Gardner Rea: No Longer a Good Provider

In yesterday's post, we saw New Yorker cartoonists from the 1950s to the 1980s play with the definition of what it means to be a "good provider." A much earlier 1927 New Yorker drawing by cartoonist Gardner Rea (1894-1966) offers something quite different, concentrating on a man who, according to his wife's testimony in divorce court, no longer rates as a good husband or a good provider:

       "A good 'usband 'e was to me, y'r Honor, an' a good provider
till 'e came under th' inflooence of Beau Nash."                     
          Gardner Rea
The New Yorker, June 25, 1927, page 26

Beau Nash (1674-1762) was a British dandy who had much to do with popularizing the spa town of Bath as a leading destination for the aristocracy. That his name should be familiar to Jazz Age New Yorker readers seems uncertain. Today it is the name of Beau Brummell (1778-1840) that is better remembered for his fashion sense. Yet a little research with the Google Books N-gram shows the late 1920s to be a time when Nash's name was ascendent and Brummell's was on the decline. The New Yorker's editors could well have been attuned to such things.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Beau+Nash%2C+Beau+Brummell&year_start=1900&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2CBeau%20Nash%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CBeau%20Brummell%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2CBeau%20Nash%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CBeau%20Brummell%3B%2Cc0

Rea's outlines are second to none and his rendering of the foppish husband is the best thing about this cartoon. But there are weaknesses here as well. Both the officer of the court and the judge appear to be speaking, but not the wife who is making the wordy complaint. It's as if the drawing had been made with a different speaker in mind. The people seated in the courtroom are downright distracting, as are the pen and paper on the floor. What purpose do they serve?

The heavy use of dialect in the caption also adds to the difficulty. It's admittedly a stretch, but could there be some wordplay going on here, an inside joke? Dropping so many of the h's allows for the words "till 'e," reminiscent of the surname of Eustace Tilley, The New Yorker's own resident dandy. The bottom line of the caption could thus be seen as "...Tilley come under th' inflooence of Beau Nash." It is too much to hope for.

Cartoon by Gardner Rea

Note:  For more on Beau Nash, see his Wikipedia page.

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