Charles Samuel Keene

Artist Info

Charles Samuel KeeneLondon, 1823 - 1891, London

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n85273359

Keene, Charles Samuel (1823–1891), illustrator and etcher, was born in Duvals Lane, Hornsey, Middlesex, on 10 August 1823, one of the sons of Samuel Browne Keene (d. 1838), a solicitor of Furnival's Inn, London, and Ipswich, and Mary Sparrow (d. 1881), the daughter of John Sparrow of the old Ipswich family of Sparrow's House, Buttermarket. He was educated in London and at the grammar school in Foundation Street, Ipswich, and on leaving it in 1839 he entered his father's old office. Finding the law uncongenial and actively encouraged to draw by his mother, he entered the employ of the architect William J. Pilkington of Scotland Yard. This was found no more satisfactory and about 1842 he left to be apprenticed to Messrs Whymper Brothers, the celebrated wood-engravers. It has always been considered that the wood-engraving studio was beneficial to his work, imposing a professionalism and discipline which many other illustrators lacked. However, in a letter to his illustrator nephew in 1871, he asserted, ‘I don't think drawing on wood is a good road to stand on as an artist’, adding ‘This is how I began, and have been sorry for it ever since’ (J. A. Hammerton, Humorists of the Pencil, 1905, 132).

Keene must have begun to work as an independent illustrator while still at Whympers; his frontispiece to The Adventures of Dick Boldero is dated 1842 and was engraved by J. D. Cooper, a fellow apprentice with whom he collaborated. At the end of his apprenticeship he produced designs for his first major book, The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1847), very much under the influence of John Tenniel and John Gilbert. He was employed to work up sketches by Samuel Read for the Illustrated London News in 1853 and he prepared subjects on Sevastopol for Messrs Dickinsons' publications during the Crimean War. Keene began to contribute to Punch anonymously in 1851, though he signed with his initials from 1854, but he did not join the Punch ‘Table’ until 1860. In 1864, following the death of John Leech, he succeeded to his place as chief social cartoonist. He contributed regularly to the magazine for the next thirty years but remained somewhat detached from the ‘Table’, eschewing the radical politics of his older colleagues as well as the social ambitions of the younger ones. Never a humorous draughtsman, but a draughtsman of humorous situations, he chose to illustrate the comedy of the street and the country, usually leaving the drawing-room to George Du Maurier. He relied heavily for subjects on his friend Joseph Crawhall (1821–1896), who supplied him with albums of incidents! His collected Punch work appeared as a volume, Our People, in 1881.

Keene's fine line and skill with gradations of colour in sepia, achieved with his home-made pens and self-mixed inks, made him a more serious artist than some of his Punch contemporaries. This is apparent in his illustrations of fiction in Punch's sister paper Once a Week in which he illustrated stories by George Meredith and Mrs Henry Wood. The same vivid and intense interpretation of nineteenth-century life is found in his pages and vignettes for Herbert Vaughan's The Cambridge Grisette (1862), the original drawings for which are masterpieces of Victorian sensitivity.

Keene's stylistic development can be divided into four phases: the first youthful drawings when he was influenced by Tenniel; the early magazine work when he was inspired by German illustration, particularly that of Adolph Menzel; a strong debt to the Pre-Raphaelite illustrators in the 1860s; and finally a triumphant attempt in the 1880s to bend traditional black and white work towards atmosphere and mood. His Germanic style can be seen in the pages of Charles Reade's ‘A Good Fight’ in Once a Week (1859), while his last Punch contribution, ‘Arry on the Boulevards’ (15 August 1890), reflects a loose treatment akin to contemporary French artists such as Jean-Louis Forain. Keene was unique among his confrères in having an international reputation among artists, admired by such diverse figures as Whistler, Menzel, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro.

Keene worked as an etcher from the 1870s but published few of his plates, mainly landscapes and figures, regarding the results as a mere hobby. Through his contact with the etcher Edwin Edwards, his etched work reached a wider circle. Mrs Edwards printed his plates and entered his works for the Paris Exhibition in 1889, where they won a gold medal.

From early manhood Keene lived a life apart as an eccentric bachelor, accommodated in London in various dilapidated rooms and lodgings often separated from a permanent studio. He moved from an attic above the Strand to Clipstone Street, then to 55 Baker Street, 11 Queen's Road, west Chelsea, and King's Road, Chelsea. In each of these addresses he surrounded himself with a jumble of artistic props, books, flints, and memorabilia, cooking meat to a cinder on an open fire. He had musical talent, joined a group of round singers, and learned to play the Northumbrian bagpipes with considerable competence, featuring them in some of his Punch jokes.

A tall, gangling figure in untidy clothes, Keene would frequently walk between Chelsea and the West End with a haversack and with his favourite clay pipe between his teeth filled with dottles—a lethal blend of used quids which helped him to draw! Domiciled in London, he took a cottage at Witley, Surrey, for some years, but his spiritual home was undoubtedly Suffolk, where he spent long holidays in rented rooms. He was an observer who liked to draw from nature in country and town. Even in late middle age he regularly attended the weekly life class at the Langham Sketch Club. He was a considerable antiquary, able letter-writer, and something of an intellectual, which accounted for his close friendship with the poet Edward FitzGerald at Woodbridge, Suffolk.

Keene's excessive smoking and poor diet led to the gradual onset of heart disease in 1890 and he died at his home, 112 Hammersmith Road, London, on 4 January 1891; he was buried in Hammersmith cemetery, attended by all his Punch friends. He left over £30,000, a sum which astonished his friends but included an annuity for his servant.

Simon Houfe

Sources

G. S. Layard, The life and letters of Charles Keene (1892) · J. Pennell, The work of Charles Keene with an introduction and comments on the drawings illustrating the artist's methods (1897) [bibliography of bks and catalogue of essays] · D. Hudson, Charles Keene (1947) · S. Houfe, Charles Keene (1991) [exhibition catalogue, Christies] · S. Houfe, The work of Charles Samuel Keene (1995) · F. L. Emanuel, Charles Keene, etcher, draughtsman and illustrator, 1823–1891 (1932) · F. Reid, ‘Charles Keene, illustrator’, Print Collector's Quarterly, 17 (1930), 23–47 · M. H. Spielmann, The history of ‘Punch’ (1895) · M. H. Spielmann, ‘Introduction’, in Twenty-one etchings by Charles Keene (1903) · Catalogue of the works of Charles Keene, Fine Art Society (1891) · Arts Council, Drawings by Charles Keene (1952) · Catalogue of the Lindsay collection of drawings by Charles Keene (1952) [exhibition catalogue, Leicester Galleries, London] · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1891) · Henry Silver diary, Punch Library and Archives, London