Reference: Samuel Begg by Douglas Lloyd Jenkins
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What we know about Samuel Begg
Posted: January 25, 2014 | Author: Editor | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Begg, Illustrated London News, London, Samuel Begg, Town and Country Journal |
Illustration: Samuel Begg, ‘Self-Portrait,’ (c1880)
Mr. Samuel Begg now only exists at the very periphery of the contemporary world. He seems at first barely remembered. His works occupy only the more eclectic art collections and are, in New Zealand at least, seldom exhibited. Yet his output lives on, through on-line heritage poster and image companies that reproduce his, now out of copyright, works on demand to satisfy a market for early twentieth century images.
Begg entered the world in 1854 a resident of London and with his parents, Samuel migrated to Napier, aged six. From this far-flung port, he would spend much of the remainder of the Nineteenth century working his way back to the centre of the Empire, eventually attaining a position as an illustrator for the Illustrated London News. From there his drawings traveled back, reaching each and nearly every peripheral point of Empire. For this unique achievement he has been described as – ‘perhaps the finest black and white artist of his age’ and conversely as representing ‘the worst features’ of late Nineteenth century illustrators.
I.
Mr. Samuel Begg senior, late of Mecklenburgh Square, London arrived with family in Napier from Auckland on 2 February 1860, aboard the costal trader White Swan. (i) Within a short time the father had established himself in business as a shipping agent and built a home for himself on Napier Hill. He sent Samuel, his eldest son, to Napier Grammar School, from where he graduated in 1868 with prizes in French and Drawing (ii).
Soon after graduation Samuel jnr., obtained a position with the survey team despatched to Poverty Bay in order to layout the settlement of Gisborne. On completion he joined the Napier Provincial Government surveyors as a ‘cadet’ that were, with the German-born surveyor Charles Weber, establishing the line of a future railroad between Napier and Wellington. After the completion of this project, Weber went on to survey the Manawhatu Gorge rail line to Wellington and the young Samuel Begg went with him.
Although Begg reported his life as ‘comfortable with good lodgings on the Wellington side of the Seventy Mile bush,’(iii) he soon decided that surveying and engineering were not for him and at that he wanted to be an artist. Begg returned to Napier where, ‘I stayed … some months, loafing about and not doing much in the way of drawing or anything else.’ (iv) However with little idea how to become an artist, Begg drifted back into surveying – this time working with private surveyors breaking up township blocks around Gisborne. While there, the Editor of a local paper approached Begg to provide some illustrations – probably observational illustrations of local elections. Although Begg described them as ‘pretty bad’ he recognised them as ‘a start’ and Begg packed up and headed by steamer for Auckland.
In Auckland Samuel Begg was introduced to staff in the lithographic and printing department of the New Zealand Herald and Auckland Weekly News, probably by his brother-in-law (an amateur artist David McFarlane) with whom he later produced a panoramic view of Auckland published as a supplement to the Herald in 1877.
In a short biographical statement written years later – Begg noted that he
Must have done fairly well in Auckland, as I find I had made enough to waste some of it helping to start a paper called the Auckland Graphic, which lasted about three weeks and perhaps only two. (v)
Soon after the failure of the Graphic, of which little trace remains, Samuel Begg packed up and headed for Sydney. Here he obtained a position with Gibbs, Shallard & Co, a large firm of printers and engravers and also began providing freelance illustrations for Illustrated Australian News and Sydney’s Town and Country Journal. Years later he described his working method –
Whenever we had work to do for the Journal, we would whenever time allowed, make our way to the cliffs above Bondi, taking our boxwood with us. Vignetting for newspaper illustrations was much in vogue at the time, so our boxwood was usually a round of wood. Bondi in those days was exactly as nature had made it. Lying on the cliffs in this open-air studio the drawing would be made. Then it was Appleton’s turn, as, after getting back to Sydney, he would have the job of sitting up all night engraving it. (vi)
Samuel Begg, Sydney Exhibition medal (1879)
Gibbs Shallard & Co provided Begg with his first important commission – the face design for the medal awarded at the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879 ‘a determining landmark in the history of the Colony of New South Wales.’ (vii) Soon after Begg (and Appleton) left Gibbs Sharland’ in order to freelance, with Begg sketching in the day and Appleton engraving his drawings at night – an arrangement that suited a market in which some dailies ran only a few illustrations a week. It was, as Begg wrote, a market dominated by the demand for shipwreck imagery –
Shipwrecks were favourite subjects for illustration. I had done one of a large sailing-ship and not long after a big steamer was wrecked. Before instructing me to deal with this subject, the art editor took me aside and said solemnly, “Now we know you can draw a sailing-ship, but” (with great caution) “can you draw a steamer?” (viii)
Eventually Appleton grew tired of Australia and returned to London. Begg too was restless. He stayed in Sydney long enough to become one of the founders partners of the Sydney Bulletin, to which he provided both capital and illustrations. However the journal struggled and when Begg and fellow artist William McLeod were asked for an additional financial contribution they both demurred and withdrew from the enterprise. (ix) By the time the Bulletin had turned around, Begg had taken up a position with the Illustrated Australian News in Melbourne.
At 26, Samuel Begg was aware that he had no training as an artist and in 1881 began study at the National Gallery Art School, Melbourne. However Begg had broader educational ambitions and by the end of 1882 had saved enough money to see himself through a couple of years of study in Paris.
By the time Samuel Begg left the colony he had secured a small but permanent place in the story of Australian graphic art. He had provided the Illustrated Australian News with eyewitness engravings of the Jolimont railway and designed the face of the Sydney Exhibition Medal. He had also been a founding partner in the establishment of the most important Australian journal of the period – the Sydney Bulletin – and had provided illustrations for its first issue.
The plans of many an ambitious New Zealander, then and now, comes to grief in Sydney or Melbourne. When seem as a young man, not yet 30, from a small settlement in New Zealand, Begg had done well. However he was not yet much more than a third of a way through the span of a normal career. What now lay ahead was something altogether more challenging. He needed now to make sufficient a name for himself at home in Britain, that those back in New Zealand and the Australian colonies might at least acknowledge his achievement.
After a difficult passage to Europe, Samuel Begg arrived in Paris in 1883 in order to study at the Académie Julian, for what he described ‘as a strenuous few years’ but which may, interrupted for periods spent making a living, have stretched on for most of the rest of the decade. Records indicate that Begg remained at the Académie until 1889 and certainly his own sketch biographical narrative resumes in the early 1890s when he was attempting to establish himself permanently in London as an illustrator
Samuel Begg struggled in the London publishing scene for the first years of the ‘nineties. However a small windfall allowed Begg to head home to New Zealand – supplying drawings to Pictorial World as he progressed. Begg, who met and married Ada Nelson of Hastings during this trip, now faced the prospect of supporting a wife with only the erratic income of a freelance illustrator only tenuously connected to Pictorial World (‘not a very prosperous paper’) to which he was selling illustrations as a way of paying for his present trip to the colony.
Although Begg must have questioned the wisdom of a return to London, he took the plunge and by the mid 1890s had moved from Pictorial World to Black & White (a paper of ‘better standing) to regular employment with the Illustrated London News. Begg had now had secured a position at the leading illustrated magazine of his time, a position that ‘after all the time wasted chopping and changing’, Begg came to relish. He remained at the Illustrated London News until he retired, aged 65, in 1919.
Samuel Begg in his studio (1912).
Samuel Begg in his studio (1912).
II.
New Zealand, and indeed Australia, are now less keen to claim Samuel Begg as their own, than they were on his death in 1936, when the obituaries where generally fulsome. If the contemporary post-colonial voices have doubts, the English have also grown dismissive, perhaps none so more than Simon Houfe, who in an uncomfortably brief entry in his Dictionary of 19th Century British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists, dismisses Begg’s works as characterized by ‘the worst features of later illustrations.’ (x) Houfe’s complaint is that Begg’s work came too close to the photograph and argues technical perfection in representing almost photographic scenes with heavy use of body-colour but no imagination.’ James Thorpe in his English Illustrators: the Nineties, considers Begg’s work as ‘so close to that medium [photography] as to be almost unnecessary.’ (xi)
Samuel Begg, Seating Five Persons c 1905.
These interpretations are influenced, perhaps too strongly, by the late twentieth century lack of affinity with demonstrations of technical skill. Refusing to engage with Begg’s all to obvious level of craft, his proficiency is skirted around in order that he can be accused of lacking imagination. Houfe and Greenwall’s responses to Begg’s work are at odds with those of his contemporaries, such as this reviewer in London’s Daily Chronicle, who described one of Begg’s appearances at the Royal Academy exhibition; —
One of the most astonishing drawings in this portion of the collection (the ‘black-and white ‘ room) is a group of excited sightseers at the races. It is entitled In front of the grand stand at the finish for the Melbourne Cup, No. 1648, by Samuel Begg. In the crowd of faces eagerly intent upon the struggle going forward we have portrayed those of every class, from the aristocrat to the parvenu, with expressions combining hope, fear, curiosity, and in some instances anxiety bordering upon despair. Such a scene opened a wide field for the artist where neither success nor failure could be other than in the highest degree. Mr. Begg, however, has not failed, but has managed a very difficult subject with singularly artistic skill.” (xii)
By overemphasizing values specific to the last decade of the Twentieth century, writers such as Greenwall and Hulfe over estimate the importance of imagination (in which No 1648 is by no means lacking) in a period in which imagination was the least valued component in the portfolio of a commercial graphic artist. This is the world of an artist whose job it was to be an eyewitness and in being so to compete with, and essentially keep at bay, the developing field of photography. That Begg’s work as near photographic as the human hand could achieve was his great triumph.
There is a second area in which Begg’s success-in early Twentieth century terms became a late Twentieth century discomfort. Samuel Begg, the busy commercial illustrator produced a broad range of subject matter; from sporting prints, The Finish of the Marathon Race, the Olympic Games, (1908) and current events, Louis Bleriot Flies the Channel (1909), through contemporary political scenes, A Home Rule Defeat (1912) and historical recreations The Presentation of the Spurs and Sword at the Coronation of Henry VI (1901) to contemporary portraits and contemporary social observation pieces, often with humorous elements, such as To Seat Five: Gentlemen Struggle to read their newspapers in an over crowed carriage (c1905). However Begg is now perceived largely as an illustrator of the doings of royalty – primarily although not exclusively on those of the British royal family.
Samuel Begg, King George V (c1913)
This close association, through which Begg occupied a privileged position as something close to an official artist to the royal family – at least where the illustrated magazines were concerned – when looked through late Twentieth century eyes, tarred Begg with the brush of the discredited idea of the British Empire and perhaps of royalty itself. Again it became too easy to dismiss Begg. He was an illustrator whose works ‘mostly consisted of members of the Royal family visiting troops in hospital or receiving news from the Front’ (xiii) or ‘an illustrator of public functions and events.’ (xiv) Such was the enthusiasm of anti-Begg sentiment among post colonial academics that one biographer reported Begg to have spent the period from 1896 to 1913 drawing illustrations of the Boer War. (xv)
Samuel Begg, Queen Mary (c1913)
It is some how unlikely that Begg, a commercial artist, able to churn out a good commercial shipwreck image on demand from the age of twenty-five and who knew his market, was still producing Boer war images with any regularity in 1913, eleven years after hostilities ceased. Yet Begg gets hopelessly entangled in the imperial project – at a personal level through his depictions of the royals and at a global level through his depictions of the Boer and the First World wars at which he was so effective. Begg, whose output was so often in celebration of the times in which he lived, was, by the turn of the twenty-first century, himself unable to be celebrated.
III.
The digital age complicates Samuel Begg in a way he could not have foreseen and that his critics have similar issues in comprehending. A broad range of Begg’s subject matter, some popular, some political, some obscure, are available through numerous online print and poster galleries. Begg’s works are once again finding an audience able and willing to celebrate their achievement as illustrations. Made available through new digital technologies, Begg’s works are now there to be admired as the expressions of the skills of a craftsperson/artist whose abilities parallel but predate those that we now have through fingertip ready software programs.
In the same way that he once used the Illustrated London News, to communicate to the Empire, Begg now reaches around a generally dismissive critical inertia, to speak directly with a public still hungry for his style of imagery. We are reminded that at its height, during Begg’s tenure, the Illustrated London News was one of the most popular magazines in the world – and Begg one of its senior illustrators. When On 19 May 1900, his black and white painting The Queen listening to a dispatch from the Front was donated to the National Bazaar for War Funds, the Illustrate London News immediately announced the publication of 1,000 signed photogravures – today subscribers would be invited to download.
Douglas Lloyd Jenkins
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