Randolph Caldecott: A Personal Memoir of His Early Art Career. Blackburn Henry
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career, it should be recorded that at this time, and ever afterwards, Mr. Armstrong, the present Art Director at the South Kensington Museum, was his best friend and counsellor.[2] He had also the advantage of the friendship of George du Maurier, M. Dalou, the sculptor, Charles Keene, Albert Moore, and others.
On the 8th June he records, "A. urged me to prepare caricatures of people well known," probably with the view of making drawings for periodicals.
Several drawings of Caldecott's were under consideration by the proprietors of Punch, and on the 22nd June, 1872, the first appeared.
In the same month he exhibited a frame of four small sepia drawings at the Black and White Exhibition, Egyptian Hall, London.
On the 28th June his diary records, "in the gallery of the House of Commons attending the debate on the Ballot Bill;" and again on the 8th July. On the 9th he is "engaged on chalk caricatures all day."
A letter dated 21st July, 1872, to one of his Manchester friends is worth having for the ludicrous sketch accompanying it. He writes:—
"London is of course the proper place for a young man, for seeing the manners and customs of society, and for getting a living in some of the less frequented grooves of human labour, but for a residence give me a rural or marine retreat. I sigh for some 'cool sequestered spot, the world forgetting, by the world forgot.'"
About this time it was suggested to him to illustrate a book of summer travel, and on the 20th August 1872 he enters in his diary:—
"To Rotterdam, Harzburg, &c., to join Mr. and Mrs. B. in the Harz Mountains."
This was the first book that Caldecott illustrated;[3] the title suggested was "A Tour in the Toy Country," and before leaving London he made the drawing on the preceding page. Caldecott, being then twenty-six, started on this journey with great readiness. The idea was altogether delightful to him; and here, as in every country he visited in after years, his playful fancy and facility for seizing the grotesque side of things stood him in good stead.
In a strange land, amidst unfamiliar scenes and faces, he roamed "fancy free"; in a country so compact in size that the whole could be traversed in a month's walking tour.
With Baedeker's Guide (English edition) in his pocket, and a dialogue book of sentences in German and English, he used to delight to interrogate the wondering natives; the necessary questions difficult to find, and "the elaborate and quite unnecessary" (as he expressed it), always turning up. Such little incidents gave opportunity to the observant artist to study the faces of the listeners; the interviews conducted slowly and gravely, and ending in a peal of laughter from the natives.
Life at a German watering-place, as seen on a small scale in summer in the Harz mountains, was Caldecott's first experience of scenes with which his name afterwards became familiar in the pages of the Graphic newspaper. In looking at these early sketches we must bear in mind that they were made at a time when Caldecott, as an "artist," was scarcely two years old; that although his sense of humour was overflowing, his hand was comparatively untrained; that with his keen eye for the grotesque he turned his back upon much that was beautiful about him, that his sense of the fitness of things, of the requirements of composition and the like, were in embryo, so to speak.
Nevertheless, as indicated in the next few pages he has left us work which, if ever a more complete life of Caldecott should be written, would form an important chapter in his art career.
Although little fitted for a mountaineer, he could not resist excursions to the highest points, and with a will which surmounted all difficulties, reached one evening the summit of the famous "Brocken." What he saw is recorded in the sketch below.
There is a legend that when the deluge blotted out man from most parts of the earth, the waters of the northern seas penetrated far into Germany, and that the enormous rock which forms the top of the Brocken formed a shelter and resting-place.
There was no need of a romantic legend to suggest to the mind, at the first sight of the primitive hostelry on the top of the Brocken, its similitude to the "ark of refuge." The situation was delightful; we were in the "toy country" without doubt. There was the identical form of packing-case which the religious world has with one consent provided as a plaything for children; there were Noah and his family, people walking two and two, and horses sheep, pigs, and goats stowed away at the great side door.
The resemblance was irresistible, and more attractive to Caldecott's mind than any of the legends and mysteries with which German imagination has peopled the district.
There is "no holding" Caldecott now; on the "Hexen Tanzplatz," the sacred ground of Goethe's poetic fancy, within sound almost of the songs of the spirit world that haunt this lonely summit, he sets to work.
The dance of witches, so weird and terrible, (as lately seen on the Lyceum stage in Henry Irving's production of Faust) took a different form in the young artist's eyes, whose fancy sketch from the Hexen Tanzplatz is reproduced opposite. He had been properly "posted," as he expressed it, he had read all that should be read about ghosts, witches, and spectres, and the result is before us. The last sketch from the dreary summit, showing the patient tourists waiting to see the view, was all we could get from him of spectres of the Brocken.
One or two sketches of the interior of his Noah's ark, when some sixty travellers had assembled to supper, completed his subjects.
It may be noted that the feeling for landscape which Caldecott possessed in after years in such a high degree, if it touched him here, was not recorded in pencil. The magnificent scenery eastward through the valley of the River Bode, the grim iron foundries and ochre mines, and the wonderful view from the heights above Blankenberg, familiar to all travellers in the Harz, was recorded in only two sketches; one of a roadside inn, where we were invited to stay, the other of two tourists en route.
How,