Helping San Diego, California and beyond since 1997.
Do you need
volunteer, community service, work, military or court hours?
|
|
Helping San Diego, California and beyond since 1997.
|
|
Click here and add this page to your favorites!
|
Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: LAP-LEO |
|
|
LEECH, JOHN (1817-1864) , English caricaturist, was born in London on the 29th of August 1817. His father, a native of Ireland, was the landlord of the London Coffee House on Ludgate Hill, " a man," on the testimony of those who knew him, "of fine culture, a profound Shakespearian, and a thorough gentle-man." His mother was descended from the family of the famous Richard Bentley. It was from his father that Leech inherited his skill with the pencil, which he began to use at a very early age. When he was only three, he was discovered by Flaxman, who had called on his parents, seated on his mother's knee, drawing with much gravity. The sculptor pronounced his sketch to be wonderful, adding, " Do not let him be cramped with lessons in drawing; let his genius follow its own bent; he will astonish the world "an advice which was strictly followed. A mail-coach, done when he was six years old, is already full of surprising vigour and variety in its galloping horses. Leech was educated at Charterhouse, where Thackeray, his lifelong friend, was his schoolfellow, and at sixteen he began to study for the medical profession at St Bartholomew's Hospital, where he won praise for the accuracy and beauty of his anatomical drawings. He was then placed under a Mr Whittle, an eccentric practitioner, the original
studies from the London streets. Then. he drew some political lithographs, did rough sketches for Bell's Life, produced an exceedingly popular parody on Mulready's postal envelope, and, on the death of Seymour, applied unsuccessfully to illustrate the Pickwick Papers. In 184o Leech began his contributions to the magazines with a series of etchings in Bentley's Miscellany, where Cruikshank had published his splendid plates to Jack Sheppard and Oliver Twist, and was illustrating Guy Fawkes in sadly feebler fashion. In company with the elder master Leech designed for the Ingoldsby Legends and Stanley Thorn, and till 1847 produced many independent series of etchings. These cannot be ranked with his best work; their technique is exceedingly imperfect; they are rudely bitten, with the light and shade out of relation; and we never feel that they express the artist's individuality, the Richard Savage plates, for instance, being strongly reminiscent of Cruikshank, and " The Dance at Stamford Hall
doctor
Turning to Leech's lithographic work, we have, in 1841, the Portraits of the Children of the Mobility, an important series dealing with the humorous and pathetic aspects of London street Arabs, which were afterwards so often and so effectively to employ the artist's pencil. Amid all the squalor which they depict, they are full of individual beauties in the delicate or touching expression of a face, in the graceful turn of a limb. The book is scarce in its original
Caudle , personated by Brougham, disturbing by untimely loquacity the slumbers of the lord chancellor, whose haggard cheek rests on the woolsack for pillow .But it was in work for the wood-engravers that Leech was most prolific and individual. Among the earlier of such designs are the illustrations to the Comic English and Latin Grammars (184o), to Written Caricatures (1841), to Hood's Comic Annual, (1842), and to Albert Smith's Wassail Bowl (1843), subjects mainly of a small vignette size, transcribed with the best skill of such woodcutters as Orrin Smith, and not, like the larger and later Punch illustrations, cut at speed by several engravers working at once on the subdivided block
standing
In 1862 Leech appealed to the public with a very successful exhibition of some of the most remarkable of his Punch drawings. These were enlarged by a mechanical process, and coloured in oils by the artist himself, with the assistance and under the direction of his friend J. E. Millais. Leech was a singularly rapid and indefatigable worker. Dean Hole tells us, when he was his guest, " I have known him send off from my house three finished drawings on the wood, designed, traced, and rectified, without much effort as it seemed, between breakfast and dinner." The best technical qualities of Leech's art, his unerring precision, his unfailing vivacity in the use of the line, are seen most clearly in the first sketches for his woodcuts, and in the more finished drawings made on tracing-paper from these first outlines, before the chiaroscuro was added and the designs were transcribed by the engraver. Turning to the mental qualities of his art, it would be a mistaken criticism which ranked him as a comic draughtsman. Like Hogarth he was a true humorist, a student of human life, though he observed humanity mainly in its whimsical aspects, " Hitting all he saw with shafts With gentle satire, kin to charity, That harmed not." The earnestness and gravity of moral purpose which is so constant a note in the work of Hogarth is indeed far less characteristic of Leech, but there are touches of pathos and of tragedy in such of the Punch designs as the " Poor Man's Friend " (1845), and " General Fevrier turned Traitor " (1855), and in " The Queen of the Arena " in the first volume of Once a Week, which are sufficient to prove that more solemn powers, for which his daily work afforded no scope, lay dormant in their artist. The purity and manliness of Leech's own character are impressed on his art. We find in it little of the exaggeration and grotesqueness, and none of the fierce political enthusiasm, of which the designs of Gillray are so full. Compared with that of his great contemporary George Cruikshank, his work is restricted both in compass of subject and in artistic dexterity. Biographies of Leech have been written by John Brown (1882), and Frith (1891) ; see also " John Leech's Pictures of Life and Character," by Thackeray, Quarterly Review (December 1854) ; letter by John Ruskin, Arrows of the Chace, vol. i. p. 161; " Un Humoriste Anglais," by Ernest Chesneau, Gazette des Beaux Arts (1875). (J. M. G.)End of Article: LEECH, JOHN (1817-1864) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
<a href="http://jcsm.org/StudyCenter/Encyclopedia/LAP_LEO/LEECH_JOHN_1817_1864_.html"> LEECH, JOHN (1817-1864) </a> |
|
|
(Previous) LEECH |
(Next) LEEDS |
|
Sponsored Advertisements