Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 13.djvu/264

 was one of the things that in later life he forswore with as much emphasis as he forswore drinking, although he had been a smoker of forty years' standing.) There is a portrait of him after Frank Stone in the ‘Omnibus,’ 1841, engraved by C. E. Wagstaff. It is needless to particularise any other likeness save the one in coloured chalks by his friend Mill, which is said to have been his own favourite. His bust by Behnes is included in the Westminster collection. To characterise briefly the work of so productive and indefatigable a worker as Cruikshank is by no means easy. As a caricaturist he was the legitimate successor of Rowlandson and Gillray; but both the broad grin of the one and the satiric ferocity of the other were mitigated in their pupil by a more genial spirit of fun and an altered environment. In his more serious designs he never, to the day of his death, lost the indications of his lack of early academic training, although even as a man of sixty he was to be seen patiently drawing from the antique at Burlington House. His horses to the last were unendurable; his wasp-waisted women have been not inaptly compared to hour-glasses; and most of his figures suffer from that defect which Shakespeare made a beauty in Rosalind; they have ‘two pitch-balls stuck in their faces for eyes.’ That he was ‘cockney’ and even ‘vulgar’ at times is more the fault of his age than his talent, as any one may see who will take the trouble to consult the popular literature of fifty years ago when he was in his prime. But all these are trifling drawbacks contrasted with his unflagging energy, his inexhaustible fertility of invention, his wonderful gift of characterisation, and his ever-watchful sense of the droll, the fantastic, and the grotesque. On a far lower level than Hogarth, who was a moralist like himself, he sometimes comes near to him in tragic intensity. Many of his etchings are masterpieces of grouping (he managed crowds as well as Rowlandson, or the painter of the ‘March to Finchley’), and of skilful light and shade. His illustrations for books have always this advantage, that they are honest and generally effective attempts to elucidate the text, not nowadays an ever-present ambition to the popular artist; but, like many other original designers, he is at his best when he freely follows his own conceptions. Humorous art underwent considerable alterations during his long life, and the breach is wide between his immediate forerunners and the modern Caldecotts and du Mauriers. Yet, in his own line, Cruikshank fills the greater part of the gap almost without a rival, and the comic gallery of the first fifty years of the nineteenth century would be poorer for his absence.



CRUIKSHANK, ISAAC (1756?–1811?), caricaturist and water-colour painter, born about 1756, was the son of a lowlander, who at one time held an appointment in the custom-house at Leith, and after the disasters of the '45 took to art as a profession. Left an orphan at an early age Cruikshank also became an artist, earning a precarious subsistence as a book illustrator, water-colour painter, and political caricatu-