#tony sarg's art deserves to be seen

[lettersregardingjeeves]

Leave It to Jeeves - The Unused Images

Halloa! I’m back, and ready to chat about more pictures I didn’t use.

Well, here I'm being a bit nitpicky, I confess, in a way that isn't awfully fair to the original artist. But I'm the curator this round, what? So some freedom to pick and choose is allowed, I think. The Bertie here does look a touch on the old side, but not awfully so - and this is before "Jeeves Takes Charge", anyhow, so that would also be an unfair criticism even if I leaned into it - but my main trouble with these images is that Bertie is canonically a slender string bean of a man, while this Bertie is considerably heavier. The artist had no way of knowing this, so he certainly cannot be blamed, but due to the depiction not matching the Bertie we as a society know, I did not include these images.

(For the record, the reverse happened with the magazine illustrations of Wodehouse's Ukridge stories, which had an awful tendency to make the canonically tall and heavy James "Corky" Corcoran (who is, believe it or not, seemingly unrelated to this story's Bruce "Corky" Corcoran, though I like to pretend they're cousins) much too small and skinny to be plausible. But more on that when the time comes.)

Everything about these expressions cracks me up. Corky's smug face. The absolute nothingness behind Bertie's eyes. Incredible.

Once again, Tony Sarg kills in expressions. Definitely the one reason I'm sad about not including them.