Recent work for Sugaronline
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
Wednesday, 8 June 2011
The weird world of George du Maurier
George du Maurier isn’t really all that fashionable anymore, which makes a change because during his heyday he was very fashionable indeed. His cartoons reflect this – they show the Victorian upper classes going about their lives in their big dresses and starched collars, obsessing about polite society and the gentle absurdity of it all. In du Maurier’s cartoons the lower classes hardly get a look in (social realism this ain’t).
The captions to his cartoons are hardly pithy – the can stretch to hundreds of characters – but they are witty and, in the main, humane. One aspect of his work that doesn’t really get recognised is his fantastic imagination, by which I mean the visionary, often surreal, quality to some of his work.
These comic pages from 1866 give a good example of this, as well as possibly giving a glimpse of the artist’s home life as well. In it our hero Tom Tit (du Maurier) meets and marries a giantess, who saves him from being attacked by a bull. What follows is a series of comic incidents taking their humour from the awkwardness of Victorian living when your wife is 10’ tall, including the giant wife riding an elephant on Rotten Row and carrying her drunken husband from lunch at the Punch table (surrounded by du Maurier’s contemporaries at Punch).
The giantess is quite an opaque character but I sense real warmth for her and the family which makes me think they are based on du Maurier’s own. He’s kind of like a reverse Robert Crumb in his depiction of powerful women – but where Crumb fetishises their bodies here du Maurier uses their size and power as a symbol of his love and affection.
Not really very fashionable at all.
The captions to his cartoons are hardly pithy – the can stretch to hundreds of characters – but they are witty and, in the main, humane. One aspect of his work that doesn’t really get recognised is his fantastic imagination, by which I mean the visionary, often surreal, quality to some of his work.
These comic pages from 1866 give a good example of this, as well as possibly giving a glimpse of the artist’s home life as well. In it our hero Tom Tit (du Maurier) meets and marries a giantess, who saves him from being attacked by a bull. What follows is a series of comic incidents taking their humour from the awkwardness of Victorian living when your wife is 10’ tall, including the giant wife riding an elephant on Rotten Row and carrying her drunken husband from lunch at the Punch table (surrounded by du Maurier’s contemporaries at Punch).
The giantess is quite an opaque character but I sense real warmth for her and the family which makes me think they are based on du Maurier’s own. He’s kind of like a reverse Robert Crumb in his depiction of powerful women – but where Crumb fetishises their bodies here du Maurier uses their size and power as a symbol of his love and affection.
Not really very fashionable at all.
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