THE CARICATURING OF PICTURES.

[Illustration: THE PICTURE SHOWS.
_Design from "Punch."_]

To feed upon one's own kind is a custom which, like so many other
vestiges of a previous civilisation, seems in the present day to have a
fair chance of revival. We have long had with us the City Cannibal, the
Fleet Street Cannibal, the Dramatic, Literary and Musical Cannibals.
Latterly the Society Cannibal has come more distinctly to the front.
Then why, I long ago asked myself, should there not be the Cannibal of
the etching pen and the brush? Especially as the writhing victims of
those mighty instruments appear to be so enamoured of their fate as to
besiege that comic slaughter-house, the studio of the caricaturist, and
with persistent cries of "Eat us! eat us! Our turn next!" solicit the
"favour of not being forgotten" in his next batch of "subjects."

[Illustration]

It may be a revelation to many of my readers, but I can assure them it
is a fact, that it is only in very exceptional cases that artists object
to having their pictures caricatured. Indeed, many of the leading
painters have given me to understand that the omission of their work
from my sketches would be anything but agreeable to them, although, when
the desired travesties of their pictures appear, they may pretend to be
highly indignant. There is one Royal Academician of my acquaintance who
has so keen an appreciation of humour that he never loses an opportunity
of giving me a hint when his magnifying glass has detected the slightest
element of the grotesque in a fellow artist's work. And that most
amiable of men, the late Frank Holl, could never refrain, when occasion
offered, from directing my attention to the humorous points of his
sitters, although I need hardly add that no trace of his having
perceived them was ever apparent in any of his works. Do artists object?
Well, in _Punch_, May, 1889, du Maurier touches this point:

"What our artist (the awfully funny one) has to put up with: _Brown_: 'I
say, look here! What the deuce do you mean by caricaturing my
pictures--hay?' _Jones_: 'Yes, confound you! and _not caricaturing
mine_!'"

I have even known artists so anxious to be parodied that, if they
happened to have a vein of humour in their pencils, they would actually
send me caricatures of their own pictures. Even poor Fred Barnard once
sent me an admirable sketch, caricaturing an excellent portrait of his
three chil