The Phil May Album

And now, Mr. Whistler, what about Black and White Art? said an interviewer. Black and White Art, said Mr. Whistler, is summed up in two words-Phil May! Nor is this merely a New School of Art paradox. It is one which is held by artists of all grades alike, and even by the art editor who professes to know and supply what the public likes. That a youth who never had a lesson in drawing in his life should have earned such a reputation between the ages of seventeen and thirty, and should have gone above men as honoured in their profession as Sir John Tenniel and Mr. George du Maurier, and on a level with Charles Keene, Mr. Abbey and Mr. Gibson, is enough to make Mr. May’s art extremely interesting. But his art is not nearly so instructive as Mr. May himself; he is a human document to the hand of the realist, and the student of heredity-if ever there was one. He has been interviewed in a sketchy fashion by the journalistic Mrs. Mangnall innumerable times; the high-art magazines have added him to their lists of Our Graphic Humorists,
Black and White Artists, and How Caricaturists Draw. The world is familiar with his own grotesque sketches of himself, and, whether he is attired in riding breeches, a straw hat perched on the back of his head, as he drives a coster’s cart, or is being flung out of a cab, his long cigar and his hair cut in a bang straight across his forehead, are unchangeable and unmistakeable.