Cruikshank, GEORGE

Cruikshank, GEORGE, one of the most gifted of English pictorial satirists, was born in London, September 27, 1792, the son of Isaac Cruikshank, who, as well as his eldest son, Isaac Robert Cruikshank, was also known as a caricaturist. Cruikshank at first thought of the stage as a profession; but some of his sketches having come under the notice of a publisher, he was induced to engage in the illustration of children's books and songs. A publication, The Scourge (1811-16), afforded scope for the display of his satiric genius, and from that time forth he continued to pursue with remarkable success this his true vein. His illustrations for Hone's political squibs and pamphlets, and especially those dealing with the Queen Caroline trial, attracted much attention, and sent some of them through no less than fifty editions. But in the exquisite series of coloured etchings contributed to the Humorist (1819-21), and in the etchings to the Points of Humour (1823-24), did his true artistic power begin to be visible. This second, and in many ways finest, period of his art, represented by these works, culminated in the etchings to Peter Schlemihl (1823), and to Grimm's German Popular Stories (1824-26), which in the simple directness and effectiveness of their execution, and in their fertile and unencumbered fancy, rank as the artist's masterpieces. The latter series, now extremely scarce, was reproduced in 1868, with a laudatory preface from the pen of Mr Ruskin. Similar in artistic aims and method are the spirited little woodcuts contributed to the Italian Tales (1824), Mornings at Bow Street (1824-27), and Clark's Three Courses and a Dessert (1830); and the plates to Scott's Demonology and Witchcraft (1830) may be regarded as the last examples of his earlier and simpler method as an etcher. His numerous plates in Bentley's Miscellany mark a third period of his art, in which he aimed at greater elaboration and completeness, introducing more complex effects of chiar-oscuro, and frequently attaining great power of tragic design. The finest of these are the great series to Dickens's Oliver Twist, and to Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard in Bentley's Miscellany, and The Tower of London, and in the same class are to be ranked the plates to Windsor Castle, and The Miser's Daughter, of which, as of Oliver Twist, he thirty years afterwards claimed the chief authorship. Among the best productions of his later years are the large and elaborate etchings to Brough's Life of Sir John Falstaff, published in 1858. His last illustration was the frontispiece to Mrs Blewitt's The Rose and the Lily (1877), 'Designed and etched by George Cruikshank, aged eighty-three, 1875.' As a water-colourist he left work marked by considerable skill and delicacy. In his late years he devoted himself to oil-painting, and in this province showed perhaps more humour, fervour, and inventive ability than artistic power. His most important picture was 'Worship of Bacchus' (1862), which has been engraved partly by his own hand, a vigorous and earnest protest against the evils of drunkenness; and to the cause of temperance he also devoted many of his designs, especially the tragic and powerful series of The Bottle (1847), which, reproduced by glyptography, attained an immense circulation. He died 1st February 1878. There are excellent collections of his works in the print-room, British Museum; the Royal Aquarium, Westminster; and the South Kensington Museum. The last named, presented in 1884 by the artist's widow, numbers 3481 items. See G. W. Reid's Catalogue (3 vols. 1871), and Lives by Bates (2d ed. 1879), Jerrold (2d ed. 1883), and Stephens (1891); and Marchmont's The Three Cruikshanks (1897).