Max Beerbohm caricatures

Abstract

Max Beerbohm, foremost caricaturist of his day, was hailed by Times in 1913 as the greatest of English comic by Bernard Berenson as the English Goya, and by Edmund Wilson as the greatest...portrayer of personalities - in 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 past: Dante, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson,and Browning from 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.