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.