The daily morning journal and courier., 1900-05-10
MARK HANNA's APPEARANCE.
Cartoons Create Wrong Impressions What Artists Endeavor to Repre-.

l Cartoons Create Wrong Impressions
 What Artists Endeavor to Repre-
 sent.
 '1he familiar conception of Mark
 Hannas personal appearance is
 laughable blunder' said visitor from Ohio, who is well acquainted with the
 famous republican leader, to a New Or-
 leans Times Democrat reporter, "The
 caricaturists have created 6 figure that
 is ats altogether different from the real
 man as an ostrich is from gorilla. The cartoon Hanna, who was invented, I believe, by Mir. Davenport, is an obese, ungainly individual, with enormous joWls, pug nose, small, perfectly routd eyes and curious little square-cut patch- es of side whisker. An ugier monster never came out of nightmare. The real Hanna i9 a decidedly fine-looking man. He is erect and broad shouldered,
 but not in the least fat, and has mas
 sive features, cast upon unmistakably intellectual lines. His nose is of the short, heavy, retrousse type, entirely different from pug, and his eyes are wide, gray and pleasant. One can see at glance that he is a man of tremen- dous determination, but there is nothing stern or menacing in his appearance; on the contrary his dominant expression is one of affability He is always careful ly and fashionably dressed, although in
 the summer he discards his senatorial froclI coat for a comfortable business sack. l am speaking, you will please
 bear in mind, simply of the outward semblance of the man; beyond that any | T. I ;,rl,+ bs, hi1t mere personal opinion. But I can as sure you positively that if an accurate likeness of Mark Hanna were introduced into a political cartoon the average newspaper reader wouldn't know who the dickens 1t was intended to repre- sent"
 II dare say all that is perfectly true" said black-and-whi artist to whom the Ohio mans remarks were repeated;
 but, as matter of fact the physical accuracy of portraits in political car toons is of no special importance. As general thing one of the big artists sets the pace. He draws a figure that em- bodies his conception of the character physical and mental-and the rest of us accept 1t as model. It is really sym bol rather than a portrait. and is so re- garded by the general public. MT. Da venport undertook to depict Mark Han ma, not as private individual, but as the incarnation of venal bossism and everything about that figure which he drew contributed to that idea. He dis torted the features so as to make them expressive of greed. rapacity and intol- erance, because that in his opinion, was ,rho M, ctr Co o,,J litical caricature I insist that the pie ture is great success. No doubt MT. Davenport Is perfectly well aware that MT Hanna's nose Is not aggressively pug, just as he Is perfectly well aware that the senator doesn't really sport baggy clothes with dollar marks on them for a pattern. As l said before, It is piece of symbolism. An accurate likeness would be unsuited to the pur- pose, because 1t would be meaningless Neither the cartoon Bryan nor the car toon Mckinley look anything like the real men The Bryan in the republican papers resembles a long -haired patent medicine fakir, and the Mckinley in democratic cartoons Is a comic Napo- leon with a hawk beak Do you think you would pick out either of them from those drawings if you had never seen any photo reproductions? Of course not. Now and then l admit, the car- caturists get hold of man with such a marked and peculiar physiognomy that they can't draw out the likeness, but i call only three such cases to mind-Carl Schurz, Roscoe Conkling and Admiral Dewey. Those were certainly three in stances in which public men did look like their carleatures Napoleon, if you once ordered his portrait and then declined to give the artist any sittlngs, You need none he 1 said simply paint me as the empe- rCr!' That expresses the idea I was trying to convey"