Max Beerbohm Caricatures [Hardcover]

N. John Hall (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 20, 1997

Max Beerbohm, the foremost caricaturist of his day, was hailed by "The Times" in 1913 as "the greatest of English comic artists", by Bernard Berenson as "the English Goya", and by Edmund Wilson as "the greatest...portrayer of personalities - in the history of art". This book is an anthology of Beerbohm's best images, accompanied by historical and analytical commentary by John Hall that is enriched by quotation from Beerbohm's own essays, criticism, letters, and fiction. The 213 caricatures reproduced here are arranged in chapters by category: writers, including Wilde, Kipling, James. Conrad, Yeats, Twain, Wells, Hardy, Strachey, Forster, and Pound; theatre people, including Ibsen, Shaw, and Barrie; artists, including Whistler, Sargent, and Fry; politicians, including Disraeli, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, and Churchill; royalty, especially King Edward VII (Beerbohm's favourite subject), but also Queen Victoria, George V, and Edward VIII; and miscellaneous contemporaries, including Caruso, Sousa, and financier Albert De Rothschild. Also reproduced are generous selections from Beerbohm's two books of caricatures dealing with the past: Dante, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson,and Browning from "The poet's corner", and Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, Swinburne, Ruskin, Morris, and others from "Rossetti and his circle". The final chapter is devoted to self-portraits.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The incomparable Max" was indeed incomparable--a writer of wit, charm, and originality, and a caricaturist with an "unfailing eye for the centre of a situation" and a "gift for fixing it in a memorably comic form." The collection of drawings presented by Mr. Hall covers Beerbohm's field of victims thoroughly. Authors, artists, actors, politicians, and royalty were all his targets. The text and notes are well written (exceptionally so for the art-book genre) and reinforced by quotations from Max and his highly articulate contemporaries. Max gave up cartooning by 1942, because, he explained, "I began to remember people more or less exactly as they were, and was obliged to put in the exaggerations consciously." An earlier description of his methods emphasized memory, not direct vision, as the basis of his resolutely unrealistic art. "I cannot," he wrote a friend, "imagine a worse thing befalling anyone than to see the streets peopled with my creations. It has never befallen me." The late drawings from the years shortly before Max "laid aside" his pencil show clearly what had happened. The subjects are recognizable, but they are no longer victims. The gadfly had lost his sting, and Max, a sound critic, knew it. But in his heyday he gave wonderfully effective and amusing jabs that can still draw a chuckle. -- The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe-Lou Adams

Hall's witty commentary is supplemented by Beerbohm's own prose as well as contemporary observations by the likes of Virginia Woolf and E. F. Benson.... More entertaining than conventional histories of the period, Hall's collection animates an era of eccentrics, many of whose priceless peculiarities would, but for Beerbohm, have been erased by time. -- The New York Times Book Review, Sarah Harrison Smith

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1St Edition edition (October 20, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300072171
• ISBN-13: 978-0300072174
• Product Dimensions: 11.6 x 8.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #352,736 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

N. John Hall is considered the world's leading authority on Anthony Trollope and Max Beerbohm. His books include "Trollope: A Biography" and "Max Beebohm: A Kind of Life." He twice has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York. Since 1967 he has lived in Greenwich Village.