to see them. He found enough beauty and romance in all that was around him, and, in his Punch work, enough subtle humour in nature seized at her most humorous moments to satisfy him. He never required his models to grin through a horse collar, as James Gillray did, or to put on their company manners, as was George du Maurier's wont. But Keene was not only a brilliant worker in pen and ink. As an etcher he has also to be reckoned with, notwithstanding the fact that his plates numbered not more than fifty at the outside. Impressions of them are exceedingly rare, and hardly half a dozen of the plates were known to be in existence [as of 1911]. He himself regarded them only as experiments in a difficult but fascinating medium. But in the opinion of the expert they suffice to place him among the best etchers of the 19th century. Apart from the etched frontispieces to some of the Punch pocket-books, only three, and these by no means the best, have been published. Writing in L'Artiste of a few which he had seen, Félix Bracquemond said: 'By the freedom, the largeness of their drawing and execution, these plates must be classed amongst modern etchings of the first rank.' A few impressions are in the British Museum, but in the main they were given away to friends and lie hidden in the albums of the collector." The painter Walter Sickert cites Keene often in his book A Free House! or the Artist as Craftsman edited by Osbert Sitwell. Sickert describes the drawings of Keene as having an authenticity about them because he draws from life as a direct observer and avoids the usual cliches that were common in his day. Sickert urges the use of "sight size" drawing from life, by which he means to draw a 6-foot man from 8 feet away so the size of the figure can be seen as a whole and brought to the page as if one was drawing on a pane of glass while looking at the subject. "And so, from the incised designs on bones scratched by primeval man, to the drawings of Charles Keene, has line been the language of design... Line supposes an unbroken thought, a sentence said in a breath. Line supposes that the hand is not taken off the paper." References Bibliography Journals Bracquemond, Félix