Richard Doyle

LCNAF n79071133

Doyle, Richard (English illustrator, printmaker, and painter, 1824-1883)

Biography:

lustrator, printmaker and painter, son of (1) John Doyle. When only 16 years old he published the first of his Comic Histories, the Eglinton Tournament: Or, the Days of Chivalry Revived, a burlesque of medievalism, selected from among his rather more grotesque pen-and-ink juvenilia. The public success of these images assured Doyle of a ready demand for work throughout his career. In 1843 he joined the staff of Punch, but his graphic skills found little immediate outlet. At first Doyle contributed only peripheral elaborations—inventive headings, borders, initials and tail-pieces—possibly inspired by the Gothic Revival interest in medieval tracery and grotesquerie. Following the success of his Punch cover design in 1849, which was retained for over a hundred years, Doyle began the series Manners and Customs of ye Englyshe, in which, with a pared-down line nearly unshaded, he represented large gatherings. In A Cydere Cellare and Ye Commons the members of these masses are just differentiated, and modern life is quietly medievalized; the middle classes glance discreetly at other classes, their institutions and themselves. Although he was notoriously shy and often portrayed himself as a small, thin figure, eyes hidden under tousled hair, Doyle did not shrink from resigning from Punch when it opposed the papacy’s plans to establish a regular diocesan hierarchy in England in 1850.

Doyle’s ‘etched outline manner’ brought him further success with The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson (1854), a caricatured Grand Tour, and Bird’s Eye Views of Society (1861–3), in a slightly darker mood. Among the numerous works illustrated by Doyle, which include books by John Ruskin and Leigh Hunt, Thackeray’s The Newcomes (1854–5) represents the most sympathetic collaboration: a version of the domestic absurd that absorbed and extended Doyle’s style into elegant, denser vignettes. His fantasy was redirected in his oil and watercolour landscapes of outlying areas of Wales and Scotland, where his grotesques reappear as supernatural fairies amid mundane nature in such works as The Fairy Tree (exh. RA 1868). By the early 1880s, with The Triumphant Entry: A Fairy Pageant (Dublin, N.G.), such studied naivety had disappeared; here, several hundred little people, in a wide and hierarchic panorama, recall the structure of Doyle’s earlier pictures, which have influenced the forms, boundaries and stereotypes of modern caricature.

Bibliography

A. R. Montalba: The Doyle Fairy Book (London, 1890)

D. Hambourg: Richard Doyle: His Life and Work (London, 1948)

G. M. Trevelyan: The Seven Years of William IV: A Reign Cartooned by John Doyle (London, 1952)

R. Engen: Richard Doyle (Stroud, 1983)

Richard Doyle and his Family (exh. cat. by R. Engen, M. Heseltine and L. Lambourne, London, V&A, 1983–4)

Lewis Johnson

Lewis Johnson. "Doyle." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed October 6, 2015, http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2154/subscriber/article/grove/art/T023537pg2