His gentle satires therein have
been at the expense of all classes of the community. But his most
successful and best remembered jokes have perhaps been those which
depicted the unconscious humours of Cockney low life. His illustration
of "Precedence at Battersea," in which one small gutter-snipe struggles
with another for a cricket bat, indignantly declaring that "The
Treasurer goes in before the bloomin' Seketery," is by way of becoming
a classic. Equally clever is the study of a small boy, (reproduced on
page 27) whose "pomptiousness" on attaining the dignity of knickers
forms the subject of admiring comment from his mother to a friendly
curate: the mother herself being a wonderful study of low life.
In "Going It" (page 59) the artist harks back to the theme of
"freak-study," if such a term is permissible, the expressions on
the faces of the two figures exhibiting well his acute powers of
observation.
[Illustration]
As an illustrator of stories of a certain type, Frank Reynolds is
without an equal. On a tale of mere incident his talent is wasted:
but into the spirit of a writer who takes human nature for his text,
the artist enters with the keenest sympathy. One is tempted to think
that the author who is so fortunate as to have Frank Reynolds for a
collaborator, must on occasion be startled at the clear vision
with which the artist materialises the private conceptions of his
mind.
Pages:
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40