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Otago Daily Times, Issue 18563, 25 May 1922, Page 4

Sir Leslie Ward, the famous caricaturist (“Spy”), of Vanity Fair, did not long survive his seventieth birthday, when he was entertained at dinner in London by a distinguished company. On that occasion it was mentioned that his mother, herself an accomplished artist, was still alive and “vigorous enough to have a picture in the Royal Academy”; and the Lord Chancellor, who presided, expressed a hope that their guest was only in the early evening of his years. 'lt was ominous, however, that Sir Leslie’s. speech in returning thanks was, on medical advice, restricted to a single sentence, and the end has come in less than six months. The length of the great cartoonist’s artistic career may be gathered from the fact that he became a contributor, to Vanity Fair in the year preceding the birth of the chairman of the festal gathering of November 21 last; and it is a good many years since he j; added the future Chancellor to the long list of his not wholly unhappy victims. Lord Birkenhead is of opinion that “humorous portraiture,” rather than “caricature,” is the right designation of Sir Leslie Ward’s type of art, which is remarkable not more for its faultless technique than for the genuine human kindliness and searching insight by which it is inspired. Some of our elderly readers will remember the first appearance of those coloured cartoons in Vanity Fair, — Disraeli was first and Gladstone second in the prolonged weekly series,—and some may retain in the “inward eye’’ the pungent characteristics of particular portraits which they have not seen with the bodily eye for many and many a year. Who could forget the representation—or should we say non-representation?—of little Earl (formerly Lord John) Russell: a back view; nothing to Be seen of the tiny great man except his hat, just topping the bench in the House of Lords; and yet, as someone once said, with a ! world pf characterisation in the hat!

Fortunate the person -who should possess all or most or even a considerable number of those many hundreds of cartoons, with their genial sting, if the phrase is permissible, produced during the fifty years during which Sir Leslie Ward went about (as Sir Harry Brittain put it at the dinner) “stalking prominent human beings!” Alas I. the stalking days are done."