Nature versus Art. From English Society. Sketched by George du Maurier. Click on image to enlarge it.
Just as Stodge is about to explain the recondite subtleties of his picture to a select circle of deeply interested and delightfully sympathetic women, his wife comes in with the baby, confound it!
du Maurier’s humorous cartoon also works well as a final study for a Victorian genre painting. Certainly, he has skillfully filled the picture space with realistic details of contemporary upper class English life and the rooms within which it takes place. du Maurier includes an Arts And crafts screen and a wicker chair, the corner which appears in the lower right corner. (The edge of the picture cuts off most of the chair— a technique Edgar Degas popularized and which creates a kind a photographic realism.)
Details of This Cartoon and Others about Children
- The Child Surrounded by Admiring Women (detail)
- The Artist and His Painting (detail)
- "Hampered with a Conscience"
- "Rivals Small and Earlies" [sic]
- "Mothers's Darlings"
- "The Tables Turned"
- "A Question of Age"
- "An Introduction"
- "Reasoning from Induction"
- "Gentle Terrorism"
- "An Unpleasant Social Duty"
- "At the Zoo"
- "The March of Progress"
- "I Must Have This Tooth Out!"
- "Feminine Perversity"
- "Chacun pour soi"
- "Proxy"
Scanned image and text by George P. Landow [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
English Society. Sketched by George du Maurier. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1897.
Created 1 July 2001
Last modified 29 April 2020