Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm NEAC (24 August 1872 – 20 May 1956) was an English essayist, parodist and caricaturist under the signature Max. He was elected to the New English Art Club in 1909.
He first became known in the 1890s as a dandy and a humourist. He was the drama critic for the Saturday Review from 1898 until 1910, when he relocated to Rapallo, Italy. In his later years, he was popular for his occasional radio broadcasts. Among his best-known works is his only novel, Zuleika Dobson, published in 1911. His caricatures, drawn usually in pen or pencil with muted watercolour tinting, are in many public collections.
Early Life
Born in 57 Palace Gardens Terrace, London which is now marked with a blue plaque, Henry Maximilian Beerbohm was the youngest of nine children of a Lithuanian-born grain merchant, Julius Ewald Edward Beerbohm (1811–1892). His mother was Eliza Draper Beerbohm (c. 1833–1918), the sister of Julius's late first wife. Although the Beerbohms were supposed by some to be of Jewish descent, on looking into the question in his later years Beerbohm told a biographer:
“I should be delighted to know that we Beerbohms have that very admirable and engaging thing, Jewish blood. But there seems to be no reason for supposing that we have. Our family records go back as far as 1668, and there is nothing in them compatible with Judaism.”
Beerbohm was close to four half-siblings, one of whom, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, was already a renowned stage actor when Max was a child. Other older half-siblings were the author and explorer Julius Beerbohm and the author Constance Beerbohm.
From 1881 to 1885, Max – who was always called simply "Max" and it is thus that he signed his drawings – attended the day school of a Mr Wilkinson in Orme Square. Wilkinson, Beerbohm later said, "gave me my love of Latin and thereby enabled me to write English". Mrs Wilkinson taught drawing to the students; the only lessons Beerbohm ever had in the subject.
Beerbohm was educated at Charterhouse School and Merton College, Oxford, from 1890, where he was Secretary of the Myrmidon Club. It was at school that he began writing. While at Oxford Beerbohm became acquainted with Oscar Wilde and his circle through his half-brother, Herbert Beerbohm Tree
In 1893, he met William Rothenstein, who introduced him to Aubrey Beardsley and other members of the literary and artistic circle connected with The Bodley Head. Though he was an unenthusiastic student academically, Beerbohm became a well-known figure in Oxford social circles.
He also began submitting articles and caricatures to London publications, which were met enthusiastically. "I was a modest, good-humoured boy", he recalled. "It was Oxford that has made me insufferable." In March 1893, he submitted an article on Oscar Wilde to the Anglo-American Times under the pen name "An American". Later in 1893, his essay "The Incomparable Beauty of Modern Dress" was published in the Oxford journal The Spirit Lamp by its editor, Lord Alfred Douglas.
By 1894, having developed his personality as a dandy and humourist, and already a rising star in English letters, he left Oxford without a degree. His A Defence of Cosmetics (The Pervasion of Rouge) appeared in the first edition of The Yellow Book in 1894, his friend Aubrey Beardsley being art editor at the time. At this time Wilde said of him, "The gods have bestowed on Max the gift of perpetual old age."
In 1895, Beerbohm went to the United States for several months as secretary to his half-brother Herbert Beerbohm Tree's theatrical company. He was fired when he spent far too many hours polishing the business correspondence. There he became engaged to Grace Conover, an American actress in the company, a relationship that lasted several years.
WRITER AND BROADCASTER
On his return to England Beerbohm published his first book, The Works of Max Beerbohm (1896), a collection of his essays which had first appeared in The Yellow Book. His first piece of fiction, The Happy Hypocrite, was published in volume XI of The Yellow Book in October 1896. Having been interviewed by George Bernard Shaw himself, in 1898 he followed Shaw as drama critic for the Saturday Review, on whose staff he remained until 1910. At that time the Saturday Review was undergoing renewed popularity under its new owner, the writer Frank Harris, who would later become a close friend of Beerbohm's.
Caricaturist
In the 1890s, while a student at Oxford University, Beerbohm showed great skill at observant figure sketching. His usual style of single-figure caricatures on formalised groupings, drawn in pen or pencil with delicately applied watercolour tinting, was established by 1896 and flourished until about 1930.
In contrast to the heavier artistic style of the Punch tradition, he showed a lightness of touch and simplicity of line. Beerbohm's career as a professional caricaturist began when he was twenty: in 1892, The Strand Magazine published thirty-six of his drawings of 'Club Types'. Their publication dealt, Beerbohm said, "a great, an almost mortal blow to my modesty".
The first public exhibition of his caricatures was as part of a group show at the Fine Art Society in 1896; his first one-man show at the Carfax Gallery in 1901.
Explaining his system for caricature, Beerbohm wrote: "The whole man must be melted down in a crucible and then, from the solution, fashioned anew. Nothing will be lost but no particle will be as it was before." He concluded: "The most perfect caricature is that which, on a small surface, with the simplest means, most accurately exaggerates, to the highest point, the peculiarities of a human being, at his most characteristic moment, in the most beautiful manner."
Beerbohm was influenced by French cartoonists such as "Sem" (Georges Goursat) and "Caran d'Ache" (Emmanuel Poir). He was hailed by The Times in 1913 as "the greatest of English comic artists", by Bernard Berenson as "the English Goya", and by Edmund Wilson as "the greatest ... portrayer of personalities – in the history of art.”
Usually inept with hands and feet, Beerbohm excelled in heads and with dandified male costume of a period whose elegance became a source of nostalgic inspiration. His collections of caricatures included Caricatures of Twenty-five Gentlemen (1896), The Poets' Corner (1904), Fifty Caricatures (1913) and Rossetti and His Circle (1922).
His caricatures were published widely in the fashionable magazines of the time, and his works were exhibited regularly in London at the Carfax Gallery (1901–08) and Leicester Galleries (1911–57). At his Rapallo home he drew and wrote infrequently and decorated books in his library. These were sold at auction by Sotheby's of London on 12 and 13 December 1960 following the death of his second wife and literary executor Elisabeth Jungmann.
His Rapallo caricatures were mostly of late Victorian and Edwardian political, literary and theatrical personalities. The court of Edward VII had a special place as a subject for affectionate ridicule. Many of Beerbohm's later caricatures were of himself.
Major collections of Beerbohm's caricatures are in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; the Tate collection; the Victoria and Albert Museum; Charterhouse School; the Clark Library, University of California; and the Lilly Library, Indiana University; depositories of both caricatures and archival material include Merton College, Oxford; the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; the Robert H. Taylor collection, Princeton University Library; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; and the privately owned Mark Samuels Lasner collection.
KNIGHTHOOD AND THE MAXIMILIAN SOCIETY
Beerbohm was knighted by George VI in 1939; it was thought that this mark of esteem had been delayed by his mockery in 1911 of the king's parents, about whom he had written a satiric verse, "Ballade Tragique a Double Refrain".
In August 1942, on the occasion of Beerbohm's seventieth birthday, the Maximilian Society was created by a London drama critic in his honour. It had seventy distinguished members, including J. B. Priestley, Walter de la Mare, Augustus John, William Rothenstein, Edward Lutyens, Osbert Lancaster, Siegfried Sassoon, Osbert Sitwell, Leonard Woolf, John Betjeman, Kenneth Clark, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, and Laurence Housman, and planned to add one more member on each of Beerbohm's successive birthdays. In their first meeting, a banquet was held in his honour, and he was presented with seventy bottles of wine.
Death and his Ashes Interred in St. Paul's Cathedral, London
He died at the Villa Chiara, a private hospital in Rapallo, Italy, aged 83, shortly after marrying his former secretary and companion, Elisabeth Jungmann. Beerbohm was cremated in Genoa and his ashes were interred in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral, London, on 29 June 1956.
This is an edited version of the Wikipedia entry for Max Beerbohm.
You can also view (and purchase) a selection of Beerbohm's artworks on the Chris Beetles Gallery website.