Without Beggarstaffs, there’d be no Banksy

A fin-de-siècle collaboration between two brothers-inlaw rewrote the rules of art, says Christopher Howse

To me, the 1890s seem to explode with energy, not expire as a fin de siècle. An expression of that energy was the art of the poster, which brought together Toulouse-Lautrec’s simplification of the human form, the Japanese influence that had been devoured by Whistler and the brave outline and block approach of Aubrey Beardsley.

In 1894 crowds went to see an exhibition of poster art at the Royal Aquarium, a vast building opposite Parliament. Prominent was the work of two artists who signed themselves J&W Beggarstaff. Some assumed they were brothers. In fact, they were brothers-in-law: William Nicholson, aged 22, and James Pryde, six years older. The two painters had been on the lookout for ways to make money, and posters seemed promising. Nicholson had seen the name Beggarstaff on an old sack.

The Beggarstaffs did not end up making much money, but they were a succès d’estime. Their partnership, told through an exhibition of 150 works at the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, thrived from 1894 to 1899, and I think they hardly realised at first the explosive effect of their stylish designs. Their influence was

absorbed by high and low art, being seen in the paintings of William Orpen and Rex Whistler, the posters of John Hassall (“Skegness is so bracing”) and the illustrations of Edward Penfield and Nicolas Bentley.

Everyone knows the Beggarstaffs’ poster of Don Quixote, cut out in brown paper, on his white horse before a black windmill. It was made in 1895 for a forgotten one-act play at the Lyceum, and became famous at the time even though Sir Henry Irving, the theatre’s actor-manager, refused to have posters made from it. He thought the Lyceum too elevated to advertise on hoardings.

The breakthrough for the Beggarstaffs had come a year earlier with an astonishing essay in yellow, white and black – with a touch of red for lips – of a young woman with a basket over her arm, to advertise Kassama corn flour. As the curator of the Fitzwilliam exhibition, Stephen Calloway, points out, the technique here is not the use of cutouts to make silhouettes, but an exercise in losing the middle tones. He likens it to the graffito by Banksy of the girl with a heart-shaped balloon.

Nicholson (like Calloway) was a dandy, not in the latest fashion, but in a fashion of his own devising, his hair combed into a curl above the cheek, his silk dressing gowns of the biggest spots, his high collars flying away and his white duck trousers defying the paint from his easel. Pryde, a bigger-made man, would wear a plum-coloured coat with large round buttons. Their extraordinary partnership came into being because Pryde’s sister Mabel, the daughter of an Edinburgh headmaster, had adventurously gone off to study at Hubert Herkomer’s school of art in London. There she fell for the

BOLD SWEEP This 1895 Cinderella showed a motor-car on stage

PLAY TIME Beggarstaffs poster for Sir Henry Irving’s 1895 Don Quixote