Max Beerbohm (1872–1956)
“Some Persons of ‘The Nineties’ Little Imagining, Despite Their Proper Pride and Ornamental Aspect, How Much They Will Interest Mr. Holbrook Jackson and Mr. Osbert Burdett”
Illustration from N. John Hall's Max Beerbohm Caricatures
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997
First published in Observations. London: William Heinemann, 1925
Item 24: "Some Persons of 'The Nineties'...." (1997, c1925)
Transcript below
Julie Carlsen: This picture is called “Some Persons of ‘The Nineties’” and it features many of the major celebrities, artistic and literary, from the 1890s. The large man in the center in the back with the big flower—oh, that’s Oscar Wilde. Standing to his right is W. B. Yeats. And then right below them, with this sort of heavily combed middle part, is Max Beerbohm.
The most distinct thing I think about Max is that you see his head is a little bit too large for his body. His neck in this image is particularly long but in classic form, he’s drawn his legs just sort of very thin and tapering into these very spindly, almost feminine feet.
This image was first published in Max’s 1925 book Observations. However, what you are seeing here, it's actually from the Library’s Picture Collection. The beauty of the Picture Collection is—unlike a Google image search—there is no algorithm or companies influencing what we see and what images that someone somewhere wants us to reproduce. The Picture Collection is a place of pure discovery.
Max Beerbohm has his own folder there. If you go and you look up caricatures, there’s a whole section of Max Beerbohm, which to me shows both his lasting influence and also is just a mark of his celebrity.
End of Transcript