Kindly Eye

Tall and red-faced, George Belcher was one of the sights of London. For daytime wear, Artist Belcher chose the tweediest of hunting tweeds or else a funereal black cape and high satin stock. At night he preferred Victorian dinner jackets, lace cuffs, and ruffles. Thus attired, he spent half a century stalking likely subjects through London’s foggy streets and second-best bar parlors. All his models, he liked to boast, were amateurs, “taken from life.”

His sympathetic, soft-pencil sketches of bitter-bibbing charladies and cockney pub-dwellers were for several decades familiar to Punch and Tatler readers. The drawings had a good humor of their own, though the gags that went with them were too topical or parochial for export.

Belcher’s blatant bohemianism and his contrastingly quiet humor were enough to endear him to the public, but it was the strict realism of his easel paintings which impressed Britain’s stuffy Royal Academicians. In 1945 they made him a member.

His best-known oil, exhibited at the Academy in 1936, and the Academy’s award-winner of the year, showed that Belcher’s realism was of a far more literal sort than Ben Shahn’s. Belcher once described the painting as “a picture of a shabby though very happy gentleman who is obviously a street musician. He is at home, seated at his table. You can see how he has been enjoying himself—there are heads and tails of herrings on a plate, a bottle which has contained stout, and a glass which betrays the fact that he has drunk the stout. There is also a half-empty packet of cigarets. The happy gentleman is all alone and he is leaning back in his chair, playing his cornet. What is he playing? Well, I’ve called the picture I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls”.

A man who took pleasure in taking pains, Belcher once spent two hours roasting a chicken to precisely the right shade of brown for painting. Though other Punch favorites, such as Rowland Emett and Fougasse, relied more on fantasy or stylization for their effect, Belcher never felt the least temptation to desert, or improve on, the humor of the world around him. Last week, at 72, he died.