A Souvenir of Dickens (also known as Dickens's Dream) by Robert William Buss, scanned by George P. Landow, from Wilkins and Matz (see bibliography). Commentary below added by Philip V. Allingham. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Commentary from Stephen Jarvis's Death and Mr. Pickwick (2015)
'Tell me — do you know the print that appeared about eighteen months after Dickens's death, showing his empty chair at his writing desk?' [The Graphic, 9 June 1870]
'I have seen it, yes.'
'What a funny combination of names Dickens and I would have made — The Pickwick Papers, written by Boz, drawn by Buss.'
Over the succeeding weeks, 'written by' was omitted from the artist's thinking, but 'Boz, drawn by Buss' was his obsession, judging by the numerous sketches of Dickens's characters which he drew while still in bed, for often he did not have the strength to rise. The sketches concerned Dickens's entire career, from Pickwick onwards, as though Buss were determined to prove not only that he was worthy to be Seymour's successor, but that he could draw the whole of Dickens's work, a feat accomplished by no other illustrator who had partnered the author.
Buss's conception was a grand watercolour portrait of Dickens, with characters from the novels in the background, beginning with Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller in the very positions they adopted in Browne's drawing, with Sam half-turning, and Mr. Pickwick admiring — the drawing that Buss would have made, had he not been dismissed.
With great exertion, he pulled himself out of the blankets one morning and started work on the watercolour, the easel having been placed in readiness beside his bed. He used a photograph of Dickens as his model, and gradually, over a number of weeks, his picture of Dickens materialised, with the author sitting in a chair in the library, while the characters floated among the books on the shelves as if emerging from Dickens's imagination.
Robert Buss died on 26 February 1875. At the time of his death, barely a quarter of the picture had been coloured, and that mostly of Dickens himself. [Jarvis, pp. 746-747]
Colour version. Image credit: Charles Dickens Museum, London. Reproduced via Art UK under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence (CC BY-NC-SA). [Click on this image too to enlarge it, and for more information about it.]
Bibliography
Jarvis, Stephen. Death and Mr. Pickwick. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. vii + 802 pp.
Wilkins, William Glyde and B. W. Matz. Charles Dickens in Caricature and Cartoon. Boston: The Bibliophile Society, 1924. No. 50.
Created 19 July 2007
Last modified 9 November 2024