George Du Maurier

Inscriptionback to top

Signed in ink lower left-hand corner: ‘Hy.F.’
On reverse inscr. in blue chalk: ‘G. du Maurier’ and ‘66’;
and in red ink ‘310’.

This portraitback to top

Harry Furniss began contributing to Punch in 1880, and he and Du Maurier were colleagues on the magazine until the mid-1890s. They were not natural bedfellows. Du Maurier’s personality seemed to bring out Furniss’s prickliness: ‘It is a curious fact that I really never had a seat allotted to me at the Punch table,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘I always sat in du Maurier’s, except on the rare occasions when he came to the dinner, when I moved up one.’[1] There was an edginess, sometimes rivalry between them; theirs were very opposite sensibilities. ‘Although as du Maurier believed for a time I had the necessary vulgarity of the “bloated millionaire,” to use his own words, we were never much more than acquaintances – although very pleasant acquaintances – and I believe du Maurier reciprocated the kind feeling I had towards him.’[2]

On the back of the drawing are a face of the same sitter, three-quarters to the left, crossed through in blue chalk, and in blue chalk ‘G. du Maurier’ and ‘66’ , and ‘310’ in red ink.[3]

See NPG collection 3337–3535, 3554–3620

Carol Blackett-Ord

Footnotesback to top

1) Furniss 1901, vol.1, p.223.
2) Furniss 1901, p.226. For whole section on Du Maurier by Furniss, see pp.223–31.
3) After remounting no longer viewable; information from NPG RP 3554–3620.

Physical descriptionback to top

Whole-length, seated to left, right elbow on table, cigarette in right hand.

Conservationback to top

Conserved, 1980.

Provenanceback to top

The artist; his sons, from whom purchased (through Theodore Cluse), April 1947

Exhibitionsback to top

Harry Furniss: Confessions of a Caricaturist, NPG, London, 1983 (26).

View all known portraits for George Louis Palmella Busson Du Maurier

View all known portraits for Harry Furniss