Harry Furniss
Date of birth: 1854.03.26
Place of birth: Wexford
Date of death: 1925
Category: artist, illustrator
Identity:
Harry Furniss was a political caricaturist and illustrator.
Life:
Furniss, who was on the staff of Punch from 1884 to 1894, in 1893 caricatured J. G. S. McNeill as a gorilla, causing the latter to assault him, and reminding David Croal Thomson of when Whistler struck Augustus Moore in the lobby of the Drury Lane Theatre (#08250). In Paris in 1894 Whistler expressed the wish to Joseph Pennell, who it appears himself had been involved with some kind of controversy with 'the wretched Furniss Joko man' (as Whistler described him), to be sent anything entertaining by Furniss as it appeared in the press (#07797, #07798).
Furniss exhibited at the Royal Academy, Fine Art Society and Royal Hibernian Academy. However, he also made fun of the artistic establishment, for example, publishing in 1887, Harry Furniss's Royal Academy, An Artistic Joke, in which he parodied works such as John Brett's Britannia's Realm (1880; Tate Gallery, London).
Bibliography:
Johnson, J., and A. Greutzner, Dictionary of British Artists 1880-1940, Woodbridge, 1980; McConkey, Kenneth, Memory and Desire: Painting in Britain and Ireland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, London, 2002.
