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Drawing
May, Philip William - Enlarge image
Drawing
- Place of origin:
London, England (made)
- Date:
1898 (made)
- Artist/Maker:
May, Philip William (R.I.), born 1864 - died 1903 (artist)
- Materials and Techniques:
Pen and ink (over pencil) on paper
- Museum number:
E.667-1949
- Gallery location:
Prints & Drawings Study Room, level E, case I, shelf 58
This image of a fashionably-dressed black couple reflects, in subject matter, caricatures made by artists in North America earlier in the century. Images like those created by Edward W. Clay for his Life in Philadelphia series in 1828-30 satirised the adoption of fashionable dress and manners by members of the black community, a community which had only recently gained freedom from slavery. Depicting black Americans as affected over-dressed dandies, the images reveal much about white attitudes to black emancipation.
This drawing was created in 1898 by Philip William May, a London-based social and political caricaturist. His most popular works deal with lower and middle-class London life in the late Victorian period and he drew inspiration from the street, the music hall, the boxing ring and gin palace. It is possible that May saw this couple, who appear to have been drawn from life, in London where there was a conspicuous, if not large, black population. Were it not for the cockerel on the woman’s hat and the caption added in pencil below (Woman[:] What’ll Mrs Edwards say when she sees dis ex hat!’) this caricature would - more simply - be a lively figure study.
It is not clear what May intended to do with the drawing. He was a regular contributor to Punch and produced his own annual album, Phil May’s Winter Annual from 1892.
