e columns of our
contemporary with pictorial parodies of the chief pictures of the Royal
Academy, the Grosvenor, and other shows, and it has now occurred to him
to develop this idea and to have a humorous Royal Academy of his own. He
has taken the Gainsborough Gallery in Old Bond Street, which he will
fill some time before the opening of Burlington House with a display of
elaborate travesties of the works of all the best known artists of the
day. There will be seventy pictures in black and white, many of them
large size, turning into good-natured ridicule the works of every
painter, good and bad, whose pictures are familiar to the public," etc.,
etc. This gives a very fair idea of the nature and objects of my "Royal
Academy." My aim was to burlesque not so much individual works as
general style, not so much specific performances as habitual manner. As
an example I take the work of that clever decorative painter and etcher,
Mr. R. W. Macbeth, A.R.A. By his permission I here reproduce reductions
in black and white of three of his well-known pictures, and side by side
I show my parody of his style and composition--not, as you will observe,
a caricature of any _one_ picture, but a boiling down of _all_ into an
original picture of my own in which I emphasise his mannerisms.
Furthermore, in my catalogue I parodied the same artist's mannerism in
drawing in black and white, and with one or two exceptions this applies
to all the works I exhibited. I hit upon a new idea for the illustrated
catalogue. The illustrations, with few exceptions, did not convey any
idea of the composition of the pictures, and in many cases they were
designed to further the idea and object of the Exhibition by reference
to pictures not included therein. My joke was that the Exhibition could
not be understood by anyone without a catalogue, and the catalogue could
not be understood by anyone without seeing the Exhibition. Therefore
everyone visiting the Exhibition had to buy a catalogue, and everyone
seeing the catalogue had to visit the Exhibition. _Q.E.D.!_ The idea,
the catalogue, and everything connected with this "Artistic Joke"
were my own, with the exception of the title, which was so happily
supplied by Mr. Humphry Ward as the heading to the preliminary notice he
wrote for the _Times_. _At the last moment_ I called in my fellow-worker
on _Punch_, Mr. E. J. Milliken, to assist me with some of the
letterpress of the catalogue and write the verses for i