Charles Keene a Victorian artist with "Punch"

One of my favourite artist biographies is George Layard's  Life and Letters of Charles Keene of Punch.
It came out in 1892-the year after the artist's death. This portrays the artist as an obsessive collector: of old music,  antiquities and so on. Keene played the bagpipes and the smaller, sweeter, Northumbrian pipes. His correspondence with the remarkable Joseph Crawhall II of Newcastle is most enjoyable. Crawhall was an interesting artist in his own right and loaned  his ideas book to Keene, thus helping furnish him with ideas for cartoons. Keene incidentally was a fervent Tory but was always uneasy about doing political cartoons. His illustrations deal with social and artistic situations.

As an artist Keene was appreciated by artists such as Pissarro and Menzel. High praise indeed, especially when coming from Menzel who was one of the most brilliant and prolific draughtsmen of the C19.

 In Keene we value his, literally, keen observation of gesture and pose and of the fall of light on clothing.

A father remonstrates with his son and comes of worst.

He drew on any scraps of paper which came to hand and sometimes with improvised, home-made implements. Here are two of his gently satirical drawings from Tate Britain.The first shows what is probably a variation on the perennial theme of the landscape painter who has to deal with naive or irritating observers. Daumier did many drawings on this theme and Keene like Daumier did not make up his own captions.

In the second drawing we have what could be described  as "the superior servant theme". The scene is a railway station or ferry terminal and the gent leaning on the post perhaps the coachman- is so impressed with his own importance that he doesn't want to get involved with dealing with the luggage-the lower servants can do that.He most certainly doesn't want to soil his uniform. His mistress on the left seems slightly agitated or concerned but he isn't bothered.

Imagine Keene's  studio full of props and costumes and also including mirrors used to study a pose or expression-for he used himself as a model. There would usually be a fug of pipe tobacco, smoked and resmoked. (He also collected old-clay pipes). By now, if you did not already know, you may have guessed that he remained a bachelor throughout his life. His after-work amusements included membership of choirs and glee-clubs. Keene loved to sing.  

decorated easter eggs.

I recently found a box of Easter Eggs which I had decorated long ago in my salad days. Some were painted and with others I  used a mixture of resist and scratching into the surface. But the egg I was most pleased to find was the  dyed egg made in the traditional Northumbrian manner. It is illustrated here and I will tell you how it was made.

The technique is very simple. Layers of vegetable material are wrapped in a small parcel of cloth which is tied up, loosely with thread, string or wool and then boiled for 40 to 60 minutes. During this time the colour from the plant material should transfer to the egg. It may be that any small flowers which are held nearest the egg will act only as a resist or stencil effect. In any case the beauty is in the accidental design and this is what I like about the technique. Do not try this if you do not like the creative accident.

In the past the cloth wrapper might have been made from material which was dyed with non-fast colours and this would have added to the decorative possibilities. If you have similar material  then go ahead and use it.

One of the problems with this technique is that it is quite hard nowadays to find a light coloured egg which will show the effect to advantage. It  seems that all eggs are now designed to be brown as customers believe that this suggests health/quality. In fact I  probably wouldn't  use the onion skin  medium unless I could find a white or very pale shelled  egg. You can see here the red/orange colour you get with onion skins which doesn't show up clearly against the brown of the egg shell

I learned this method of dyeing eggs from my Granny. Eggs were sometimes rubbed very lightly with butter to enhance the colour effect.

What sort of plant material can you use?  The traditional  choice is onion skins as an envelope within which there can be seasonal flowers. In Northumberland this could be the yellow whinn. Some have said that spinach will give a green effect- but it did not work for me. You can also use old tea leaves or coffee grounds to colour the water. I used leather dye in the egg shown below. It was a recent experiment.

Coloring eggs at Easter is common throughout Europe. In some cases the folk designs are bold patterns but their symmetry is not for me.

When I made the old eggs I blew some of them-the painted ones- as some boys used to do when collecting eggs. The eggs which were boiled can survive with careful handling and will not smell unless they are broken . After a few years you will have a shell with a dried up egg rattling around inside it. Break the egg then and it will smell  odd.