MiniMax

Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm (1872—1956)

If you have the opportunity to study Max Beerbohm’s satirical sketches in the current exhibition Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity (NY Public Library), it will not escape your notice how the writer and cartoonist ‘Max’, as he was familiarly known, was himself a consummate subject for caricature.

As we shall see, the idea of a Beerbohm burlesque was not lost on contemporary artists, nor, indeed, on Max either, for he caricatured himself more than any other subject.

Nothing makes one a candidate for caricature more than a distinctive appearance—and in this respect Max Beerbohm was destined to be distinctive. He was one of those people in whom the features of the adult are particularly well-founded in the face of the child.

This suggestion of prefiguring the future self recalls a perceptive phrase in Wordsworth’s short poem My Heart Leaps Up. The verse, despite opening as if it were an ode to the rainbow, becomes a metaphor for the arc of life with the well-remembered observation: “the Child is father of the Man”:

My Heart Leaps Up (1802)
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Evidently, with this last line, Wordsworth’s hope was for the constancy of childhood reverence as one ages.

Whereas, in Beerbohm’s case, the persistence of youth into maturity is manifested more in physiognomy—the older Max clearly visible in these photographs of him as a boy.¹

Thus it was when he came to be caricatured.

The following representations of the maximized Beerbohm could equally have been an exaggerations of the erstwhile mini-Max.

The examples (L-R) are by Walter Sickert, Arthur Good, and Joseph Simpson, and below is his own droll self-parody.

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Addendum For the Aficionado

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The above, and rarely-seen, self-caricatures by Beerbohm are two of many hand-drawn illustrations he made in a copy of Caricatures of Twenty-Five Gentlemen, his first collection, published by Leonard Smithers, (1896).²

Beerbohm continued to make sketches and notes in this particular copy of the book periodically over many years, hence the annotation to the first drawing: “Trying to realise the lapse of six years. Max. 1909”. The second illustration made in 1920 has a reference on the facing page: “trying not to realise the lapse of eleven more years!”

The literary critic John Felstiner, in his article Changing Faces in Max Beerbohm’s Caricature, concluded that with Max’s extended updating of this volume, correcting images, and making explanatory notes, “we begin to understand how potent the act of caricature was for him”.³

© John Cooper, 2023.

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Footnotes:

1. Images of Max as a Boy:
   
   [left]: Max Minimus, the young Max Beerbohm. Illustration for Max Beerbohm in Perspective by Bohun Lunch (Heinemann, 1921).
   
   [center]: Cabinet card, 1886. Portrait of Max Beerbohm in boyhood from The Sketch, Vol. VIII, No. 101, January 2, 1895. NYPL, Berg Collection.
   
   [right] Photograph of Max Beerbohm. Alexander Bassano (1829–1913).
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2. This unique copy of Caricatures of twenty-five gentlemen by Max Beerbohm is in the Robert H. Taylor collection at Princeton University Library, identified as RHT copy 4 being a presentation copy to Mark Hyams, 1903; reinscribed in 1909, and again in 1920; each inscription is accompanied by a contemporary self-portrait of the artist; the book is “improved” with 15 lengthy autograph notes, and 12 further portraits in pencil, pen-and-ink, and watercolor to correct faults in the original designs. ↩︎
3. The Princeton University Library Chronicle , Winter 1972, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 73-88. ↩︎

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