Walter Sneyd Sheet of Caricature Portraits

An original early 19th-century graphite drawing, Walter Sneyd, Sheet of Caricature Portraits.

A fabulous sheet of early 19th-century caricatural portraits by Walter Sneyd (1809–1888), who was a bibliophile, antiquarian, minister and amateur caricaturist.

The majority of the profiles in this drawing are elegant young ladies, and the sketches could be mistaken for flattering portrait studies were it not for the buxom character at the top of the sheet, the exaggerated features of the older man at the right and the rather comic expression of the man lower right. These caricatures are not damning satire, but the artist's lightly acerbic wit bubbles below the drawing's refined surface.

Rev Walter Sneyd was one of six children of Lieutenant-Colonel Walter Sneyd (1752–1829) of Keele Hall, an ancient family of local consequence in Staffordshire. He was educated at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, graduating in 1831. Ordained in 1834, he took up a curacy at Begbroke near Woodstock, where he remained for the next thirty years. He was an ardent bibliophile and over his lifetime he formed an important collection of choice illuminated medieval manuscripts and early printed books.

Whilst at Oxford, Walter Sneyd wrote the humorous satirical work 'Portraits of the Spruggins Family / arranged by Richard Sucklethumkin Spruggins, Esq', published in 1829. The book, which includes numerous caricature drawings by Sneyd, is a parody of contemporary family histories and similar works of 19th-century antiquaries, genealogists and art historians. Its humour is very much in the vein of 18th-century British satire which characterised much literature in Britain in the long 18th-century.

A reading of 'Portraits of the Spruggins Family', with its light-hearted mockery of pomposity and pretension, brings particular life and character to the present drawing, which also presents the upper classes in a lightly humorous way. Sneyd writes, for example:

What pastoral simplicity—what engaging sweetness appears in the interesting countenance of Cynthia, daughter of Matthew and Melicent Spruggins, the elegant female here represented, tending her favourite lambkin. Far too refined to engage in the ordinary pursuits of this turbulent world, this amiable lady passed her innocuous life in administering the comforts of the brute creation, and admiring the works of nature. She died a Spinster.

This drawing represents a very remarkable curiosity which has been handed down as an heir-loom in our family. A shoe which was undoubtedly possessed and frequently worn by Joan Spryggyns, early in the 16th century; it is in fine preservation, and a morsel of crushed cheese adhering to the sole is much discoloured, and bears evident marks of extreme antiquity.

In graphite with touched of coloured pastel.