Tag Archives: Lance Thackeray

July 14, 2016 · 4:38 pm

More light on Lance

I’ve written about the artist Lance Thackeray before on this site – click on the link in the word cloud to the right. What I like about him – and, again, I have said this before – is not only was he a brilliantly talented draughtsman, but unlike most foreign visitors to Egypt in the early 20th century he seems refreshingly free of condescension toward the country and its people. Instead, he tended to poke fun at his fellow travellers, who in his drawings frequently appear as figures of ridicule, fat, out-of-breath, over-dressed, sunburnt, falling asleep in temples…

The man himself, though, has always been a bit of mystery. I managed to find out very little about him. That has recently changed a little with the appearance of a new book, Lance Thackeray: His Life & Art by historian Tom Askey.

Askey’s interest is in Edwardian illustrators and the book is good at placing Thackeray in the context of his time. He was part of a busy London sketching-and-socialising scene that regularly met in upstairs rooms and boozed with ink brushes to hand. He was moderately successful, landing commissions to illustrate several books and being sent off to America by Tatler. How he ended up in Egypt isn’t quite explained but it may have something to do with the Orientalist painter Robert Talbot Kelly, who’d settled in Egypt in 1883 and published a book called Egypt Painted and Described in 1902. According to Askey, the two artists knew each other and it’s possible Talbot Kelly sold Thackeray on the idea of heading out to Cairo and doing a book of his own (that’s Lance, at the top of this post, sketching in Egypt). When Thackeray’s book, The Light Side of Egypt, appeared in 1907, it was with the same publisher that put out Talbot Kelly’s book.

Askey’s book lacks any details of Thackeray’s time in Egypt. If the artist kept any journals, they haven’t survived. There are no letters, no diaries, no private papers. Thackeray never married and there are no descendants with any kind of archive. Askey has had to stitch together a life out of fragments scattered in public records and newspaper notices.

One of his discoveries, though, was the catalogue to a July 1908 exhibition held at the Leicester Galleries on Leicester Square, London, shared between Thackeray and Talbot Kelly. Talbot Kelly had sixty watercolours in the show, Thackery had sixty-six. The catalogue lists the titles of the works and thirty-six of these paintings are included in The Light Side of Egypt. The other thirty are lost. It was a selling exhibition, so some of them could still be in private hands and may one day resurface. One of the pieces in the show, reproduced in the book, was a sketch of a mule throwing its guidebook-carrying rider, entitled ‘A Stopping Place on the Nile’. It turned up on ebay a few years ago. It now hangs above my desk.

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Tagged as Lance Thackeray, Robert Talbot Kelly, The Light Side of Egypt

May 23, 2013 · 8:05 pm

On Shepheard’s balcony

Old timers may get tired of Shepheard’s Hotel, and find more repose and quieter pleasures at the Savoy, the Semiramis, or the latest architectural wonder, The Heliopolis, but it still remains the most popular hotel in the country. No tourist to Egypt fails to pay a visit to this old-established home. Americans are particularly attracted to it, and would just as soon cut out of their programme the Sphinx or Pyramids, as return home without having put in at least one night there. The balcony is a great feature of the hotel. Every afternoon in the season it is packed with people taking tea and enjoying the passing show. Nothing more interesting or amusing can be imagined than this strange medley of the East and West; nothing more fascinating than studying the picturesque types of the East as they move along the roadway in a ceaseless stream.

From ‘A Series of 10 Egyptian Sketches by Lance Thackeray’, a Players Navy Cut Cigarettes card, issued by John Player & Sons of Nottingham, England, in 1910 or thereabouts

The marvelous Jules Guerin

There are a handful of artists whose names are familiar to anybody interested in travel in Egypt in the 19th and early 20th centuries: the David Roberts and Robert Hay, of course; the watercolourist Augustus Lamplough and orientalist R. Talbot Kelly; and the lesser known but more commercially minded Tony Binder, Willy Burger and Lance Thackeray, all of whom produced designs for postcards and advertising. I’ve posted on most of these artists before. Recently I came across a new (to me) and exciting addition to that list.

Jules Guerin (born in St Louis, Missouri in 1866) was an American illustrator who studied art in Chicago, where he shared a studio with cartoonist Winsor McCay of Little Nemo fame. He specialized in architectural illustration and provided spectacular birds-eye perspective drawings for the monumental Plan of Chicago in 1907. He produced competition drawings for Henry Bacon’s proposed Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, and when Bacon triumphed Guerin was asked to paint two large murals on its ceiling.

From 1909 to 1911 the painter travelled with British journalist Robert Hichens through Egypt, the Holy Land, and the Near East. The trip resulted in several books, including Egypt and its Monuments, published in 1908. Hichens text is negligible, but Guerin’s illustrations are astonishing. They manage to be both incredibly precise (as you’d expect from an architectural illustrator) but at the same time beguilingly romantic thanks to the dramatic perspectives and set-like design, and an Impressionistic colour palette.

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Tagged as Egypt and its Monuments, Jules Guerin, Lance Thackeray, Robert Hichens

March 9, 2013 · 5:30 pm

Thackeray at the hotels

Back last August, I blogged about the artist Lance Thackeray and promised to post more examples of his work. It’s a taken a while, but here we go – these sketches, all of which deal with hotel life, are taken from his 1908 book The Light Side of Egypt, along with the accompanying text.

The Vultures
No one in Egypt gives you a more hearty welcome than the dragoman. He remembers his old friends, and beams upon the newcomers with childlike simplicity; he speaks English, and other languages, also American – sure! Put yourself in his hands and he will see you through. If you have money to burn he will fan the flame. His favourite hobby is collecting baksheesh, which includes a ten per cent commission on everything you purchase while in his company. This accounts for his passion for the bazaars.

Cairo Curios, or the Shepheard’s Flock
No one could desire a more delightful way of spending an hour than to sit on the balcony of Shepheard’s Hotel and watch the curious crowd of natives who decorate the front in every imaginable costume. Millions of piastres must have passed through its balcony railings in exchange for the various articles which the natives hawk in the street below. Shawls, beads, scarabs, fly-whisks, stuffed snakes and crocodiles, and many other charms and horrors, are here bargained for and bought to decorate or disfigure our Western homes.

Romeo and Juliet, or the Balcony Scene at Shepheard’s Hotel
The balcony of this famous hotel still remains the happy hunting ground of the tourist. It has been the scene of many delightful comedies, and more than one tragedy. The beginning of many a love story, and also the end. The arrival of some new beauty will send a flutter through the hearts of the male portion of the visitors, and arouse the susceptibilities of the resident soldier; she will be come the Juliet of the balcony, but with more than one Romeo; and when she at last boards her train at the station, a sigh of relief goes up from the mothers of rival daughters, and the pulse of the Turf Club returns to normal.

The Parting Guest
Any lack of attention which may have shown itself during your stay at the hotel in this country is thoroughly made up for by the extraordinary amount of it which is wasted on you during the day of your departure. You will, no doubt, have provided yourself with a good handful of loose change for those servants who have become familiar obstacles; but you are not prepared for the sudden attack of civility which greets you around the hotel entrance. It is no use looking over their heads, or putting on a far-away expression, as they are sure to trip you up. So pay up and try to look pleasant.

Globe Trotters
It is the hour of the departure. Men and women, from all quarters of the globe, are busy shaking hands, exchanging cards, and pressing cordial invitations upon each other to distant and impossible parts of the earth. The American blonde walks down to her ’bus with a supreme air of indifference and importance, holding fast to her bag, leaving along line of males guessing their chances of meeting on the steamer. The hotel manager stands deferentially by receiving the congratulations and au revoirs of his best customers, and the keen-eyed dragomans rush in for a farewell handshake with their old clients.

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Tagged as dragoman, Lance Thackeray, Shepheard's

August 27, 2012 · 4:19 pm

The Light Side of Egypt

Of all the books I accumulated while researching Grand Hotels of Egypt (and, boy, did I accumulate some books), the desert island book – the one item you’d save from the wave that sweeps your library out to sea – is something called The Light Side of Egypt by Lance Thackeray. Published in 1908 it contains 36 painted plates, each with a single paragraph of commentary. A big reason I’m fond of it is that the subject matter is the same as my book, which, despite the title, is not really hotels but the experiences of early(ish) travellers in Egypt. Another reason is that it makes me laugh.

Thackeray was a satirical artist of immense, if never fully realised, talent. In England he made his living drawing for humorous postcards. He worked for a company called Raphael Tuck & Sons of London, producing his first postcard for them in 1900 and going on to dash out around 800 further designs over the next 15 years. He was a terrific draughtsman with a simple but beautiful line and a good eye for the comedic.

His subjects were toffs in top hats on the town, gents at the snooker table, rotund cricketers, gangly beachgoers and manic enthusiasts indulging in the new-fangled fad of motoring. He gently poked fun at the lot, using his drawing skills to lampoon the mannerisms of Edwardian English Society. He drew for Punch and was a founder member of the London Sketch Club.

Whether on commission or on a whim, in 1906/07 Thackeray went out to Egypt. He was probably there for several months, accumulating enough material not just for The Light Side of Egypt but also for another book, The People of Egypt, which was published in 1910. Unlike most artists who spent their time on the Nile sketching temples, mosques and desert scenery, Thackeray was more interested in observing his fellow travellers. He drew them climbing pyramids, haggling in the souk, flirting on the hotel terrace and snoozing in the shade of pharaonic masonry. He also drew them looking foolish in their mounds of inappropriate clothing, laid out by the heat, outsmarted by local traders, and defeated by the willfullness of donkeys and camels. Most Western writers who visited Egypt at this time were at best condescending towards the country and its people, if not outright racist, but Thackeray saw the pomposity of the Westerner in Egypt and punctured it with his pencil.

So who was Lance Thackeray? That I don’t really know. Public records offer a sort of biographical skeleton: he was born in 1867 in Darlington, County Durham, the fifth child of ten (five boys, five girls). His father was a railway porter and one of Lance’s first jobs was as a clerk for the railways. However, in 1897 he was making his living as an artist down in London with a studio at 169 Ebury Street – where he came by his training or the money to pay for London lodgings, I don’t know. In 1904 he spent two months in America, returning to take up lodgings in Notting Hill, where he lived for the next ten years.

In November 1915, he signed up to join the British Army’s Artists’ Rifles Regiment 28th Battalion. He never saw action: he died on 10 August the following year in Brighton, age 52, of pernicious anemia. He never married (I have a suspicion he was gay) and the little money he left went to a sister.

Beyond that, Lance is a bit of a mystery. His work is coveted by postcard collectors and his two books fetch good prices on antiquarian book sites, otherwise he’s forgotten. In the coming months I’ll be posting some of the plates from his books with commentary, but I’ll begin here with a bunch of postcards that resulted from his trip to Egypt. Meanwhile, if anyone knows anything about this favourite artist of mine, I’d love to hear from you.