Product Description

This delightful book is an anthology of Beerbohm`s best images, accompanied by historical and analytical commentary by N. John Hall that is enriched by liberal quotation from Beerbohm`s own witty essays, criticism, letters, and fiction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1744826 in Books
• Published on: 1997-10-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Review
"The incomparable Max" was indeed incomparable--a writer of wit, charm, and originality, and a caricaturist with an "unfailing eye for the centre of a situation" and a "gift for fixing it in a memorably comic form." The collection of drawings presented by Mr. Hall covers Beerbohm's field of victims thoroughly. Authors, artists, actors, politicians, and royalty were all his targets. The text and notes are well written (exceptionally so for the art-book genre) and reinforced by quotations from Max and his highly articulate contemporaries. Max gave up cartooning by 1942, because, he explained, "I began to remember people more or less exactly as they were, and was obliged to put in the exaggerations consciously." An earlier description of his methods emphasized memory, not direct vision, as the basis of his resolutely unrealistic art. "I cannot," he wrote a friend, "imagine a worse thing befalling anyone than to see the streets peopled with my creations. It has never befallen me." The late drawings from the years shortly before Max "laid aside" his pencil show clearly what had happened. The subjects are recognizable, but they are no longer victims. The gadfly had lost his sting, and Max, a sound critic, knew it. But in his heyday he gave wonderfully effective and amusing jabs that can still draw a chuckle. -- The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe-Lou Adams

Hall's witty commentary is supplemented by Beerbohm's own prose as well as contemporary observations by the likes of Virginia Woolf and E. F. Benson.... More entertaining than conventional histories of the period, Hall's collection animates an era of eccentrics, many of whose priceless peculiarities would, but for Beerbohm, have been erased by time. -- The New York Times Book Review, Sarah Harrison Smith