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.
