W H Chesson

George Cruikshank W H Chesson

The artist who drew Napoleon week by week, with all the vulgar insolence which only a great man's contemporaries can display towards him, was the same who, half a century after the Emperor's death, produced a conception of the "Leader of the Parisian Blood Red Republic of 1870." The artist who, in the last year of the reign of George the Third, depicted Thistlewood's lair in Cato Street, drew also, as though with "a mother's tender care," almost every pane in that glass palace which the trees of Hyde Park inhabited in 1851. Before the punctuality of his interest in everything new that rose to the surface to obliterate an expiring mode or event, we stand astonished. It is not so much as an artist that we here admire him.