Page:English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the nineteenth century.djvu/500

 boy to observe with watchful eye the leading features of the object before him, and then some little time after reproduce them from memory as nearly as he could. &hellip; He had no regular training in academy or school of art; he painted in the studio of no master save his father; and it is curious to see how his genius overleapt what would have been serious disadvantages to an ordinary man. &hellip; He attached himself to no school; he was not familiar, strange to say, with the masterpieces of foreign artists. He had never been in Paris, or Rome, or Vienna." It will be well for the reader to bear this in mind, because Doyle is one of the few book illustrators or etchers whom the professional art critic has condescended to notice, and it will enable him the better to understand and appreciate the soundness of his criticism. No one, we are told, owed less than Richard Doyle "did to those who had gone before him; and if this rendered his works less elaborate and conventional, it gave them a freshness and originality which might have been hampered if he had been forced into conformity with the accepted canons of the professional studio." The writer of the article from which we have quoted would seem to have read what Mr. Hodder has told us respecting his friend Kenny Meadows, for the following is certainly not new to us: "He was not a self-taught artist, for he was trained by one who had a genius kin to his own, but he was an artist who had never forced himself into the observance of those mechanical rules and canons which to ordinary men are necessary to their correct painting (just as rules of grammar are necessary to correct writing), but hamper and trammel the man of genius, who has in himself the fount whence such rules proceed, and instinctively follows them in the spirit, though not in the letter. So far as they will forward the end he has in view, and no farther." It will be seen by the above that the kindly writer gives Doyle credit for genius, and we who are strictly impartial will cheerfully admit that if he had not positive genius,—which we somewhat doubt,—he was certainly one of the most genial and graceful of comic designers.