Inscribed with title, signed and dated u.r.: Mr Henry Tonks The Famous Ventriloquist with his favourite puppet/Albert R/1906 and with later dedication l.l. AR to HT/Jan 9 (?) 1924

Sepia wash over pen and ink, 23 by 18 cm

Provenance: a gift from the artist to Henry Tonks in 1924, subsequently bequeathed to his nephew, Myles Tonks

This caricature portrait of the famously rigorous Slade School of Art drawing master, Henry Tonks, was in Tonks’s own collection before being passed on to his nephew, the painter and doctor Myles Tonks. Rutherston had been a pupil of Tonks relatively early in the latter’s career in the late 1890s and his 1906 drawing stands an affectionate (if revealing) artistic joke by a distinguished alumnus at his teacher’s expense. Perhaps tellingly, the later dedication reveals that Rutherston did not (perhaps dared not) give the drawing to Tonks until nearly twenty years later in 1924.