45. Charles Samuel Keene
(1823-1891)
The Cellist

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Keene, The Cellist

The Cellist

Etching, 131 x 83 mm. Brilliant impression on laid paper with good margins and with a stamped signature. Keene enjoyed great fame as a humorous illustrator (for Punch magazine, principally), but on the side, he was a masterly, if hardly prolific, etcher. He was admired and befriended by Whistler, who declared, with typical overstatement, that Keene was the greatest English artist since Hogarth. Keene’s etchings were generally small and most of them were published only after his death, frequently bearing a stamped signature, as here. He, in his modest way, had wanted them destroyed.