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Letter to Edgar Browne
Charles Green
22 February 1883
Hand-written letter
This correspondence between Charles Green and Edgar Browne demonstrates the personal connections between the late Victorian illustrators Fred Barnard, the son of the great Phiz, and another Household Edition illustrator, Charles Green.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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Of the works and sketches in water colour and oils exhibited in Liverpool after the artist's death, personally we have seen nothing. They took the public by surprise, for few at least of the outer world suspected that this shy, retiring illustrator of books was a persevering and accomplished water-colour artist. [Everitt, 352]
Charlecote.
Hampstead Hill Gardens.
Feb 22/83
My dear Sir
Our Mutual Friend Fred Barnard told me last night that he had just paid a visit to Liverpool on a most interesting occasion, and knowing that I am a most ardent admirer of the works of your late Father wishes me to write and tell you what I have so often paid to him & others. I remember [1/2] when I was a small boy one of my first art pleasures was derived from "Phiz" and this feeling has grown stronger with me ever since, as I have become better able to appreciate the many beauties in his drawings.
I think there is nothing to come up to the illustrations to Dickens & Lever, not only for character & humour but also intense pathetic feeling. One has only to pick out a few characters such as Mrs. Gamp, Pecksniff, Dombey, Quilp, Mark Tapley, Captain Cuttle, or Tom Pinch. [2/3]
I take these at random from a long list of old friends) all entirely different but so delightfully complete in every way, and ask what other Artist has done anything in a similar way to be compared with them.
I was a few years ago asked to illustrate "The Old Curiosity Shop" for Chapman & Hall and never did I feel I was undertaking such a difficult task when I felt I was coming after what had been done so exquisitely before. [3/4]
I hope the Exhibition in Liverpool will be a very great success, as it should be, and I would much like to see the collection come afterwards to London and your late Father's great talent as properly appreciated by everyone as it is by
Yours very truly
C. Green
Edgar Brown Jr.
[Letter in the personal collection of Valerie Lester, sent 12 July 2008]
According to Valerie Browne Lester, soon after Phiz's death at the age of 67 on 8 July 1882, his son Edgar, also an illustrator, organized an exhibition of 409 of Hablot Knight Browne's etchings, sketches, water-colours, oil-paintings, designs for statuettes, and engravings at the Arts Club, Liverpool, in January 1883. A huge success, the exhibit (somewhat scaled down) was transferred to London's Fine Arts Gallery at the end of the year, attended on 15 December by seventeen-year-old Beatrix Potter.
Everitt, Graham. Chapter XVI. "A Book Illustrator: Hablot Knight Browne," English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century.London: Swann Sonnenschein, 1893. 336-54.
Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto & Windus, 2004.
Created 13 October 2016
Last modified 14 April 2020