FAMOUS CARTOONIST DEAD.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 12, 21 September 1910, Page 42

FAMOUS CARTOONIST DEAD.

Readers of “Punch” the world over will regret the death of that, famous comic weekly’s chief cartoonist, Air Linley Sambourne, who passed away this week in London. Sambourne has been contributing to “Punch” ever since 1867, when a sketch which he made while still a young draughtsman in an engineer’s

office was accepted by Mark Lemon, "Punch’s” lirst editor. in 1871, Sambourne became a regul ir member of 1 he stall', and almost every week sin?.? then has seen a cartoon from his pen. lie shone as a draughtsman. (1. F. Watts once declared tint he would willingly sacrifice his ability in painting to possess Sambourne’s power in iinedrawing. "That wonderful haul of his, like Giotto’s, can draw you a perfect circle with bis pen,” wrote Mr M. 11.

England, in Europe, who can do 50” And next to his marvellous line-drawing, Sambourne’s most noteworthy quality was exactitude. He amassed a collection of 12,000 photographs !■> aid him in getting his details correct. Some remarkable things are told of this pious devotion to truth in detail. In 1889 a cartoon by him appeared in ‘Punch” of Gladstone, as Wellington leading his troops to victory. The uniform which the artist drew was from the actual uniform worn by the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. Mr Sambourne’s brother-in-law was the late Mr Boehrn,, and, when the sculptor was doing a new statue of Wellington, the clothes of the Iron Duke were lent to him. Mr Sambourne seized the opportunity to put them on a friend and photograph them. For some time Mr Sambourne went twice a week to the Zoo to make studies of the animals, and that is why his drawings of lions and elephants are the delight of students of animal life. He made a picture of a lion yawning on e, and people said, "How very good! How true to Nature!” They were right: t

had meant hours of close study, however, and waiting for the exact moment when the beast obliged by yawning. He once borrowed the robes of the Lord Mayor, in order to be quite e.aicct in his picture of London’s chief magistrate. How few artists, he has remarked, could draw a policeman’s helmet without seeing it! "It irritates ne,'’ he told 'in interviewer, "when people remark, ’I dare say you knock oil' your sketches very quickly.’ I do nothing of the kind. Often 1 spend hours investigating a point before I begin to draw, in order that some incidental fact may be accurate.’' A visitor to his studio -aw a number of unmounted photographs, some of them nude, on his desk. "Yes,” sail the artist, “I have to draw a mermaid, and I am trying to get the figure of one in time to run back to Ramsgate by an early train to draw the sea ‘from life.’” Impressionism was all very well, but, in .Mr Linley Sambourne’s view, it was often the cover for indolence, and he found few ymmg artists who would take the trouble they ought to take over details. In great measure it was this fidelity to truth that made him as popular with genuine art-lovers in the I lilted States, France and Germany, as m ais own land.