Leech, JOHN

Leech, JOHN, humorous draughtsman, was born, of Irish descent, in London, 29th August 1817, his father, a cultured and excellent man, being landlord of the London Coffee House, Ludgate Hill. He was educated at the Charterhouse, where he was a fellow-pupil of Thackeray's, his friend throughout life, who at school was deemed the better caricaturist of the two, and who afterwards published an admirable estimate of Leech's art (Quarterly Review, December 1854). He next studied medicine and surgery, and during his attendance at St Bartholomew's Hospital his artistic skill found exercise in the production of anatomical drawings. Before long he adopted art as a profession, and at the age of eighteen published Etchings and Sketchings, by A. Pcn, Esq. About 1838 he was contributing to Bell's Life; and in the fourth number of Punch, 7th August 1841, we find his first contribution to the journal with which his name is most closely associated, and with which he was connected till the time of his death. The cartoons which he designed for Punch, especially those dealing with incidents in the political life of Lord Brougham, Lord Palmerston, and Lord John Russell, and the powerful and terrible 'Général Février turned Traitor,' are full of high qualities, and have been published separately. But even more delightful are the smaller woodcuts, drawn easily and freely, and dealing in gently humorous fashion with subjects of everyday life. In these, as it has been truly said, 'he has entered with genial sympathy into every phase of the many-sided English life of the hunting-field, the seaside, the ballroom, the drawing-room, and the nursery,' 'he has turned caricature into character, and left behind him not a little of the history of his time and its follies sketched with inimitable grace.' Various series of these designs have been collected in volumes entitled Pictures of Life and Character from the Collection of Mr Punch; and in 1862 a collection of them, enlarged by a mechanical process, and coloured by the artist himself in a combination of oil- and water-colours, was brought together in the Egyptian Hall, London, and formed an exceptionally popular exhibition. In the intervals of work for Punch Leech contributed much to other journals and publications, including woodcuts in Once a Week (1859-62) and The Illustrated London News (1856), in The Comic English and Latin Grammars (1840), Hood's Comic Annual (1842), Smith's Wassail Bowl (1843), A Little Tour in Ireland (1859); etchings in Bentley's Miscellany and Jerrold's Shilling Magazine, in the Christmas books of Dickens, the Comic History of England (1847-48), the Comic History of Rome (1852), and the Handley Cross sporting novels; and also drew several lithographed series, of which Portraits of the Children of the Mobility (1841) is the most important. At length the artist's health began to suffer from incessant overproduction, he fell into a state of nervous irritability and prostration, and died at Kensington, 29th October 1864. See Dr John Brown's John Leech (1882), F. G. Kitton's Biographical Sketch (1883), and the Life by W. P. Frith, R.A. (1891).