ART AND ARTISTS. THE ART OF CARICATURE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2389, 14 December 1899, Page 63

ART AND ARTISTS. THE ART OF CARICATURE.

Speaking in an "interview" in the New Penny Magazine on the art of caricature, Mr Carruthers Gould says : "It is emphatically not work that can be done without any trouble. Even the small drawings which illustrate my note 3iv Parliament cost me a lot of thinking out, besides the actual work. My larger cartoons mean three or four hour 3* woi'k, and sometimes more. And to be an effective political caricaturist you must study party politics. You must know the ins and outs of the game. A political cartoon should, to my mind, aim at bringing out the weak points in your opponents' case, should draw a moral and teach a lesson in a pictorial form. A caricaturist is stronger if he bo an independent critic. "I lake one side because T think its political point cf view the right one. But I should not, simply to score a party hit, throw ridicule on what I believed to be a measure of true progress or reform because the political party to which I was generally on principle opposed initiated it." '"How, Mr Gould," I asked, "do you get suili wonderful likenesses?" - "That, I suoDOse," answered Mr Gould with a laugh, "'is a gift. But it is a gift that must be developed by a great, deal of study. Many an hour have I sat hi the sallory of the House of Common* watching every laovement.on pome faes. till I know every line of it and its various expressions by heart. I apply this same process to every face that I want to caricature. I want everyone to bo able to recognise tha subject of my caricature at once. The public take such pleasure — It Matters their vanity — if they can say, 'Ah, that's Balfour ; and. ly Jove ! Chamberlain ; and hero's Ilarcourt," and so-- on with all the face.*. But if they have to 'rack their brains and think who it i~, tho cartoon is spoilt for them." "But how do you remember the distinctive features of your many characters?" I insisted. "How can I explain it?" answered Mr Gould. "It is as if there were hundreds of little, pigeon-holes in my brain, where I keep my different subjects when I have once learnt their distinctive feature? ready for use. I want' one. and ail I have to do is to touch a sprintr and out it comes. And there I have tho face before me as if I had the actual person. You seem to think it peculiar, but it is all very simple when you have learnt the trick." I could, not help wishing that I had the art of pigeon-holing in formal ion in the samp way. oven to a small degree. As for carrying all theso faces in one's brain, each distinctive and clear, the meie idea made one'.s mind reel. W* then fell to talking of the literary idea in caricature, and on this point Mr Gould was very interesting. Facing me on the wall was a picture of .Sir John Gorst as the white k"night in "Alice in Wonderland." Hid horjffe was shying at a gate, and in the next sketch there he was. head downwards, in the liramWo. Tt bad been drawn.- to illustrate

certain , phases in the first Education Bill of | the present Government, and its political significance must have caused a chuckle in the warmest admirers of that act. Here again was the literary idea of another picture, in one of the Christmas numbers of Truth, of the frozen lake in Dante's "Inferno." There was Sir William Harcourt, white-robed, lau-rel-crowned, looking mournfully at the heads of half a hundred Liberal Unionists embedded in the terrible lake of Conservative ice. In this and a hundred other ways Mr Gould has brought home at one time and another to us all who see his cartoons in the WestminNter Gazette the political meaning of passing events by these qimint exotics of i literary reminiscence.