Affiliating an Aesthete PILCOX, A PROMISING YOUNG PHARMACEUTICAL CHEMIST, HAS MODELLED FROM MEMORY AN HEROIC GROUP, IN WHICH MRS CIMABUE BROWN IS REPRESENTED AS THE MUSE OF THIS CENTURY, CROWNING POSTLETHWAITE AND MAUDLE AS THE TWIN GODS OF ITS POETRY AND ART. POSTLETHWAITE: 'NO LOFTIAH THEME HAS EVAH EMPLOYED THE SCULPTAH'S CHISEL!' MAUDLE: 'DISTINCTLY SO! ONLY WORK ON IN THIS REVERENT SPIRIT, MR PILCOX, AND YOU WILL ACHIEVE THE TRULY GREAT!' MRS CIMABUE BROWN: 'NAY! YOU HAVE ACHIEVED IT! OH, MY YOUNG FRIEND, DO YOU NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE, A HEAVEN BORN GENIUS?' POOR PILCOX: 'I DO!' (GIVES UP HIS PESTLE AND MORTAR, AND BECOMES A HOPELESS NINCOMPOOP FOR LIFE.)

George Du Maurier (1834-1896)

Price

£3,750

Signed

Signed
Inscribed with title and dated 'June 19 80' below mount

Medium

Pen and ink

Dimensions

5 ¾ x 8 ¾ inches

Illustrated

Punch, 19 June 1880, Page 287;
Society Pictures Drawn by George Du Maurier, Selected From 'Punch', London: Bradbury Agnew & Co, Vol II, Page 231

Exhibited

The Fine Art Society, 1884, No 144;
'The Long Nineteenth Century: Treasures and Pleasures', Chris Beetles Gallery, March-April 2014, No 122;
'Ruskin's Artists', Chris Beetles Gallery, February-March 2019

For the decade between 1873 and 1882, George Du Maurier produced a series of highly memorable cartoons for Punch which satirised the Aesthetic Movement and its extravagant cult of the beautiful. However, he gave the series a proper sense of unity only by introducing Mrs Cimabue Brown, the leader of a circle of aesthetic enthusiasts (1877) and then the painter Maudle and the poet Postlethwaite (1880). Here they are joined by Peter Pilcox, who gives up chemistry for sculpture, and vies with Postlethwaite for public attention.

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