Tall and red-faced, George Belcher was one of the sights of London. For daytime wear, Artist Belcher chose the tweediest of hunting tweeds or else a funereal black cape and high satin stock. At night he preferred Victorian dinner jackets, lace cuffs, and ruffles. Thus attired, he spent half a century stalking likely subjects through London's foggy streets and second-best bar parlors. All his models, he liked to boast, were amateurs, "taken from life."
His sympathetic, soft-pencil sketches of bitter-bibbing charladies and cockney pub-dwellers were for several decades familiar to Punch and...