"Say, Watchman, What of the Night?'
So goes the Club song, a melodramatic dirge composed by Arthur Sullivan, and sung, one imagines, loudly after dinner, with lugubrious theatricality by the members. The ambiguous answer to the question (asked originally in Isaiah of the guard set to watch for an Assyrian invasion of Israel) was: 'The morning comes, but also the night,' or, after the good times, bad times follow.
The men of the London Sketch Club were clearly enjoying themselves far too much, with wine and song (but no women of course). You can tell because the cartoons that the members drew are still very funny today. You might wish you'd been to their sketching evenings and dinners, in the same way that you might be glad you didn't have to attend a soirée with, say, Aubrey Beardsley (not a member) and his friends.
Phil May, who died aged thirty-nine of cirrhosis of the liver, was my favourite member of the Club, the one I'd most have liked to have had dinner with, of whom Simon Houfe (Dictionary of Illustrators) wrote: May was the obverse of the Beardsley coin: if the latter was the master of the refined line, the former was of the eliminated line.' He was also wonderfully witty, had a bulldog, and wore very loud suits, and opened his door saying (to the painter Lavery) 'Come in and listen to it, dear boy.'
The London Sketch Club was, and still is, full of witty, unconventional, subversive and observant men (and now women), in the very best mould of British eccentrics."
Rupert Maas
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