Alfred Crowquill

Artist Info

Alfred CrowquillLondon, 1804 - 1872, London

Alfred Crowquill (LCNAF n82228293) pseudonym for Alfred Henry Forrester (LCNAF n83146707)

http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/crowquill/cooke.html

Forrester, Alfred Henry [pseud. Alfred Crowquill] (1804–1872), illustrator and writer, was born in London on 10 September 1804, the second son of Robert Forrester of 5 North Gate, Royal Exchange, London, a wealthy City of London notary. He was educated at a private school in Islington, London. His elder brother, Charles Robert Forrester (1803–1850), was a lawyer and writer, and both brothers collaborated on literary ventures under the name Alfred Crowquill (literally the quill taken from a crow for writing and drawing). Alfred assumed the pseudonym for himself before his brother's death.

Crowquill began to draw caricatures before 1822, and as a talented amateur fully entered into the great age of the separately issued print. After literary contributions to The Hive in 1822, and to the editor John Timbs's The Mirror in 1823, he studied drawing, wood-engraving, and etching on steel and collaborated with George Cruikshank as engraver on a Freischütz travesty (1824) by Septimus Geobus (J. A. Apel) and on W. F. von Kosewitz's Eccentric Tales (1827). He achieved some fame with his single prints Beauties of Brighton (1825) and Dover Coach 5 O'Clock Morning, which show strong characterizations. He explored the follies of fashion and the court in A Trump, a Court Card (1828), satirizing the duchess of St Albans; The Great Humming Top (1829), featuring Baron M. A. Rothschild; and Bull Broke Loose (August 1832), a Reform Bill print, which was unusually a lithograph. Elsewhere he showed a liking for grammatical personifications and puns. On 10 March 1838 he married Mary Saunders at St Dunstan and All Saints, Stepney, London.

With the shift from the printseller to pictorial journalism in the 1840s, Crowquill found work on Bentley's Miscellany (1840–41) and in Punch's early numbers from 1842 to 1844, including some cartoons. But M. H. Spielmann says that his appearance in Punch was ‘sought after at a time when comic artists were few’ (Spielmann, 450). He was very soon outclassed by the likes of John Leech and John Tenniel. He contributed full-page figure subjects to the Illustrated London News Christmas supplements between 1844 and 1870, but not regularly. Although not a first-rate artist, he drew competent genre subjects, filling sketchbooks and exhibiting four pen-and-ink works at the Royal Academy in 1845 and 1846. He was also an occasional painter in oils.

During the 1840s Crowquill issued a number of comic books written and illustrated by himself, of which good examples are A. Crowquill's Guide to the Watering Places (1839), Sketches of Pumps, Handled by R. Cruikshank with some Temperate Spoutings by A. Crowquill (1846), A Missile for Papists! (1850), and A bundle of crowquills, dropped by A. Crowquill in his eccentric flights over the fields of literature (1854). He illustrated works by Henry Cockton and Cuthbert Bede and was ‘understudy’ in works illustrated by the great names John Leech and H. K. Browne (Phiz), notably the former's Comic Latin Grammar (1840) and the latter's Merry Pictures (1857). He collaborated with both Richard Doyle and Leech in The Book of Ballads by Bon Gaultier (1845).

After 1860, when burlesque books were less popular, Crowquill devoted much of his time to children's books, which he both wrote and illustrated. The Times obituarist noted that ‘Among other things he could dash off a little tale with much humour, infuse spirit into a song, and win all the attention of children by such works as the Careless Chicken and Fairy Footsteps’ (31 May 1872). Basing his anthropomorphic animals on the styles and themes of his great French contemporary Grandville, he brought to scenes a particularly British element, even if his illustrations were less incisive. But contemporary audiences applauded him—‘Human arrogance scowled in his lions, feminine conceit strutted in his ostriches, impertinent coxcombry appeared in his monkeys, craftiness governed the expression in the eye of his wolves and foxes to a remarkable degree’ (ibid.). He issued nearly thirty of these delightful titles between 1839 and 1870, and one, The Pictorial Grammar, was reprinted posthumously in 1875.

Forrester's versatility extended to stage scenery and many pantomimes and transformation scenes were enlivened by his inventions. He was also a skilled modeller, producing a statuette of the duke of Wellington in 1851, which he presented to Queen Victoria a fortnight before the duke's death. That same year he exhibited at the Great Exhibition a porcelain statuette of a child leading a lion on a floral halter. He turned his virtuosity to designing book covers for Messrs Routledge in the 1860s and adapted himself to the new trade and fashion for Christmas cards in the 1870s. A frame of his drawings was shown at the important exhibition ‘English humorists in art’, at the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in June 1889 (no. 1384). Examples of his works on paper, including the watercolour for the Beauties of Brighton (1825), are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Crowquill suffered from heart disease for eight years and died on 26 May 1872 at his home, 3 Portland Place North, Clapham Road, London. He was buried at Norwood cemetery, London, on 31 May. His wife survived him. A surviving photograph shows a powerful man with a rather Roman head and fine beard. A contemporary wrote of Forrester: ‘If not a genius, the man was talented and clever—a universal favourite. He could draw, he could write, he was an admirable vocalist, setting the table in a roar with his medley of songs’ (Everitt, 370).

Simon Houfe

Sources

G. Everitt, English caricaturists and graphic humourists of the nineteenth century, 2nd edn (1893) · M. H. Spielmann, The history of ‘Punch’ (1895) · R. L. Patten, George Cruikshank's life, times, and art, 1 (1992), 258–9 · Exhibition of the works of the English humorists in art (1889) [exhibition catalogue, Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, London] · S. Houfe, The dictionary of 19th century British book illustrators and caricaturists, rev. edn (1996) · English caricature, 1620 to the present: caricaturists and satirists, their art, their purpose and influence, V&A (1984) [exhibition catalogue, Yale U. CBA, L. Cong., the National Library of Canada, Ottawa, and the V&A, London, 1984] · J. I. Whalley and T. R. Chester, A history of children's book illustration (1988) · M. Bryant and S. Heneage, Dictionary of British cartoonists and caricaturists, 1730–1980 (1994) · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1872) · d. cert. · The Times (31 May 1872) · ‘Forrester, Charles Robert’, DNB · parish register (marriage), Stepney, St Dunstan and All Saints, 10 March 1838