Success came early to Max Beerbohm both as caricaturist and critic. In 1892 he published his first caricatures of London club types. Publication, he said, "dealt a great, an almost mortal blow to my modesty." In 1898 Beerbohm took over George Bernard Shaw's post as drama critic of the Saturday Review. It gave rise to Shaw's famous endorsement of "the incomparable Max."
Beerbohm, who produced more than 2000 caricatures during his lifetime, "dismantled,"as one critic put it, "the pose of almost every significant figure in view from Queen Victoria to Rudyard Kipling to Matthew Arnold's niece." He hid from view the effort it took to produce his brilliant send-ups. "Caricature,"he said, "is a form of wit, and nothing so ruthlessly chokes laughter as the suspicion of labour."
Rossetti and his circle had seized Beerbohm's imagination. "In London, in the great days of a deep, smug, thick, rich, drab, industrial complacency,"he wrote, "Rossetti shone, for the men and women who knew him, with the ambiguous light of a red torch somewhere in a dense fog. And so he still shines for me." Rossetti and his aesthetic warriors aimed to replace the reigning academic style of painting with simplicity and a spirit of devotion.
Rossetti and His Circle is now considered one of Beerbohm's masterpieces. In imagined scenes, Beerbohm recreated the age of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the period, as he put it, "just before oneself." Many of the players are there: the bearded Gabriel with his sister Christina, John Ruskin, Holman Hunt, John Millais and George Meredith. In plate 22, Oscar Wilde, on tour in America, initiates a stony-faced audience into the delights of the Aesthetic Movement.
During the winter of 1917, Beerbohm had rented a cottage in the English countryside near his friend William Rothenstein. There he worked on his Rossetti drawings. Every day, balancing a portfolio in his hands, Beerbohm tread cautiously across the snow to visit his friend. "No wonder Max was nervous of leaving his Rossetti caricatures in an empty cottage,"Rothenstein later wrote. "What a remarkable reconstruction of a period!"
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