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Sir Max Beerbohm (1872-1956)

H.R.H. in the 'sixties. signed & dated 1921

Pencil and watercolour | 31.5 x 19.7 cm (whole object) | RCIN 917171

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  • Pencil and watercolour caricature of Edward VII when Prince of Wales holding a top hat by his side with a fashionable dressed woman in the background to the right.

    A central member of the ‘decadent’ artistic milieu of 1890s London which included Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm showed precocious talents as a caricaturist and writer, contributing to the Yellow Book while still an undergraduate at Oxford. He wrote brilliant literary parodies, and developed a form of graphic caricature reliant upon a high degree of physiognomic distortion. Beerbohm’s style owed little to previous conventions of the genre, and has continued to exert a strong influence.

    Although the majority of his subjects were artists and writers, Beerbohm returned frequently to the subject of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII; in fact the number of caricatures Beerbohm made of him is exceeded only by the number of self-caricatures he drew. This example is selected from a series of eight dating from 1921. The series begins with HRH in the forties and HRH in the fifties, showing the Prince first as a young boy studying a globe (prefiguring his later expeditions abroad), next as a youth chaperoned by two grim-faced schoolmasters; as the series progresses, the Prince is shown expanding steadily in girth, always with a different fashionably dressed woman in the background. The final watercolour of the series, A.E. in the teens shows a corpulent Edward VII (Albert Edward) playing a harp in heaven. Beerbohm’s fascination was with the Prince’s reputation as a bluff philistine who rejected the values of refinement and industry so firmly espoused by his parents, and whose principal interests lay in racing and womanising.

    When in 1923 this series was included in an exhibition of Beerbohm’s work at the Leicester Galleries in London, it provoked a scandal, partly because Beerbohm mischievously called his caricatures Proposed Illustrations for Sir Sidney Lee’s Forthcoming Biography. Lee, an eminent Shakespearan scholar and an editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, was writing the official biography of Edward VII at the request of King George V; this was published in two volumes, in 1925 and 1927. In reviews of Beerbohm’s exhibition the right-wing press responded furiously to what it perceived to be an attack on the monarchy; the Daily Chronicle declared it to be ‘The end of Max Beerbohm’, and another journal concluded that the artist must be ‘either a shameless bounder or a stealthy Bolshevist.’ Beerbohm, who decided to withdraw the pictures from the exhibition after the opening, described the furore in a letter to his friends William and Alice Rothenstein: ‘I had foreseen that these pictures would make the injudicious grieve; but I hadn’t guessed that the heathen would rage furiously together. As their rage (mostly simulated as it was, I suppose) seemed likely to infect the general public, and perhaps lead to ‘incidents’ in the Leicester Gallery, I decided to do what I did.’

    In his memoir of Beerbohm, S.N. Behrman records a conversation many years later in which the artist fancifully imagined his drawings in royal hands:

    ‘a series I did of Edward VII was bought by the Royal Family, don’t you know. It is not generally known, but they are at Windsor. The tenants keep them behind a panel in the drawing-room. I am told that when they have people they are cosy with, they take them out from behind the panel and show them. I hope that, unlike this lady on a historic occasion’ - he made a flicking gesture towards Queen Victoria - ‘they are amused.’

    In 1942 these watercolours were shown to Sir Owen Morshead by the director of the bookshop Bumpus, who was, as the Librarian put it, ‘anxious from patriotic motives that they should not fall into the wrong hands’. Acting on the advice of Morshead, Queen Elizabeth - who evidently was amused - purchased them for the Royal Library. In a letter of July 1943, just after the purchase of this group of drawings, Morshead wrote to her enclosing one of Beerbohm’s publications: ‘I think Your Majesty is one of the discerning people who would like to read this little pamphlet by Max Beerbohm, if it has not already come your way. Unfortunately it only takes 3/4 of an hour.’

    Catalogue entry adapted from Watercolours and Drawings from the Collection of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, London, 2005
    Provenance

    Gerard T. Meynell; purchased through Messers J. and E. Bumpus, June 1943

  • Medium and techniques

    Pencil and watercolour

    Measurements

    31.5 x 19.7 cm (whole object)

  • Other number(s)

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