(b London, 10 Aug 1823; d London, 4 Jan 1891). English illustrator and caricaturist. Keene’s family left London for Ipswich where he spent two years at school; thereafter, he preferred to be known as an ‘Eastern Counties man’, not as a cockney ‘like Hogarth and Cruikshank’. Encouraged by his mother, Keene followed apprenticeships with an architect and with Whympers, the wood-engravers, pursuing his studies at the Clipstone Street Art society. Early work for the Illustrated London News was followed by employment with Punch. Keene’s illustrations for Punch introduced, wherever possible, the social side of the magazine’s political concerns. This emphasis prevailed from his first design, A Sketch of the New Paris Street-sweeping Machines (Dec 1851), which gave an observer’s view of the cannon used by Louis Napoleon to suppress opposition to his recent coup d’état, to his last, ’Arry on the Boulevards (Aug 1890), in which an aging middle-class Englishman ponders his newspaper, unaware of the eye of the French waiter upon him. His fascination with dialect and other marks of provincial difference suited Punch’s persistent investigation of the aspects of national identity. The French classed Keene with Degas, Adolph Menzel and Pissarro, while the English veered between suppressed embarrassment and censure. Ruskin, for example, thought him ‘coarse’.

• Keene, Charles
  • Japonisme, §1: Origins and diffusion
  • Watercolour societies and sketching clubs
  • Wood-engraving, §2: History