The man who... loved Gozo

Heritage Malta is currently hosting (until January) an exhibition featuring drawings of scenes of Malta by well-known cartoonist H.M. Bateman at the salon of the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta (until January).

Mr Bateman was perhaps the best-known cartoonist in Britain in the years between the two world wars. He spent his last years in Malta doing what he had always yearned to do – painting simple scenes.

He died on one of his walks outside the Royal Lady Hotel (today the Grand Hotel) in Mgarr, Gozo.

On Tuesday, Heritage Malta invited the public to view the exhibition and also to hear a presentation on the artist by Anthony Anderson, the author of The Man Who Was HM Bateman. Mr Anderson is married to the artist’s granddaughter, who was also at the presentation.

In 1937 Bateman wrote: “I would like to paint a quite serious picture; one that did not depend on any comic situation to make it appeal… the picture I have in mind is quite a simple one. A landscape perhaps, with just the way the light falls on a house or a tree, almost anything would do for a subject so long as it expresses the beauty of earth and sky and water, so that it would charm you”. Having painted in much of Europe, in 1964 he finally discovered the Maltese Islands, and here he found the climate and unspoilt local charm for which he was looking.

Settling eventually in Gozo, he spent the next five years painting tirelessly, struggling modestly to master the art of colour and light, continually experimenting with different painting techniques.

He painted what he saw: the boats in the harbour, the donkey carts in the lane, the village bars and local inhabitants, the churches and the landscapes.

When he died at the roadside while out for a walk in Mgarr in 1970, he left behind bundles of paintings and drawings, often executed on the backs of envelopes and nearly all unsigned.

Since the recent research into his paintings by Bateman’s granddaughter, who tracked down several people who remember him and discovered the locations he depicted, there has been a sudden interest in Bateman in Malta itself. He has been taken to the hearts of the Maltese and Gozitans and this year a series of commemorative stamps was issued by MaltaPost alongside those of Edward Lear, another celebrated painter of the Islands.

To many admirers of the art of the cartoon, H.M. Bateman is the most original, the most varied, the most brilliant – and, indeed, the funniest – genius of his times.

Born in 1887, he was already drawing for publication in his early teens. Astonishingly prolific and inventive, everything he saw became material, so that his work can be read as a social history of Britain in the first half of the 20th century and, to an extraordinary degree, as a kind of autobiography. His family and friends; his trips to the fair, to the seaside, abroad; his passions for the music hall, for tap-dancing, for boxing, for fishing, for golf; his desperate experiences in the First World War; his car, his house, his vacuumcleaner; his triumphs and disasters over many years – all find their way into his cartoons. His childhood years, in purely Edwardian times, are all there in his first drawings.

By 1908, when he was just 21 years old, he was producing as many as 60 cartoons a month.

His style developed and changed radically over the years. From the graceful and rhythmical lines of his earlier work to the stark brilliance of his strip cartoons and the furious energy of his “Man Who...” series, his essential qualities of superb draughtsmanship, astonishing observation and a profound appreciation of humanity’s foibles are always married to a wonderful wit and narrative perfection. He told marvellously funny stories in pictures.

He made three great and radical contributions to the art of the cartoon in this country. The first came in 1908 when, aged 21, he suffered a nervous breakdown probably caused by the dreadful choice he had to make between pushing forward with his career as a cartoonist, already much in demand, or trying to become a “serious” painter. This derangement, coupled with an absolute devotion to the surreal madness of music hall comedians, seems to have given him a new intensity, a highly charged way of working.

At a stroke he did away with the conventional stillness – not to say stiffness – of cartoon figures and, as he himself put it, “went mad on paper”. Up until this point in time, conventional cartoons had been illustrated jokes – drawings with a few lines of text or dialogue underneath. Take away the dialogue and the drawing becomes meaningless, the joke lay in the words.

From 1909 onwards, Bateman drew no more illustrated jokes and so changed profoundly the art of the cartoon, investing it with a new freedom of line and expression. The drawing became funny in itself, selfexplanatory. He made emotion the subject of his cartoons and the characters became actors expressing feeling, rather than illustrations to an idea. This was a new, histrionic, hyperbolic creative method and its effects are still apparent amongst some of the greatest cartoonists today.

The second great and innovative contribution Bateman made to the art of the cartoon came during the First World War. He had been rejected by the army and retreated – ill and deeply depressed – to a remote inn on Dartmoor. But he worked prodigiously and in 1916 started to produce astonishing strip cartoons that immediately gripped the public and the attention of his fellow artists.

As a child he had been an avid reader of the new comic papers and these were, of course, full of comic strips. But these stories and adventures, full of invention and wonderful comic characters though they were, relied again on the story underneath, or speech-bubbles within, and were childish and simple.

What Bateman did was to create self-contained strip cartoons without words, brilliant, innovative, cinematic comic stories, adult, often harsh and macabre, and frequently – at this period – to do with themes of guilt, punishment, retribution and death.

Cartoons like The Boy Who Breathed on the Glass at the British Museum, The Guest Who Filled his Fountain Pen with Hotel Ink or Mexicans at Play are all wonderfully humorous but also harsh and complex and they came as a tremendous shock amongst the predictable pages of Punch or The Tatler. Nothing like them had been seen in this country before.

Many of his cartoons were about the war he missed because he was turned down. The troops loved his depictions and at long last the War Office perked up and tried to see the advantages of drawing him into the war effort.

His third major influence on the history of the cartoon came in 1921 and continued for many years. It is, perhaps, the most famous of all his contributions and profoundly changed the landscape of humorous art: he started on his great series of Man Who cartoons.

Looking back through his work, it is apparent that he had been playing with this idea for many years, but the publication of The Guardsman Who Dropped It by The Tatler as a full colour centre-spread caused a sensation and engendered a series of cartoons that lasted for the rest of Bateman’s career.

The majority of the Man Who cartoons describe some terrible social misdemeanour, some offence against accepted custom and behaviour. They contain those repeated descriptions of anger, consternation and disgust that became the hallmarks of the Bateman cartoon: eyeballs popping out of sockets, contorted bodies, figures prone or airborne.

The protagonist is shown recoiling in horror from his actions and the attention focused on him, or else blithely carrying on, innocent of the outrage he has perpetrated and the world’s indignant roar. And the cartoons single out for scrutiny not only the individual who has caused such offence but, perhaps more interestingly, the society that condemns him.

Astonishingly, right at the height of his fame, still in his forties, a few years before the Second World War, Bateman gave up all humorous art completely and slipped off quietly, alone, to pursue his old dream of becoming a “serious painter”.

He died in his 84th year, still painting every day, out walking in the sunshine on Gozo, where he had lived simply and frugally in a quiet hotel, in the room with the finest view.