Small is Beautiful ...

I've been working on a couple of large pictures of one of my heroes lately (the illustration on the left being a not very good phone snap of a detail of one them). If you don't recognise the face I can hardly blame you, Harry Relph is no longer the household name he once was. Before Chaplin he was probably Britain's first globally known superstar. A cinematic pioneer and recording artiste, the highest paid entertainer in Europe, star of the Folies Bergere , the man whose best known routine Jacques Tati described as 'a foundation for everything that has been realised in comedy on the screen' and whose stage name, far from being a tautology, actually gave the English language the word 'tich' meaning 'tiny'. Ladies and gentlemen I am proud to present, the incomparable 'Little Tich'. 


For the moment the wraps are still on for the destination of these paintings but I'm hoping that they are going to get some significant online exposure, probably before I post them in full to this site, so keep an eye out for further announcements here. In the meantime here's the man himself in that routine that Tati was talking about (which also happens to be probably the oldest piece of synchronised sound film still in existence), enjoy!

---