Harry Furniss was born in Wexford, Ireland in 1854, but considered himself to be British,
as his father was English and his mother from Scotland. And at the time that region of Ireland
was part of the United Kingdom. He was educated in Dublin, but had no formal art education.
Following school He worked briefly for a wood engraving firm ,although not as an engraver,
and even contributed to Zozimus, a short-lived Irish humour magazine while still in his teens.
At the age of 19 in 1873 he left for England and once he had settled in lodgings in London
he started work for the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News. Not long after the publication
was bought by the owners of the much bigger Illustrated London News. And for his new employers
he produced illustrations of major social and sporting events, as well as attending
numerous trials as court artist.
All his drawings at this time were necessarily reproduced as wood engravings, and his early
experiences in the Irish engraving company meant he was familiar with how to work with
this process and keep the engravers happy.
In 1877 he married Marianne Rogers and a couple of years later the first of 4 children was
born. And by this point he was also having journalistic illustration published in the
highly regarded Graphic magazine.
Having become quite well established through his work to date, in 1880, when he was still
only 26 he started having work published Punch, the most popular and respected satirical magazine
of the Victorian age. And he quickly became an invaluable asset to the magazine's visual
content, with many appearances to his name.
He didn't work exclusively for Punch and in 1886 he published the children's book Romps
All the Year Round, which had a cover and some pages printed in chromolithographic full
colour. But it was his series of comedic two colour spot illustrations which showed him
at his gestural best.
But in the following year a much more successful colour series appeared in The Comic Blackstone,
a humorous exploration of the baffling complexities of the British legal system written by Arthur
A'Beckett. These humorous full pages gave a much better idea of what Furniss could create
using colour, and it's a great pity there isn't more of this created by him during his
career.
He was evidently extremely prolific at this time because also in 1887 his parody The Royal
Academy, an Artistic Joke was also published. This little book took cheerful potshots at
the Academy and many of those who exhibited at its annual exhibition.
And yet another highly popular parody, this time of Isaak Walton's 1653 book The Compleat
Angler, now cheekily re-titled the Incompleat Angler, with a collection of very well drawn
comic monochrome pages. Again the humour was goodnatured and frequently absurd, and the
collection made for an amusing and popular read.
And as with his work for Punch this book was also skilfully engraved by the magazine's
engraver of choice Joseph Swain.
In the same year He also had a handful of drawings published as one of no less than
four different illustrators chosen for the book Rhymes for the Young Folk by William
Allingham.
But whatever other projects he got involved with his professional relationship with Punch
continued undiminished and he became increasingly popular with his political subjects in particular.
In 1889 his collaboration with author Lewis Carroll, the book Sylvie and Bruno was published.
John Tenniel, who had been the first to illustrate Carroll's Alice books some 25 years earlier
warned Furniss about the author's controlling ways and generally unlikeable character. But
despite his misgivings Furniss agreed to the commission.
And although the pair had struggled to agree about virtually any aspect of the book Furniss's
illustrations were appropriately madcap and engrossingly imaginative, and although nothing
like as popular as the Alice books it proved to be a reasonable success.
In 1890 Furniss returned to the world of art for his book Academy Antics, in which he once
more made fun of the general pomposity and self importance of the British art establishment
of the time. In the same year the book Wanted - A King
written by Maggie Browne was published, featuring a series of gloriously surreal and highly
entertaining expressive pen drawings from Furniss. This was another fantasy tale similar
to Lewis Carroll's Alice books with a young girl as the heroine , and her encounters with
a host of bizarre and not always well intentioned nursery rhyme characters. It was popular enough
to be reprinted several times and later editions even featured a rare watercolour frontispiece.
By this point his success had led to the purchase of a large house for himself and his family
near London's Regents Park and despite his considerable workload he found time to travel
regularly. in 1892 he published his own book of illustrated travel anecdotes titled Flying
Visits, and in the same year made his first trip to the USA but whether this was business
or pleasure isn't recorded.
Despite his earlier less than happy collaboration with Lewis Carroll he reluctantly agreed to
illustrate a second book about the same characters. Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, which was just
as surreal and entertaining as the first, at least in pictorial terms, was completed
and published in 1894. At which point Furniss vowed never to work with the author again,
and never did.
1894 was also the year that he left Punch after a falling out caused by him selling
the copyright of a drawing he had made for Punch a decade earlier for an advertising
campaign by Pears soap, and this was in breach of the terms of his contract.
Following his acrimonious departure Furniss brought out his own humorous magazine Lika
Joko as a rival to Punch, which naturally enough featured his work and contributions
form other pen and ink humorous contemporaries. And although it contained some impressive
work it failed to connect with the public and only a year later ceased publication.
Furniss not only lost a considerable amount of money due to the failure of the project,
but his reputation also suffered as a consequence.
Nevertheless he rallied with more book work and in 1895 The Wallypug of Why, written by
G. E. Farrow was published. And alongside his own larger format illustrations it featured
some smaller spots and chapter headings from his daughter Dorothy. This was another narrative
which owed a certain debt to Alice in Wonderland but once more Furniss's drawings were engagingly
absurd and contributed greatly to the books popular success.
In 1896 Furniss returned to the USA, where his work had by this point become quite well
known, and although it's known he gave an interview to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the
purpose of this visit isn't clear. In 1897 his book Pen and Pencil in Parliament
was published which drew in the main from the many political satires and caricatures
he had created for his now defunct magazine Lika Joko.
And in the same year he sailed to Australia, and his experiences, encounters and observations
of the country and its population formed the basis of his book Australian Sketches- Made
on Tour , which was subsequently published in 1899 and enjoyed similar success to his
growing line of creative achievements. By now he was enjoying a certain celebrity
status with a strong reputations for his drawings and skills as a witty raconteur, and in 1902
he published his two-volume illustrated autobiography, The Confessions of a Caricaturist. And another
equally well recieved volume of personal recollections and anecdotes, Harry Furniss At Home, was
published in 1904.
It's by no means certain in what year actually drew his 20 visualisations of scenes from
Lewis Carroll's Alice stories, and they were never published as an illustrated book. But
they were published in 1908 in three instalments of The Children’s Encyclopaedia, and revealed
his innate affinity for the illustration for absurd children's fantasy, not that any further
proof of this was needed.
In recognition of his status as one of the countries finest pen and ink illustrators,
he was given the commission to illustrate Charles Dickens' books, and this monumental
body of work was published in 1910 as an 18 volume set.
The first book in the series was the collection of short stories Sketches by Boz, which was
Dickens' original pen name, and these illustrations set a very high standard which all others
fell into line with. He created hundreds of illustrated dramatic and emotionally charged
iconic moments from the various stories, as well as a large volume of particularly eloquent
character studies of the vast collection of the colourful figures who populated Dickens'
text. The remarkably evocative illustrations he
created for Tis series of books has arguably become his most significant legacy, and it
was reprinted several times.
In the following year he produced a more modest single volume of William Makepeace Thakeray's
work, which also featured illustrations by others including John Leech, Joseph Kenny
Meadows and Thakeray's own earlier images.
Most of his contributions took the form of highly descriptive monochrome character studies,
but there were also several more scenic vignettes of scenes from the various narratives. He
also created this marvellous colour frontispiece, and again I find myself wishing there were
more examples.
In 1912 he set sail on the Lusitania with his daughter Dorothy back to the USA, not
as an illustrator but as a writer of dramas for the early silent movie productions of
Thomas Edison. Furniss was apparently highly enthusiastic about the film making process
and He also made a couple of unexceptional live action shorts including Peace and War
-Pencillings by Harry Furniss, in 1917 in which he created cartoons on screen.
At the end of the war he returned to Britain and retired to the south coast town of Hastings.
But he still wrote and illustrated occasional books and in 1919 he published a collection
of theatrical anecdotes and drawings, titled my Bohemian Days.
in 1923 he published a collection titled Some Victorian Women, and in the following year
he followed this with Some Victorian Men, neither of which could be considered among
his greatest achievements. And following a career of 54 years Harry Furniss died in Hastings
in 1925 at the age of 71.
Although his later books had only served to demonstrate that he had become somewhat of
an anachronism in the postwar British cultural landscape, in his heyday he had been one of
the most significant comedic pen and ink illustrators. There's no doubt that despite his success
in his lifetime he has become an increasingly neglected talent over the decades. But for
some, including me, he was a highly influential, skilful and imaginative figure, and collecting
and viewing the images I used in this video have served to remind me just how important
his contribution was.