peeresses, and famous hostesses, and a lot of social climbers who have succeeded in obtaining coveted invitations to the event. A message sent from London on the opening day of this exhibition stated that a picture which had been accepted r.r.d hur.g in one of',the galleries,- had been vemoved by order of the president of the Royal Academy, because the council had been informed on varnishing day (always the day previous to the opening of the exhibition) that the picture was an allegorical study of the Duke of Windsor. It was entitled "The Lord of Creation." and depicted a young man with a crown oh his head being tugged along by an alluring female. The artist, Mr. Oswald Moser, denied in a Press interview that his picture referred in any way to the- Duke of Windsor. "It is simply a symbolical study of a young man," he said, "and it was painted two years ago. The! crown on his head is purely symbolical of man's supposed superiority over the birds and beasts." Doubtless the artist, in order to justify himself, will seek an early opportunity of exhibiting the picture at one of the numerous private galleries of the London art dealers. ANOTHER INCIDENT. The removal of this picture on the ground that it caricatures Royalty recalls a somewhat similar incident in London in 1922 in connection with an exhibition of caricatures by Max Beerbohm, who at the time had the reputation of being by far the best of England's caricaturists. It had been his custom for about two decades to exhibit at intervals of three or four years a collection of his caricatures. Eventually society "took him up," and the private-view day of a Max Beerbohm exhibition became almost as fashionable an event as the privateview day of the Royal Academy's exhibition. His exhibition seldom included more thaSi 50 or 60 drawings,) and they were all hung in one room of the Leicester Galleries, which, like most of the other private galleries in London, are the showrooms of the firm of art dealers occupying the premises. Peers and peeresses, eminent statesmen and their wives, distinguished authors and artists, leading members of the judicial bench and of the Bar, popular actors and actresses, and the cream of fashionable society, went to the Leicester Galleries to laugh at Max Beerbohm's clever caricatures of eminent people, and to enjoy the spice of malice with which the victims were portrayed. As a rule the "captions" explaining the drawings were extremely witty and satirical, and added to the sting of the caricatures. The main object of the exhibition was to sell the drawings, but a substantial sum was obtained by charging a high price for admission to the galleries. Private view day at the exhibition to the Royal Academy is free to the hundreds of distinguished people invited, but admission to Max Beerbohm's exhibition on private-view day costs 10s 6d. On succeeding clays the price was 2s 6d to see the 50 or 60 drawings exhibited, whereas the cost of admission to the Royal Academy to see about 1500 works of art by nearly 1000 artists is only Is 6d. SOME OF BAD TASTE. A storm of adverse criticism was raised by Max Beerbohm's exhibition • in 1922. The art critics of the Lon- , don newspapers declared that some of , the caricatures were in extremely bad , taste. The drawings to which most ■ objection was raised were those which ; caricatured members of the Royal ; family. Concerning one of these deal- j ing with the marriage of a future Prince of Wales, there was an im- 1 ( mediate demand that it should be i withdrawn from the exhibition, and ( after a few days the artist bowed to the storm, and withdrew it. i In this drawing, which was en- l titled "Long Choosing and Beginning ] Late," the Prince of Wales was depicted " as an elderly man, standing before a ] table in a registrar's office with his i bride, a coarse-looking, red-faced woman of middle age, wearing a red ] tam-o'-shanter. The marriage was ] supposed to be taking place in 1972— j fifty years from the date of the exhibition —and the great social, political, > and constitutional changes that had taken place in the interval, were in- j dicated in the following note at the ; side of the caricature, which purported to be an. extract from "The Times" of j November, 1972:— ; An interesting wedding was quietly ; celebrated yesterday at the Ealing Registry Office, when Mr. Edward I Windsor was united to Miss Flossie ; Pearson. The bridegroom, as many of our elder readers will recall, was at one time well known as the "heir apparent" of the late "King" George. He has for some years been residing at "Balmoral," 65 Acacia Terrace, Lenin Avenue, Ealing, and his bride is the only daughter of his landlady. Immediately after the ceremony the happy pair travelled to Ramsgate, where the honeymoon will be spent. "Interviewed later in the day, the aged mother-in-law confessed that she had all along been opposed to the union because of the disparity between the ages of the two parties—the bride being still on the sunny side of 40. 'I had alwaj'S,' she said, 'hoped that my Flossie was destined to make a brilliant match.' RESIGNED TO IT. "Now that the knot was tied, however, the old lady was evidently resigned to the fait accompli. "I believe," she said, -"that Mr. Windsor will make a good husband for my girl, for I must say that a nicer, quieter gentleman, or more pleasant spoken, -never lodged under my roof." Included in the exhibition was a series of eight caricatures of King i Edward VII, which the artist suggested | in the catalogue were intended to illustrate Sir Sydney Lee's forthcoming biography of that monarch. The drawing in this scries which aroused most condemnation was the last, which was labelled "Angel Edward." and depicted the late. King as an angel with a harp, a halo, and a pair of wings. He was an extremely fat, coarse-looking angel, dressed in a loose white garment. But one caricature of this series was extremely clever and by no means vulgar. It illustrated what Mr. Lytton Strachcy had referred to in his '"Life of Queen Victoria" as ''the rare, the rather awful, visits of Albert Edward. Prince of Wales, to Windsor Castle." Mr. Strachey explained that there was very little sympathy between Queen Victoria and her eldest son. and that even after the Prince had reached mature age he was afraid of his mother and kept out of her way as much as

possible. Max Beerbohm depicted Queen Victoria sitting on a chair, with an expression of stern disapproval on her face, and the Prince of Wales doing penance by standing in a corner of the room with his back to her, because he had been a naughty boy. The humour of the drawing consisted mainly in the fact that the Prince was not depicted as a boy, but as a stout, baldheaded, middle-aged man. "NOT VERY FUNNY." "The Times," after warmly praising many of the drawings in the exhibition, deplored as a display of bad | taste those dealing ' with Royalty. "They are not very funny, and they are (we hate to have to say it) rather vulgar," said "The Times." Caricatures of Royalty are excusable only if they are witty and amusing; not if they are vulgar and malicious. In less refined periods of English history it was a common custom to lampoon the King and his mistresses, in the most scurrilous prose or verse. As might be expected, lampooners flourished in England during the reign of | the Merry Monarch, Charles 11, and during the life of that profligate Prince who became George IV. Charles had several mistresses, each of whom was the subject of many lampoons. "Here they still paste up their drolling lampoons and scurrilous papers," wrote Evelyn in his diary. But George IV, aptly summed up as "a bad son, a bad husband, a bad father, a- bad subject, a bad monarch, and a bad friend," had a succession of more than twenty mistresses. But, strange to say, the most notable lampooner of his day, whose fame as a scurrilous writer has earned him the title of the prince of lampooners, was on the side of King George IV. This was Theodore Hook, who became editor of "John Bull," a paper started by the friends of the King for the express purpose of defaming his Queen, from whom he was separated, and from whom he tried unsuccessfully to obtain a divorce by | means of the passage of a Bill through j Parliament. Of Theodore Hook's editorship of "John Bull," the Dictionary of National Biography states: —"His reckless humour and preternatural faculty of improvisation, now had full swing, and his powers were never displayed to so much advantage as in this scurrilous, scandalous, but irresistible facetious, and for a time exceedingly potent, journal. No man with a particle of chivalr.y could have written as Hook did, but no such man could have been equally effective in exposing a pernicious, though generous, popular delusion (i.e., that Queen Caroline was I a faithful wife, and a much-maligned woman). "PRINCE OF LAMI-'OONEKb.' ■ "He undoubtedly proved himself the prince of lampooners. The exuberance of his impetuous fun sweeps away the studied and polished sarcasms of refined satirists like Moor; he hurls ridicule and invective right and left with a Titanic vigour, so admirable in itself as a manifestation of energy, that we j almost forget that after all it is only I mud that he is showering." "John Bull." in his campaign against the Queen, published scurrilous attacks on every lady of position who called on her to express sympathy with her, as a persecuted woman. It published a list of the. clergy who had included the Queen in their prayers from the pulpit for the Royal Family, and warned them not to offend again. The object of the campaign was to counteract . the popular demonstrations in favour of the Queen. After the Government had withdrawn the Bill of divorce because it realised the measure | could not be forced through the House of Commons, the Queen received scores of congratulatory addresses from public bodies and other associations. A thanksgiving service we., held in St. Paul's Cathedral. The only epigram that has survived from the fierce controversy that raged round the two Royal antagonists is the following:— Most gracious Queen, we thee implore, To go away and sin no more; But if that effort be too great. To go away at any rate.