American 1920s High Society’s lifestyles, as seen by Anne Fish

Fish, And Her Work

When, in the summer of 1914, certain remarkable drawings of social life, by a new hand, began to appear, in Vanity Fair in New York, and in The Tatler in London, people all over the world stared at them, amazed, amused, admiring. Then they stared at each other, demanding, with one voice: “Who, under the sun, is Fish?” Meantime, a tall, slender young girl of twenty-two was drawing the pictures that were helping to keep laughter alive during those dark days — and troubling very little indeed as to whether Fame’s wandering searchlight would ever find her out.
That girl was “Fish,” deemed to-day, by many critics, the most distinguished of satirical black-and-white illustrators. Miss Fish has created, on that miraculous drawing-board of hers, a complete human society, as original and amusing as the worlds of George Du Maurier and Charles Dana Gibson. It is a world populated by young-old matrons, astoundingly mature young girls, Victorian lady remnants, resplendent captains of industry, pussy-footing English butlers, amourous nursemaids, race touts, yearning young lovers, swanking soldiers, blank and vapid bores, bridge-playing parsons, and middle-class millionaires. But, for all its sophistication, it is a world of innocence.

The creatures in it are of a touching simplicity, an incredible naïveté. Fish is one of the only caricaturists who has ever done this sort of satire without malice — who has ever treated the poor, misguided children of this world as if they were really children. But there is beauty in her extraordinary gallery, as well as caricature. The patterns on her flappers’ gowns are like laces and hangings by Beardsley; a Pomeranian lying on a rug, becomes a patch of elegant scrollery, like a detail in a Japanese print.

There is no trace at all, in her drawings, of the hackneyed conventions of illustration : everything in them is presented through the medium of an original feeling for form. Even her profiteering millionaires become designs made up of deft and satisfying curves.
Her sketches are creations not only of a clever and sophisticated intelligence, but of a true artist. In depicting fashionable society Miss Fish is perhaps at her best, for the reason that the spectacle which seems to interest her most is that pageant of “smart” types that race, as if by magic, to her drawing-board, from every haunt of social life — from opera boxes, ballrooms, race-meets, cabarets, smart supper parties, dinners of state, musicales, and the thousand and one happy backgrounds against which the contemporary beau monde is wont to pose and posture. In the pages of this book the reader will meet only with Miss Fish’s social creations: the double-decked dowagers, the amateur vampires, the horsey horsemen, the diabolically clever little debutantes, the tango addicts, the incurable bridge-players, the worn-out week-end hostesses, and the myriad types of human beings that seem perpetually to haunt the portals of our most exalted society.

For six years, Miss Fish’s sketches have appeared, in America, only in Vanity Fair. For the past two years the British public has only seen her work in Vogue (the British edition), and in The Patrician, — the English edition of Vanity Fair. All the drawings in this book appear here with the permission of Conde Nast, the publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The Patrician. The Editor: Heyworth Campbell.