An exhibition of Osbert Lancaster's drawings, cartoons, illustrations and set and costume designs, selected by James Knox, will begin at the Wallace Collection on 2 October. Lancaster was a short man with a big head, strikingly large blue eyes, a curled moustache and a dandy's taste for very good, but emphatic clothes (pink shirts, bow ties). He surveyed English society from a secure promontory. An upper-middle-class upbringing, public school and Oxford delimited the foreground. Friendship and work extended the view but did not change it. It was an ideal position - secure, informed, confident - from which to make jokes about England, its classes, styles and politics, and the effect on them of encroaching modernity. In his autobiography, All Done from Memory, he draws himself wheeled in his pram by Nanny in Kensington Gardens and cooed over by a veiled lady with an ermine muff and hat, and in another illustration he is taking tea with aunts whom Lartigue would have been keen to snap.

LRB 25 September 2008 | PDF Download