Linley Sambourne: Illustrator and Punch Cartoonist by Leonée Ormond (review)

Linley Sambourne animates our understanding of the Victorian era today through a series of historical flukes whereby his residence, 18 Stafford Terrace, Kensington—modestly proportioned but decorated with eclectic élan—has survived almost as it was the day he died in 1910, its decorations from the 1870s still intact. The interior is a masterpiece of aestheticism-on-a-budget; chipped blue and white china is displayed on a high shelf, its imperfections invisible from below. Embossed wallpapers simulate Spanish leather; framed photographs of works by the great masters elegantly mask the absence of an art collection. The furniture is of every imaginable variety, historical and modern, Eastern and Western. The house, horrifying to modernist taste, is an irresistible mélange, much more agreeable than the elaborate, often obscure, and sometimes clumsy graphic works of its creator.

Leonée Ormond’s memoir of Sambourne is framed with accounts of the soirée on 5 November 1957, at which the artist’s daughter Maud, by then Lady Rosse, hosted “a remarkable gathering of like minds which led to the foundation of the Victorian Society” (304). John Betjeman, Nikolaus Pevsner, John Piper, and Christopher Hussey doubtless formed a group as gregarious as the many gatherings presided over by the affable Punch illustrator who had purchased the house in 1875. Now open as a museum, lovingly staffed by well-briefed volunteers, Linley Sambourne House has become a much-loved place of pilgrimage.

Ormond’s affectionate and finely executed biography carries the imprimatur of long and dedicated research. In addition to his copious output of drawings—the weekly rhythm of production-to-a-deadline is well evoked by Ormond—Sambourne and his wife were both energetic diarists. It is replete with detail concerning the Sambournes’ personal and professional dealings, family relationships, and intimacies, and is, therefore, a rich and fascinating document of Victorian social and artistic culture.

Sambourne was most definitely a card. An exuberant personality, he was never happier than when amid the homosocial banter and bluster of the clubby Punch dinners every Wednesday evening. He was a keen rider, a fine sportsman, a great raconteur, and a drinker and trencherman on a grand scale. Sociable evenings are often followed in the diary by a seedy morning. The pages of this book chronicle—and celebrate—a peculiarly Victorian success story, for Sambourne was not born into a position of privilege. And while he never amassed substantial wealth, he achieved the social prominence he ardently desired, both in life and posthumously: his great-grandson, David Linley, named after the artist, is a grandson of the queen. Sambourne’s ascent was achieved in part through a socially and financially advantageous marriage, but largely by grafting away, producing weekly comic illustrations in a career at Punch that lasted more than four decades.

Ormond’s book is reluctant, unfortunately, to delve into either the style or the iconography of Sambourne’s illustrations. This is surprising given the strength in this regard of Ormond’s earlier biography of George du Maurier. The real culprit is Sambourne himself. Unlike John Leech, John Tenniel, and du Maurier, Sambourne’s talents lay in excessive enumeration of a comic idea, rather than in the brilliant visual pun (Leech) or the psychologically charged satirical narrative scene (as in du Maurier’s chronicles of Mrs. Cimabue Brown). The arabesques of fantasy that allowed Tenniel to produce a visual equivalent to Lewis Carroll’s Alice books were quite beyond the reach of Sambourne. His finer works, such as the long series of soft-grained satires of the art world, speak of a warm-hearted humorist rather than an inheritor of the harsh satirical mantle of James Gillray and George Cruikshank. He was at his most competent as a commercial illustrator, creating monstrously elaborate confections such as the Diploma for the International Fisheries Exhibition of 1883 to 1884. His book illustrations, especially those for children’s fairy tales, do bespeak true distinction.

By far the most...