failing, it is lack of
humour. We poor caricaturists know that; but we also know that whereas
women can compete side by side with painters on the line of the Royal
Academy, we are not honoured by even a failure in caricature.

It is curious how clever lady artists become when they happen to be the
wives of successful painters, but it is a significant fact that while
all writers seem to agree that marriage is the cause of obliterating
artistic ambition in women, it has in many cases been the birth of
genius; and while domestic companionship with an artist will make a
woman a painter, no caricaturist has ever succeeded in making his wife
a humorist in art, and I shall ask Mr. Sterry what he means by placing
"graphic caricature" on a par with "knocked-off" pretty water-colours
and the weak studies of flowers by lady amateurs. Mr. Sterry is an
artist himself, and this disparagement of a most difficult and most
unique art fully qualifies him to be a member of the Royal Academy.

[Illustration: EARLY VICTORIAN ART.]

At the beginning of the Victorian Era art was at its lowest ebb. The
young lady students of the period were copying those impossible
lithographed heads which formed the stock-in-trade of the
drawing-master, or those fashion-plate Venuses whose necks recalled the
proportions of the giraffe, with the eyelashes of a wax doll, and
fingers that tapered off like the point of a pencil. These sirens of the
drawing-board were invariably smelling a rose or kissing a canary, and
always had a weakness for pearls. They used to be drawn upon tinted
paper, and when the faces had been duly smeared over with the stump to
suggest shadow, and after the drawing-master had endowed the work with
artistic merit by the application of white chalk to the high lights, the
pearls, the canary's eyes, and the pathetic tear-drops upon the damsels'
faces, the immortal productions were ready for framing. The giraffe or
swan-necked angel was the keynote for all ideal work, and even the
recognised artists of those days, with one or two brilliant exceptions,
followed in her train.

Now she rushes into a large oil picture--perhaps a portrait of her
brother in riding costume, _et hoc genus omne_. These are caricatures,
but, like many of the pictures on the walls of the Royal Academy, they
are unconscious ones.

As I am writing about the failure or success of women, I should like to
introduce a curious request once made to me.

[Illustration: