Sketchbook

George Cruikshank · n.d.

Medium

Sketchbook with 16 leaves and 34 pages (including endpapers) of drawings in graphite, many with watercolor, pen and ink or gouache, on cream wove paper, with additional drawings on wove and laid papers tipped in, bound with worn calf-covered boards and in a red levant morocco slip case lined in red watered silk

Original size

Sheets: 12.5 × 20.6 cm (4 15/16 × 8 1/8 in.); Sketchbook: 13.3 × 21 × 1 cm (5 1/4 × 8 5/16 × 7/16 in.); Slipcase: 23.4 × 15.6 × 2.6 cm (9 1/4 × 6 3/16 × 1 1/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

This intimate sketchbook offers a rare glimpse into the private working world of one of Victorian England's most celebrated graphic artists, its pages alive with the restless energy of a master draughtsman thinking on paper. George Cruikshank (1792–1878) made his name through sharp political caricature and his beloved illustrations for Charles Dickens, but private sketchbooks like this reveal his true range — graphite studies giving way to watercolor washes, pen and ink, and touches of gouache, all worked across the warm surface of cream wove paper. The worn calf-covered boards and the fine red levant morocco slip case tell you something about how carefully these drawings were kept, even as the pages themselves preserve all the spontaneity of thinking with a pencil. Later in life, Cruikshank became a passionate temperance campaigner and famously claimed — to Dickens' considerable annoyance — that he had been the true moral force behind the social conscience of Oliver Twist. The hand-painted oil reproduction brings this layered, mixed-media work onto a single canvas, translating the tonal warmth of those original pages and the loose, assured marks of an artist who never stopped drawing.