3-028-279 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"Behind the Scenes," by J. A. Fitzgerald, 1870. Engraving of a painting. 'The blanket screen; the sorry old Dobbin that drags the troupe from town to town, drinking at the trough; the solitary clown, waiting his turn to complete the full strength of the house before the curtain...It is a scene which, doubtless, the artist himself has witnessed...this is not exactly a subject which an artist could have evolved out of the depths of his internal consciousness...It is...a casual peep into vagabond life gained, probably, in some country excursion. And really the grotesque contrasts presented in this out-of-the-way phase of life were not wholly undeserving of pictorial record. Fancy a clown - that incarnation of burlesque fun peculiar to the British stage - coolly reading newspaper politics, or perhaps criticising some dramatic critic! What his real opinion and sentiments are, however,...it is impossible to guess at through the mask of that ludicrous "make-up." If we might, indeed, accept his apparent expression, we should say that, judging from the eyebrows, the writer of the article he is perusing had succeeded in exciting a degree of astonishment bordering on frenzy if it were not modified by Mephistophelean - nay, wholly diabolic - gaiety'. From "Illustrated London News", 1870.