{"id":78626,"date":"2014-10-27T19:07:00","date_gmt":"2014-10-27T23:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=78626"},"modified":"2014-10-27T19:07:00","modified_gmt":"2014-10-27T23:07:00","slug":"thackeray-gets-grotesque","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/10\/27\/thackeray-gets-grotesque\/","title":{"rendered":"Thackeray Gets Grotesque"},"content":{"rendered":"

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When William Makepeace Thackeray died, near the end of 1863, he left behind a formidable library in a mansion he\u2019d only recently designed, erected, and occupied. A few months later, his home was dismantled and his books were put to auction. On the flyleaves and margins, their new owners discovered a wealth of Thackeray\u2019s sketches, some in pencil and others in pen and ink.<\/p>\n

Thackeray\u2019s talents as an artist were no secret\u2014he\u2019d contributed illustrations to many of his own novels, including Vanity Fair\u2014<\/em>but few were aware of the extent of his doodling habit. More than ten years later, in 1875, the art collector Joseph Grego published Thackerayana<\/a><\/em>, an assemblage of more than six hundred of Thackeray\u2019s drawings with extracts of the books in which he\u2019d drawn them. (Grego, perhaps fearing the consequences of his blatant copyright infringement, presented the collection anonymously.)<\/p>\n

What surprises most about the sketches in Thackerayana <\/em>is their range\u2014Thackeray was an adept caricaturist, but these drawings find him equally at home in more high-flown styles. As his source material moved him, he could do landscapes and portraiture, the irreverent and the solemn, the macabre, the surreal, the juvenile. It\u2019s these last three qualities, in particular, that caught my eye; with Halloween around the corner, it seems as good a time as any to present a portfolio of Thackeray at his most imaginatively unhinged. He had a thing for combat, for instance, and for men with hideously bulbous noses. Here, then, are a series of Thackerayana<\/em>\u2019s more unsettling entries. <\/p>\n

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When William Makepeace Thackeray died, near the end of 1863, he left behind a formidable library in a mansion he\u2019d only recently designed, erected, and occupied. A few months later, his home was dismantled and his books were put to auction. On the flyleaves and margins, their new owners discovered a wealth of Thackeray\u2019s sketches, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2384],"tags":[12976,1146,2783,15814,15813,13134,15815,50,12213],"class_list":["post-78626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-look","tag-drawings","tag-halloween","tag-illustrations","tag-joseph-grego","tag-macabre","tag-sketches","tag-thackerayana","tag-vanity-fair","tag-william-makepeace-thackeray"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHappy Halloween from Thackeray<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A collection of William Makepeace Thackeray\u2019s wide range of drawings.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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