An old cottage at Witley

Charles Samuel Keene (1823-91) was an English artist and illustrator, who worked in black and white. He never had any regular art training, and was essentially an artist's artist. He holds the foremost place amongst English craftsmen in black and white, though his work was never appreciated at its real value by the general public. No doubt the main reason for this lack of public recognition was his unconventionality. He drew his models exactly as he saw them, not as he knew the world wanted to see them. He was probably best known for his hundreds of cartoons published in <em>Punch</em>, which he joined in 1851, and was the weekly's most outstanding artist following the premature death of John Leech in 1864. He found enough beauty and romance in all that was around him, and, in his Punch work, enough subtle humour in nature seized at her most humorous moments to satisfy him. But it was the quality of his art, rather than his wit, that explains why the great 19th century German artist Adolf Menzel became a subscriber to Punch solely for the sake of enjoying Keene's work week by week.

But Keene was not only a brilliant worker in pen and ink. As an etcher he has also to be reckoned with, notwithstanding the fact that his plates numbered not more than fifty at the outside. Impressions of them are exceedingly rare, and hardly half a dozen of the plates were known to be in existence twenty years after his death. He himself regarded them only as experiments in a difficult but fascinating medium. But in the opinion of experts, they place him among the best etchers of the 19th century.

This etching is one of the series <em>Twenty-one Etchings by Charles S. Keene</em>, printed posthumously by Frederick Goulding from Keene's plates and published in 1903 by the Astolat Press. The introduction is by the eminent critic of the time, M.H. Spielmann. Witley is a small  town in the rural south-west of Surrey - in Keene's time really a village. It enjoys a good proportion of attractive tile-hung, half-timber and brick houses. In this attractive etching, Keene focusses on a picturesque, almost Tudor cottage, dripping with tile-hanging and with no shortage of half-timbering.

See: Wikipedia, 'Charles Keene (artist), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Keene_(artist)

Dr Mark Stocker    Curator, Historical International Art    May 2018