Max Beerbohm Caricatures
"The incomparable Max" was indeed incomparable--a writer of wit, charm, and  originality, and a caricaturist with an "unfailing eye for the centre of a situation" and a  "gift for fixing it in a memorably comic form." The collection of drawings presented by Mr.  Hall covers Beerbohm's field of victims thoroughly. Authors, artists, actors, politicians, and royalty were all  his targets. The text and notes are well written (exceptionally so for the art-book genre) and reinforced by  quotations from Max and his highly articulate contemporaries. Max gave up cartooning by 1942, because,  he explained, "I began to remember people more or less exactly as they were, and was obliged to put  in the exaggerations consciously." An earlier description of his methods emphasized memory, not  direct vision, as the basis of his resolutely unrealistic art. "I cannot," he wrote a friend,  "imagine a worse thing befalling anyone than to see the streets peopled with my creations. It has  never befallen me." The late drawings from the years shortly before Max "laid aside" his  pencil show clearly what had happened. The subjects are recognizable, but they are no longer victims. The  gadfly had lost his sting, and Max, a sound critic, knew it. But in his heyday he gave wonderfully effective  and amusing jabs that can still draw a chuckle. --The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe-Lou AdamsHall's witty commentary is supplemented by Beerbohm's own prose as well as contemporary  observations by the likes ofVirginia  WoolfandE. F. Benson....  More entertaining than conventional histories of the period, Hall's collection animates an era of eccentrics,  many of whose priceless peculiarities would, but for Beerbohm, have been erased by time.  --The New York Times Book Review, Sarah Harrison Smith