English Illustration 'The Sixties': 1855-70 / With Numerous Illustrations by Ford Madox Brown: A. Boyd Houghton: Arthur Hughes: Charles Keene: M. J. Lawless: Lord Leighton, P.R.A.: Sir J. E. Millais, P.R.A.: G. Du Maurier: J. W. North, R.A.: G. J. Pinwell: Dante Gabriel Rossetti: W. Small: Frederick Sandys: J. Mcneill Whistler: Frederick Walker, A.R.A.: and Others

by Gleeson White

THE GRAPHIC

That this admirably conducted illustrated weekly revolutionised English illustration is granted on all sides. Its influence for good or ill was enormous. With its first number, published on December 4, 1869, we find a definite, official date to close the record of the 'sixties'; one by mere chance, chronologically as well as technically, appropriate. Of course the break was not so sudden as this arbitrary limit might suggest. The style which distinguished the Graphic had been gradually prepared before, and if Mr. William Small is credited with the greatest share in its development, such a statement, incomplete as most generalities must needs be, holds a good part of the truth, if not the whole. The work of Mr. Small introduced new qualities into wood-engraving; which, in his hands and those of the best of his followers, grew to be meritorious, and must needs place him with those who legitimately extended the domain of the art of drawing for the engraver. But to discuss the style which succeeded that of the sixties would be to trespass on new ground, and that while the field itself is all too scantily searched. Mr. Ruskin dubbed the new style 'blottesque,' but, as we have seen, he was hardly more enamoured of the manner that immediately preceded it.

Many of the surviving heroes of the sixties contributed to the Graphic. Charles Green appears in vol. i. with Irish Emigrants, G. J. Pinwell with The Lost Child (January 8, 1870), A. Boyd Houghton has a powerful drawing, Night Charges, and later, the marvellous series of pictures recording his very personal visit to America.

William Small, R. W. Macbeth, S. L. Fildes, Hubert Herkomer, and a crowd of names, some already mentioned frequently in this book, bore the weight of the new enterprise. But a cursory sketch of the famous periodical would do injustice to it. The historian of the seventies will find it takes the place of Once a Week as the happy hunting-ground for the earliest work of many a popular draughtsman and painter—that is to say, the earliest work after his student and experimental efforts. To declare that it still flourishes, and with the Daily Graphic, its offspring, keeps still ahead of the popular average, is at once bare truth and the highest compliment which need be paid.

The illustrated weeklies in the sixties were almost as unimportant, relatively speaking, as are the illustrated dailies to-day. Yet to say that the weeklies did fair to monopolise illustration at the present time is a common truth, and, remembering what the Daily Graphic and the Daily Chronicle have already accomplished, to infer that the dailies will do likewise before 1900 has attained its majority is a prophecy that is based upon a study of the past.

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[CHAPTER VII: SOME ILLUSTRATED BOOKS OF THE PERIOD BEFORE 1860]

To draw up a complete list, with the barest details of title, artist, author, and publisher of the books in the period with which this volume is concerned would be unnecessary, and well-nigh impossible. The English Catalogue, 1863–1872, covering but a part of the time, claims to give some 30,000 entries. Many, possibly a large majority, of these books are not illustrated; but on the other hand, the current periodicals not included contain thousands of pictures. The following chapters cannot even claim to mention every book worth the collector's notice, and refer hardly at all to many which seemed to the compiler to represent merely the commercial average of their time. Whether this was better or worse than the commercial average to-day is of no moment. Nearly all of the books mentioned have been referred to personally, and the facts reported at first hand. In spite of taxing the inexhaustible courtesy of the officials of the British Museum to the extent of eighty or more volumes during a single afternoon, I cannot pretend to have seen the whole output of the period, for it is not easy to learn from the catalogue those particulars that are needed to identify which books are illustrated.

So far as we are concerned here, the interest of the book lies solely in its illustrations, but the catalogue may not even record the fact that it contains any, much less attribute them to their author. Of those in which the artist's share has been recognised by the publisher in his announcements, I have done my best to find the first edition of each. By dint of patient wading through the advertisements, and review columns of literary journals, trade periodicals, and catalogues, a good many have turned up which had otherwise escaped notice; although for the last twenty years at least I have never missed an opportunity of seeing every illustrated book of the sixties, with a view to this chronicle, which had been shaping itself, if not actually begun, long before any work on modern English illustrators had appeared. When a school-boy I made a collection of examples of the work of each artist whose style I had learned to recognise, and some of that material gathered together so long ago has been of no little use now. These personal reminiscences are not put forward by way of magnifying the result; but rather to show that even with so many years' desultory preparation the digesting and classification of the various facts has proved too onerous. A staff of qualified assistants under a capable director would be needed to accomplish the work as thoroughly as Mr. Sidney Lee has accomplished a not dissimilar, if infinitely more important, task—The Dictionary of National Biography. A certain proportion of errors must needs creep in, and the possible errors of omission are even more to be dreaded than those of commission. A false date, or an incorrect reference to a given book or illustration, is easily corrected by a later worker in the same field; but an omission may possibly escape another student of the subject as it escaped me. As a rule, in a majority of cases—so large that it is practically ninety-nine per cent., if not more—the notes have been made side by side with the publication to which they refer. But in transcribing hasty jottings errors are apt to creep in, and despite the collation of these pages when in proof by other hands, I cannot flatter myself that they are impeccable. For experience shows that you never open the final printed text of any work under your control as editor or author, but errors, hitherto overlooked, instantly jump from the page and force themselves on your notice. An editor of one of the most widely circulated of all our magazines confesses that he has made it a rule never to glance at any number after it was published. He had too often suffered the misery of being confronted with obvious errors of fact and taste which no amount of patient care on his part (and he is a most conscientious workman) had discovered, until it was too late to rectify them. In the matter of dates alone a difficulty meets one at first sight. Many books dated one year were issued several months before the previous Christmas, and are consequently advertised and reviewed in the year before the date which appears upon their title-page. Again, many books, and some volumes of magazines (Messrs. Cassell and Co.'s publications to wit), bear no date. 'Women and books should never be dated' is a proverb as foolish as it is widely known. Yet all the same, inaccuracy of a few months is of little importance in this context; a book or a picture does not cease to exist as soon as it is born, like the performance of an actor or a musician. Consequently, beyond its relative place as evidence of the development or decline of the author's talent, it is not of great moment whether a book was issued in 1869 or 1870, whether a drawing was published in January or February. But for those who wish to refer to the subjects noted, the information has been made as exact as circumstances permitted. When, however, a book has been reissued in a second, or later edition, with no reference to earlier issues, it is tempting to accept the date on its title-page without question. One such volume I traced back from 1868 to 1849, and for all I know the original may have been issued some years earlier; for the British Museum library is not complete; every collector can point with pride to a few books on his shelves which he has failed to discover in its voluminous catalogue.

To select a definite moment to start from is not easy, nor to keep rigidly within the time covered by the dates upon the cover of this book. It is necessary to glance briefly at some work issued before 1855, and yet it would be superfluous to re-traverse ground already well covered in The History of Wood Engraving, by Chatto and Jackson, with its supplementary chapter by H. G. Bohn (in the 1861 edition), in Mr. W. J. Linton's Masterpieces of Engraving, in Mr. Joseph Pennell's two sumptuous editions of Pen Drawing and Pen Draughtsmen (Macmillan), and the same author's Modern Illustrations (Bell), not to mention the many admirable papers read before learned societies by Messrs. W. J. Linton, Comyns Carr, Henry Blackburn, Walter Crane, William Morris, and others. Still less is it necessary to attempt to indorse their arguments in favour of wood-engraving against process, or to repeat those which support the opposite view. So that here, in the majority of cases, the question of the engraver's share has not been considered. Mr. Pennell, for one, has done this most thoroughly, and has put the case for process so strongly, that if any people yet believe a wood-engraving is always something sacred, while a good process block of line work is a mere feeble substitute, there is little hope of convincing them. Here the result has been the chief concern. The object of these notes is not to prove what wood-engraving ruined, or what might or ought to have been, but merely to record what it achieved, without too frequent expression of regret, which nevertheless will intrude as the dominant feeling when you study many of the works executed by even the better class wood-engravers.

One must not overlook the very obvious fact that, in the earlier years, an illustration was a much more serious affair for all concerned than it is to-day. In Jackson's Pictorial Press we find the author says: 'Illustration was so seldom used that the preparation of even a small woodcut was of much moment to all concerned. I have heard William Harvey relate that when Whittingham, the well-known printer, wanted a new cut for his Chiswick Press Series, he would write to Harvey and John Thompson, the engraver, appointing a meeting at Chiswick, when printer, designer, and engraver talked over the matter with as much deliberation as if about to produce a costly national monument. And after they had settled all points over a snug supper, the result of their labours was the production a month afterwards of a woodcut measuring perhaps two inches by three. At that time perhaps only a dozen persons besides Bewick were practising the art of wood-engraving in England.'

But this preamble does not seek to excuse the meagre record it prefaces. A complete bibliography of such a fecund illustrator as Sir John Gilbert would need a volume to itself. To draw up detailed lists of all the various drawings in The Illustrated London News, Punch, and other prominent weeklies, would be a task needing almost as much co-operation as Dr. Murray's great Dictionary. The subject, if it proves to be sufficiently attractive, will doubtless be done piece by piece by future workers. I envy each his easy pleasure of pointing out the shortcomings of this work, for no keener joy awaits the maker of a handbook than gibbeting his predecessors, and showing by implication how much more trustworthy is his record than theirs.

D. G. ROSSETTI

'THE MUSIC-MASTER'
BY WILLIAM ALLINGHAM
1855

THE MAIDS OF
ELFENMERE

Few artistic movements are so sharply defined that their origin can be traced to a particular moment, although some can be attributed more or less to the influence of one man. Even the pre-Raphaelite movement, clearly distinct as its origin appears at first glance, should not be dated from the formal draft of the little coterie, January 13th, 1851, for, as Mr. W. M. Rossetti writes, 'The rules show or suggest not only what we intended to do, but what had been occupying our attention since 1848. The day when we codified proved also to be the day when no code was really in requisition.' Nor has the autumn 1848 any better claim to be taken as the exact moment, for one cannot overlook the fact that there was Ford Madox Brown, a pre-Raphaelite, long before the pre-Raphaelites, and that Ruskin had published the first volume of Modern Painters. There can be little doubt that it was the influence of the so-called pre-Raphaelites and those in closest sympathy with them, which awakened a new interest in illustration, and so prepared the ground for the men of the sixties; but to confine our notice from 1857 to 1867—a far more accurate period—would be to start without sufficient reference to the work superseded by or absorbed into the later movement. So we must glance at a few of the books which preceded both the Music-master of 1855 and the Tennyson of 1857, either volume, the latter especially, being an excellent point whence to reckon more precisely 'the golden decade of British Art,' as Mr. Pennell terms it so happily.

Without going back too far for our purpose, one of the first books that contains illustrations by artists whose work extended into the sixties (and, in the case of Tenniel, far beyond) is Poems and Pictures, 'A Collection of Ballads, Songs, and Poems illustrated by English Artists' (Burns, 1846). So often was it reprinted that it came as a surprise to discover the first edition was fourteen years earlier than the date which is upon my own copy. Despite the ornamental borders to each page, and many other details which stamp it as old-fashioned, it does not require a rabid apologist of the past to discuss it appreciatively. From the first design by C. W. Cope, to the last, A Storm at Sea, by E. Duncan, both engraved by W. J. Linton, there is no falling off in the quality of the work. The influence of Mulready is discernible, and it seems probable that certain pencil drawings for the Vicar of Wakefield, engraved in facsimile—so far as was within the power of the craftsmen at that time—did much to shape the manner of book-illustrations in the fifties.

Nor does it betray want of sympathy with the artists who were thus influenced to regret that they chose to imitate drawings not intended for illustration, and ignored in very many cases the special technique which employs the most direct expression of the material. In The Mourner, by J. C. Horsley (p. 22), you feel that the engraver (Thompson) has done his best to imitate the softly defined line of a pencil in place of the clearly accentuated line which is most natural in wood. Yet even in this there is scarcely a trace of that elaborate cross-hatching so easily produced in plate-engraving or pen drawing, so tedious to imitate in wood. Another design, Time, by C. W. Cope (p. 88), shows that the same engraver could produce work of quite another class when it was required. Curiously enough, these two, picked at random, reappear in almost the last illustrated anthology mentioned in these chapters, Cassell's Sacred Poems (1867).

Several books earlier in date, including De la Motte Fouqué's Undine, with eleven drawings by 'J. Tenniel, Junr.' (Burns, 1846), and Sintram and his Companions, with designs by H. S. Selous and a frontispiece after Dürer's The Knight and Death need only be mentioned. The Juvenile Verse and Picture Book (Burns, 1848), with many illustrations by Gilbert, Tenniel, 'R. Cruikshank,' Weigall, and W. B. Scott, which was reissued with altered text as Gems of National Poetry (Warne, 1868), and Æsop's Fables (Murray, 1848), with 100 illustrations by Tenniel, deserve a bare mention. Nor should The 'Bon Gaultier' Ballads (Blackwood, 1849) be forgotten. The illustrations by Doyle, Leech, and Crowquill were enormously popular in their day, and although the style of humour which still keeps many of the ballads alive has been frequently imitated since, and rarely excelled, yet its drawings have often been equalled and surpassed, humorous although they are, of their sort.

The Salamandrine, a poem by Charles Mackay, issued in a small quarto (Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1853), with forty-six designs by John Gilbert, is one of the early volumes by the more fecund illustrators of the century. It is too late in the day to praise the veteran whose paintings are as familiar to frequenters of the Royal Academy now as were his drawings when the Great Exhibition entered a formal claim for the recognition of British Art. Honoured here and upon the Continent, it is needless to eulogise an artist whom all agree to admire. The prolific invention which never failed is not more evident in this book than in a hundred others decorated by his facile pencil, yet it reveals—as any one of the rest must equally—the powerful mastery of his art, and its limitations. Thomson's Seasons, illustrated by the Etching Club (1852), S. C. Hall's Book of British Ballads (1852), an edition of The Arabian Nights, with 600 illustrations by W. Harvey (1852), and Uncle Tom's Cabin, with 100 drawings by George Thomas, can but be named in passing. Gray's Elegy, illustrated by 'B. Foster, G. Thomas, and a Lady,' (Sampson Low), The Book of Celebrated Poems, with eighty designs by Cope, Kenny Meadows, and others (Sampson Low), The Vicar of Wakefield, with drawings by George Thomas, The Deserted Village, illustrated by members of the Etching Club—Cope, T. Creswick, J. C. Horsley, F. Tayler, H. J. Townsend, C. Stenhouse, T. Webster, R.A., and R. Redgrave—all published early in the fifties—may also be dismissed without comment. About the same time the great mental sedative of the period—Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy (Hatchard, 1854)—was reprinted in a stately quarto, with sixty-two illustrations by C. W. Cope, R.A., E. H. Corbould, Birket Foster, John Gilbert, J. C. Horsley, F. R. Pickersgill and others, engraved for the most part by 'Dalziel Bros.' and H. Vizetelly. The dull, uninspired text seems to have depressed the imagination of the artists. Despite the notable array of names, there is no drawing of more than average interest in the volume, except perhaps To-morrow (p. 206), by F. R. Pickersgill, which is capitally engraved by Dalziel and much broader in its style than the rest.

Poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (David Bogue, 1854) appears to be the earliest English illustrated edition of any importance of a volume that has been frequently illustrated since. This book is uniform with the Poetical Works of John Milton with 120 engravings by Thompson, Williams, etc., from drawings by W. Harvey, The Works of William Cowper with seventy-five illustrations engraved by J. Orrin Smith from drawings by John Gilbert; Thomson's Seasons with illustrations 'drawn and engraved by Samuel Williams,' and Beattie and Collins' Poems with engravings by the same hand from designs by John Absolon. The title-page of the Longfellow says it is illustrated by 'Jane E. Benham, Birket Foster, etc.' It is odd to find the not very elegant, 'etc.' stands for John Gilbert and E. Wehnert, also to note that the engravers have in each of the above volumes taken precedence of the draughtsman. Except that we miss the pre-Raphaelite group for which we prize the Moxon Tennyson to-day, the ideal of these books is very nearly the same as of that volume. This edition of Longfellow must not be confused with another, a quarto, issued the following year (Routledge, 1855), 'with over one hundred designs drawn by John Gilbert and engraved by the brothers Dalziel.' This notable instance of the variety and inventive power of the artist also shows (in the night pieces especially, pp. 13, 360), that the engraver was trying to advance in the direction of 'tone' and atmospheric effect; and endeavouring to give the effect of a 'wash' rather than of a line drawing or the imitation of a steel engraving. This tendency, which was not the chief purpose of the work of the sixties, in the seventies carried the technicalities of the craft to its higher achievements, or, as some enthusiasts prefer to regard it, to its utter ruin, so that the photographic process-block could beat it on its own ground. But these opposite views have been threshed out often enough without bringing the parties concerned nearer together to encourage a new attempt to reconcile the opposing factions. The Longfellow of 1855 was reissued with the addition of Hiawatha in 1856. Another edition of Hiawatha, illustrated by G. H. Thomas, issued about this time, contains some of his best work.

Allingham's Music-master (Routledge, 1855) is so often referred to in this narrative that its mere name must suffice in this context. But, as the book itself is so scarce, a sentence from its preface may be quoted: 'Those excellent painters' (writes Mr. Allingham), 'who on my behalf have submitted their genius to the risks of wood-engraving, will, I hope, pardon me for placing a sincere word of thanks in the book they have honoured with this evidence through art of their varied fancy.' To this year belongs also The Task, illustrated by Birket Foster (Nisbet, 1855).

Eliza Cook's Poems (Routledge, 1856) is another sumptuously illustrated quarto gift-book with many designs by John Gilbert, J. Wolf, Harrison Weir, J. D. Watson, and others, all engraved by Dalziel Brothers. A notable drawing by H. H. Armstead, The Trysting Place (p. 363), deserves republication. In this year appeared also the famous edition of Adams's Sacred Allegories with a number of engravings from original drawings by C. W. Cope, R.A., J. C. Horsley, A.R.A., Samuel Palmer, Birket Foster, and George C. Hicks. The amazing quality of the landscapes by Samuel Palmer stood even the test of enormous enlargement in lantern slides, when Mr. Pennell showed them at his lectures on the men of the sixties; had W. T. Green engraved no other blocks, he might be ranked as a great craftsman on the evidence of these alone.

In George Herbert's Poetical Works (Nisbet, 1856), with designs by Birket Foster, John Clayton, and H. N. Humphreys, notwithstanding the vitality of the text, the drawings are sicklied over with the pale cast of religious sentimentality which has ruined so much religious art in England. A draughtsman engaged on New Testament subjects of that time rarely forgot Overbeck, Raphael, or still more 'pretty' masters. In the religious illustrations of the period many landscapes are included, some of them exquisite transcripts of English scenery, others of the 'Oriental' order dear to the Annuals. The delightful description of one of these imaginary scenes, by Leland, 'Hans Breitmann,' will come to mind, when he says of its artist that

'All his work expanded with expensive fallacies,
Castles, towered walls, pavilions, real-estately palaces.
In the foreground lofty palm-trees, as if full of soaring love,
Bore up cocoa-nuts and monkeys to the smiling heavens above;
Jet-black Indian chieftains—at their feet, too, lovely girls were sighing,
With an elephant beyond them, here and there a casual lion.'

George Herbert the incomparable may be hard to illustrate, but, if the task is attempted, it should be in any way but this delineation of pretty landscapes, with 'here and there a casual lion.' This reflection upon the mildly sacred compositions of 'gift-book' art generally, although provoked by this volume, is applicable to nearly every one of its fellows.

In Rhymes and Roundelays, illustrated by Birket Foster (Bogue, 1856), the designs are not without a trace of artificiality, but it contains also some of the earliest and best examples of a most accomplished draughtsman, and in it many popular blocks began a long career of 'starring,' until from guinea volumes some were used ultimately in children's primers and the like.

The Works of William Shakespeare illustrated by John Gilbert (Routledge, 1856–8) will doubtless be remembered always as his masterpiece. At a public dinner lately, an artist who had worked with Sir John Gilbert on the Illustrated London News, and in nearly all the books of the period illustrated by the group of draughtsmen with whom both are associated, spoke of his marvellous rapidity—a double-page drawing done in a single night. Yet so sure is his touch that in the mass of these hundreds of designs to Shakespeare you are not conscious of any scamping. Without being archæologically impeccable, they suggest the types and costumes of the periods they deal with, and, above all, represent embodiments of actual human beings. They stand apart from the grotesque caricatures of an earlier school, and the academic inanities of both earlier and later methods. Virile and full of invention, the book is a monument to an artist who has done so much that it is a pleasure to discover some one definite accomplishment that from size alone may be taken as his masterpiece, if merely as evidence that praise, scantily bestowed elsewhere, is limited by space only.

FORD MADOX BROWN

WILLMOTT'S 'POETS OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY,' 1857

THE PRISONER
OF CHILLON

Scott's Lady of the Lake, illustrated by John Gilbert, appeared in 1856. The other volumes, Marmion, the Lady of the Lake, and the Lay of the Last Minstrel, appear to have been published previously; but to ascertain their exact date of issue, the three bulky volumes of the British Museum catalogue devoted to 'Scott (Walter)' can hardly be faced with a light heart. This year saw an edition of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress with outline drawings by J. R. Clayton, who is sometimes styled 'J. R.,' and sometimes 'John.' An illustrated guinea edition of a once popular 'goody' book, Ministering Children, with designs by Birket Foster and H. Le Jeune (Nisbet, 1856), an edition of Edgar Allan Poe's Works, illustrated by E. H. Wehnert and others (Addey, 1856); Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, with pictures by Birket Foster, A. Duncan, and E. H. Wehnert, are also of this year, to which belongs, although it is post-dated, Pollok's Course of Time (W. Blackwood, 1857), a book containing fifty fine illustrations by Birket Foster, John Tenniel, and J. R. Clayton, engraved by Edward Evans, Dalziel Brothers, H. N. Woods, and John Green. A block by Dalziel, after Clayton, on page 19, shows a good example of the white line, used horizontally, for the modelling of flesh, somewhat in the way, as Pannemaker employed it so effectively in many of Gustave Doré's illustrations years after. The twenty-seven Birket Fosters are full of the special charm that his work possesses, and show once again how a great artist may employ a method, which, merely 'pretty' in inferior hands, has something of greatness when he touches it.

In the next year appeared the famous 'Poems by Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet-Laureate. London. Edward Moxon, Dover St., 1857.' Not even the bare fact that it was illustrated appears on the title-page. As the book has been re-issued lately in a well-printed edition, a detailed list of its contents is hardly necessary; nor need any of the illustrations be reproduced here. It will suffice to say that Dante Gabriel Rossetti is represented by five designs to The Lady of Shallott (p. 75), Mariana (p. 82), Palace of Art (pp. 113–119), Sir Galahad (p. 305); Millais has eighteen, W. Holman Hunt seven, W. Mulready four, T. Creswick six, J. C. Horsley six, C. Stanfield six, and D. Maclise two. A monograph by Mr. G. Somes Layard, Tennyson and his pre-Raphaelite Illustrators (Stock, 1894), embodies a quantity of interesting facts, with many deductions therefrom which are not so valuable. In the books about Rossetti and the pre-Raphaelites, and their name is legion, this volume has rarely escaped more or less notice, so that one hesitates to add to the mass of criticism already bestowed. The whole modern school of decorative illustrators regard it rightly enough as the genesis of the modern movement; but all the same it is only the accidental presence of D. G. Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and Millais, which entitles it to this position. It satisfies no decorative ideal as a piece of book-making. Except for these few drawings, it differs in no respect from the average 'quarto poets' before and after. The same 'toned' paper, the same vignetted pictures, appear; the proportions of the type-page are merely that in ordinary use; the size and shape of the illustrations was left apparently to pure chance. Therefore, in place of talking of the volume with bated breath as a masterpiece, it would be wiser to regard it as one of the excellent publications of the period, that by the fortuitous inclusion of a few drawings, quite out of touch with the rest, has acquired a reputation, which, considered as a complete book, it does not deserve. The drawings by Rossetti, even as we see them after translation by the engraver had worked his will, must needs be valued as masterpieces, if only for the imagination and thought compressed into their limited space, and from their exquisite manipulation of details. At first sight, some of these—for instance, the soldier munching an apple in the St. Cecilia—seem discordant, but afterwards reveal themselves as commentaries upon the text—not elucidating it directly, but embroidering it with subtle meanings and involved symbolism. Such qualities as these, whether you hold them as superfluous or essential, separate these fine designs from the jejune simplicity of the mass of the decorative school to-day. To draw a lady with 'intense' features, doing nothing in particular, and that in an anatomically impossible attitude, is a poor substitute for the fantasy of Rossetti. No amount of poorly drawn confused accessories will atone for the absence of the dominant idea that welded all the disturbing elements to a perfect whole. One artist to-day, or at most two, alone show any real effort to rival these designs on their own ground. The rest appear to believe that a coarse line and eccentric composition provide all that is required, given sufficient ignorance of academic draughtsmanship.

JOHN GILBERT

WILLMOTT'S 'POETS OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY,' 1857

HOHENLINDEN

F. R. PICKERSGILL

WILLMOTT'S 'POETS OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY,' 1857

THE WATER
NYMPH

Another book of the same year, The Poets of the Nineteenth Century, selected and edited by the Rev. Robert Aris Willmott (Routledge, 1857), is in many respects quite as fine as the Tennyson, always excepting the pre-Raphaelite element, which is not however totally absent. For in this quarto volume Millais' Love (p. 137) and The Dream (p. 123) are worthy to be placed beside those just noticed. Ford Madox Brown's Prisoner of Chillon (p. 111) is another masterpiece of its sort. For this we are told the artist spent three days in a dissecting-room (or a mortuary—the accounts differ) to watch the gradual change in a dead body, making most careful studies in colour as well as monochrome all for a foreshortened figure in a block 3¾ by 5 inches. This procedure is singularly unlike the rapid inspiration which throws off compositions in black and white to-day. In a recent book received with well-deserved applause, some of the smaller 'decorative designs' were produced at the rate of a dozen in a day. The mere time occupied in production is of little consequence, because we know that the apparently rapid 'sketch' by Phil May may have taken far more time than a decorative drawing, with elaborately minute detail over every inch of its surface; but, other qualities being equal, the one produced with lavish expenditure of care and thought is likely to outlive the trifle tossed off in an hour or two. In the Poets of the Nineteenth Century the hundred engravings by the brothers Dalziel include twenty-one of Birket Foster's exquisite landscapes, all with figures; fourteen by W. Harvey, nine by John Gilbert, six by J. Tenniel, five by J. R. Clayton, eleven by T. Dalziel, seven by J. Godwin, five by E. H. Corbould, two by D. Edwards, five by E. Duncan, seven by J. Godwin, and one each by Arthur Hughes, W. P. Leitch, E. A. Goodall, T. D. Hardy, F. R. Pickersgill, and Harrison Weir—a century of designs not unworthy as a whole to represent the art of the day; although Rossetti and Holman Hunt, who figure so strongly in the Tennyson, are not represented. This year John Gilbert illustrated the Book of Job with fifty designs; The Proverbs of Solomon (Nisbet, 1858), a companion volume, contains twenty drawings.

Another noteworthy volume is Barry Cornwall's Dramatic Scenes and other Poems (Chapman and Hall, 1857) illustrated by many of the artists already mentioned. The fifty-seven engravings by Dalziel include one block on p. 45, from a drawing by J. R. Clayton, which is here reprinted—not so much for its design as for its engraving; the way the breadth of the drapery is preserved, despite the elaborate pattern on its surface, stamps it as a most admirable piece of work. Thornbury's Legends of the Cavaliers and Roundheads (Hurst and Blackett, 1857), was illustrated by H. S. Marks.

So far the few books of 1857 noticed have considerable family likeness. The Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (Nisbet, 1857), illustrated with twenty designs by G. H. Thomas, more slight in its method, reflects the journalistic style of its day rather than the elaborate 'book' manner, which in many an instance gives the effect of an engraving 'after' a painting or a large and highly-wrought fresco. As one of the many attempts to illustrate the immortal Protestant romance it deserves noting. To this year belongs The Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated with some striking designs by John Tenniel, and others by F. R. Pickersgill, R.A., Birket Foster, Percival Skelton; and besides these, Felix Darley, P. Duggan, Jasper Cropsey, and A. W. Madot—draughtsmen whose names are certainly not household words to-day. In the lists of 'artists' the portrait of the author is attributed to 'daguerreotype'! one of the earliest instances I have encountered of the formal appearance of the ubiquitous camera as an artist. Longfellow's prose romance, Kavanagh (Kent, 1857), with exquisite illustrations by Birket Foster, appeared this year; Hyperion (Dean), illustrated by the same author, being issued the following Christmas.

Poetry and Pictures from Thomas Moore (Longman, 1857), the Poems and Songs of Robert Burns (Bell and Daldy, 1857), both illustrated by Birket Foster and others, and The Fables of Æsop, with twenty-five drawings by C. H. Bennett, also deserve a passing word. Gertrude of Wyoming, by Thomas Campbell (Routledge, 1857), is only less important from its dimensions, and the fact that it contains only thirty-five illustrations, engraved by the brothers Dalziel, as against the complete hundred of most of its fellows. The drawings by Birket Foster, Thomas Dalziel, Harrison Weir, and William Harvey include some very good work.

Lays of the Holy Land (Nisbet, 1858), clad in binding of a really fine design adapted from Persian sources, is another illustrated quarto, with one drawing at least—The Finding of Moses—by J. E. Millais, which makes it worth keeping; a 'decorative' Song of Bethlehem, by J. R. Clayton, is ahead of its time in style; the rest by Gilbert, Birket Foster, and others are mostly up to their best average. The title-page says 'from photographs and drawings,' but as every block is attributed to an artist, the former were without doubt redrawn and the source not acknowledged—a habit of draughtsmen which is not obsolete to-day.

J. R. CLAYTON

BARRY CORNWALL'S
'DRAMATIC SCENES'
1857

OLYMPIA AND
BIANCA

J. E. MILLAIS

'HOME AFFECTIONS FROM
THE POETS,' 1858

THERE'S NAE LUCK
ABOUT THE HOUSE

J. E. MILLAIS

'HOME AFFECTIONS FROM
THE POETS,' 1858

THE BORDER
WIDOW

Perhaps the most important illustrated volume of the next year is The Home Affections [portrayed] by the Poets, by Charles Mackay (Routledge, 1858), which continues the type of quarto gilt-edged toned paper table-books so frequent at this time. Its illustrations are a hundred in number, all engraved by Dalziels. Its artists include Birket Foster, John Gilbert, J. R. Clayton, Harrison Weir, T. B. Dalziel, S. Read, John Abner, F. R. Pickersgill, R.A., John Tenniel, with many others, 'and' (as play-bills have it) J. Everett Millais, A.R.A. There's nae Luck about the House (p. 245) and The Border Widow (p. 359) are curiously unlike in motive as well as handling; the one, with all its charm, is of the Mulready school, the other intense and passionate, highly wrought in the pre-Raphaelite manner. Yet after the Millais' all the other illustrations in the book seem poor. A landscape by Harrison Weir (p. 193), Lenore, by A. Madot (p. 159), a very typical Tenniel, Fair Ines (p. 135), Oriana (p. 115), Hero and Leander (p. 91), The Hermit (p. 67), and Good-night in the Porch (p. 195), by Pickersgill, claim a word of appreciation as one turns over its pages anew. Whether too many copies were printed, or those issued were better preserved by their owners than usual, no book is more common in good condition to-day than this.

Another book of the same size, with contents less varied, it is true, but of almost the same level of excellence, is Wordsworth's Selected Poems (Routledge, 1859), illustrated by Birket Foster, J. Wolf, and John Gilbert. This contains the hundred finely engraved blocks by the brothers Dalziel, some of them of the first rank, which was the conventional equipment of a gift-book at that time.

Other noteworthy volumes of 1858–9 are Merrie Days of England, Sketches of Olden Times, illustrated by twenty drawings by Birket Foster, G. Thomas, E. Corbould, and others; The Scouring of the White Horse, with designs by Richard Doyle (Macmillan), his Foreign Tour of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, and the same artist's Manners and Customs of the English, all then placed in the first rank by most excellent critics; Favourite English Poems of the last two Centuries, illustrated by Birket Foster, Cope, Creswick, and the rest; Wordsworth's White Doe of Rylstone (Longmans), also illustrated by Birket Foster and H. N. Humphreys; Childe Harold, with many designs by Percival Skelton and others; Blair's Grave, illustrated by Tenniel (A. and C. Black); Milton's Comus (Routledge, 1858), with illustrations by Pickersgill, B. Foster, H. Weir, etc.; and C. H. Bennett's Proverbs with Pictures (Chapman and Hall). Thomas Moore's Poems (Longmans, 1858); Child's Play, by E. V. B., appeared also about this time. Krummacher's Parables, with forty illustrations by J. R. Clayton (Bohn's Library, 1858), is another unfamiliar book likely to be overlooked, although it contains good work of its sort; inspired a little by German design possibly, but including some admirable drawings, those for instance on pages 147 and 347. The Shipwreck, by Robert Falconer, illustrated by Birket Foster (Edinburgh, Black, 1858), contains thirty drawings, some of them charmingly engraved by W. T. Green, Dalziel Brothers, and Edward Evans in 'the Turner vignette' manner; they are delightful of their kind.

In 1859 there seems to be a falling off, which can hardly be traced to the starting of Once a Week in July, for Christmas books—and nearly all the best illustrated volumes fall into that category—are prepared long before midsummer. C. H. Bennett's illustrated Bunyan's Pilgrim Progress (Longmans) is one of the best of the year's output. A survival of an older type is A Book of Favourite Modern Ballads, illustrated by C. W. Cope, J. C. Horsley, A. Solomon, S. Palmer, and others (Kent), which, but for the publisher's announcement, might well be regarded as a reprint of a book at least ten years earlier; but its peculiar method was unique at that time, and rarely employed since, although but lately revived now for half-tone blocks. It consists in a double printing, black upon a previous printing in grey, not solid, but with the 'lights' carefully taken out, so that the whole looks like a drawing on grey paper heightened by white chalk. Whether the effect might be good on ordinary paper, these impressions on a shiny cream surface, set in gold borders, are not captivating.

Odes and Sonnets, illustrated by Birket Foster (Routledge, 1859), has also devices by Henry Sleigh, printed in colours. It is not a happy experiment; despite the exquisite landscapes, the decoration accords so badly that you cannot linger over its pages with pleasure. Byron's Childe Harold, with eighty illustrations by Percival Skelton, is another popular book of 1859.

Hiawatha, with twenty-four drawings by G. H. Thomas, and The Merchant of Venice (Sampson Low, 1860), illustrated by G. H. Thomas, Birket Foster, and H. Brandling, with ornaments by Harry Rogers, are two others a trifle belated in style. Of different sort is The Voyage of the Constance, a tale of the Arctic Seas (Edinburgh, Constable), with twenty-four drawings by Charles Keene, a singularly interesting and apparently scarce volume which reveals powers of imagining landscape which he had never seen in a very realistic manner. I once heard him declare that he had never in his life been near either an Irish bog or a Scotch moor, both subjects being very frequent in his work.

The Seasons, by James Thomson (Nisbet, 1859), illustrated by Birket Foster, F. R. Pickersgill, R.A., J. Wolf, G. Thomas, and Noel Humphreys, is another small quarto gift-book with the merits and defects of its class. Yet, after making all due allowance, one feels that even these average volumes of the fifties, if they do not interest us as much as those of the sixties, are yet ahead, in many important qualities, of the average Christmas gift-book to-day. The academic scholarship and fine craft of this era would equip a whole school of 'decorative students,' and leave still much to spare. Yet if we prefer, in our heart of hearts, the Birmingham books to-day, this is merely to confess that modernity, whether it be frankly actual, or pose as mediæval, attracts us more than a far worthier thing out of fashion for the moment. But such preference, if it exists, is hardly likely to outlast a serious study of the books of 'the sixties.'

---

[CHAPTER VIII: SOME ILLUSTRATED BOOKS OF THE PERIOD 1860–1864]

Among the books dated 1860, or issued in the autumn of that year, are more elaborately illustrated editions of popular poets—all, as a rule, in the conventional quarto, or in what a layman might be forgiven for describing as 'quarto,' even if an expert preferred to call it octavo. Of these Tennyson's The Princess, with twenty-six drawings by Maclise, may be placed first, on account of the position held by author and artist. All the same, it belongs essentially to the fifties or earlier, both in spirit and in style. A more ample quarto, Poems by James Montgomery (Routledge, 1860), (not the Montgomery castigated by Lord Macaulay), 'selected and edited by Robert Aris Wilmott (Routledge), with one hundred designs by John Gilbert, Birket Foster, F. R. Pickersgill, R.A., J. Wolf, Harrison Weir, E. Duncan, and W. Harvey, is perhaps slightly more in touch with the newer school. Its engravings by the brothers Dalziel are admirable. The Clouds athwart the Sky (p. 23), by John Gilbert, and other landscapes by the same hand, may hold their own even by the side of those in the Moxon Tennyson, or in Wilmott's earlier anthology. Of quite different calibre is Moore's Lalla Rookh, with its sixty-nine drawings by Tenniel, engraved by the Dalziels (Longmans, 1861). If to-day you hardly feel inclined to indorse the verdict of the Times critic, who declared it to be 'the greatest illustrative achievement by any single hand,' it shows nevertheless not a few of those qualities which have won well-merited fame for our oldest cartoonist, even if it shows also the limitations which just alienate one's complete sympathy. Yet those who saw an exhibition of Sir John Tenniel's drawings at the Fine Art Society's galleries will be less ready to blame the published designs for a certain hardness of style, due in great part (one fancies) to their engraver.

H. H. ARMSTEAD

WILLMOTT'S 'ENGLISH SACRED
POETRY' 1862, p. 49

A DREAM

FREDERICK WALKER

WILLMOTT'S 'SACRED
POETRY,' 1862

THE NURSERY
FRIEND

FREDERICK WALKER

WILLMOTT'S 'SACRED
POETRY,' 1862

A CHILD IN
PRAYER

In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (Routledge), with a hundred and ten designs by J. D. Watson, engraved by the Dalziels, we are confronted with a book that is distinctly of the 'sixties,' or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that most of its illustrations are distinguished by the broader treatment of the new school. It is strange that the ample and admirable achievements of this artist have not received more general recognition. When you meet with one of his designs set amid the work of the greatest illustrators, it rarely fails to maintain a dignified equality. If it lack the supreme artistry of one or the fine invention of another, it is always sober and at times masterly, in a restrained matter-of-fact way. Some sketches reproduced in the British Architect (January 22, 1878) display more freedom than his finished works suggest.

Quarles' Emblems (Nisbet), illustrated by C. H. Bennett, a caricaturist whose style seems to have lost touch with modern taste, with decorative adornments by W. H. Rogers, must not be overlooked; nor Tennyson's May Queen (Sampson Low), with designs by E. V. B., a gifted amateur, whose work in this book, in Child's Play, and elsewhere, has a distinct charm, despite many technical shortcomings.

Lyra Germanica (Longmans, 1861), an anthology of hymns translated from the German by Catherine Winkworth, produced under the superintendence of John Leighton, F.S.A., must not be confused with a second series, with the same title, the same anthologist and art editor, issued in 1868. This book contains much decorative work by John Leighton, who has scarcely received the recognition he deserves as a pioneer of better things. At a time when lawless naturalistic detail was supreme everywhere he strove to popularise conventional methods, and deserves full appreciation for his energetic and successful labours. The illustrations include one fine Charles Keene (p. 182), three by M. J. Lawless (pp. 47, 90, 190), four by H. S. Marks (pp. 1, 19, 57, 100), and five by E. Armitage (pp. 29, 62, 111, 160, 197). The engraving by T. Bolton, after a Flaxman bas-relief, is apparently the same block Bohn includes in his supplementary chapter to the 1861 edition of Chatto and Jackson's History of Wood-Engraving, as a specimen of the first experiment in Mr. Bolton's 'new process for photographing on the wood.' As this change was literally epoch-making, this really beautiful block, with its companion p. 111, is of historic interest.

Shakespeare: His Birthplace, edited by J. R. Wise, with twenty-three pictures drawn and engraved by W. J. Linton (Longmans); The Poetry of Nature, with thirty-six drawings by Harrison Weir (Low), and Household Song (Kent, 1861), illustrated by Birket Foster, Samuel Palmer, G. H. Thomas, A. Solomon, J. Andrews, and others, including two rather powerful blocks, To Mary in Heaven especially, by J. Archer, R.S.A.; Chambers's Household Shakespeare, illustrated by Keeley Halswelle, must not be forgotten; nor A Boy's Book of Ballads (Bell and Daldy), illustrated by Sir John Gilbert; but The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, with designs by A. Crowquill (Trübner), is not very important.

An illustrated edition of Mrs. Gatty's Parables from Nature (Bell and Daldy) would be remarkable if only for the Nativity by 'E. Burne-Jones.' It is instructive to compare the engraving with the half-tone reproduction of the original drawing which appears in Mr. Pennell's Modern Illustrations (Bell). But there are also good things in the book by John Tenniel, Holman Hunt, M. E. Edwards, and drawings of average interest by W. (not J. E.) Millais, Otto Speckter, F. Keyl, L. Frolich, Harrison Weir, and others. In the respective editions of 1861 and 1867 the illustrations vary considerably.

Another book that happened to be published in 1860 would at any time occupy a place by itself. Founded on Blake, David Scott developed a distinctly personal manner, that has provoked praise and censure, in each case beyond its merit. Yet without joining either detractors or eulogists, one must own that the Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (Edinburgh, 1860), illustrated by David and W. B. Scott, if a most ugly piece of book-making, contains many very noteworthy designs. It is possible, despite the monograph of J. M. Gray (one of the earliest critics who devoted special study to the works of Frederick Sandys) and a certain esoteric cult of a limited number of disciples, that David Scott still remains practically unknown to the younger generation. Yet this book, and Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, which he also illustrated, contain a great many weird ideas, more or less adequately portrayed, which should endear themselves to the symbolist to-day.

H. S. MARKS, R.A.

WILLMOTT'S 'SACRED POETRY'
1862

A QUIET MIND

H. S. MARKS

WILLMOTT'S 'SACRED
POETRY,' 1862

IN A HERMITAGE

FREDERICK SANDYS

WILLMOTT'S 'SACRED
POETRY,' 1862

LIFE'S JOURNEY

FREDERICK SANDYS

WILLMOTT'S 'SACRED
POETRY,' 1862

A LITTLE
MOURNER

Goldsmith's Poems, with coloured illustrations by Birket Foster, appeared this year, which saw also many volumes (issued by Day and Son), resplendent with chromo-lithography and 'illuminations' in gold and colours. So that the Christmas harvest, that might seem somewhat meagre in the short list above, really contained as many high-priced volumes appealing to Art, 'as she was understood in 1860,' as the list of 1897 is likely to include. But the books we deem memorable had not yet appeared, and the signs of 1860 hardly point to the rapid advance which the next few years were destined to reveal. In passing it may be noted that this was the great magenta period for cloth bindings. 'Surely the most exquisite colour that ever left the chemist's laboratory,' exclaims a contemporary critic, after a rapturous eulogy.

The 'wicked fratricidal war in America,' we find by references in the trade periodicals of the time, was held responsible for the scarcity of costly volumes at this date. Perhaps the most important book of 1862 is Willmott's Sacred Poetry of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries (like many others issued the previous Christmas). It contains two drawings by Sandys, which are referred to elsewhere, three by Fred Walker, seven by H. S. Marks, two by Charles Keene, twenty-eight by J. D. Watson, one by Holman Hunt, eight by John Gilbert, and others by G. H. Andrews, H. H. Armstead, W. P. Burton, F. R. Pickersgill, S. Read, F. Smallfield, J. Sleigh, Harrison Weir, and J. Wolf. Although the absence of Millais and Rossetti would suffice to place it just below the Tennyson, it may be considered otherwise as about of equal interest with that and the earlier anthology of Poets of the Nineteenth Century, gathered together by the same editor. It is distinctly a typical book of the earlier sixties, and one which no collector can afford to miss.

Poetry of the Elizabethan Age, with thirty illustrations by Birket Foster, John Gilbert, Julian Portch, and E. M. Wimperis, is not quite representative of the sixties, but of a transitional period which might be claimed by either decade. The Songs and Sonnets of Shakespeare, with ten coloured and thirty black-and-white drawings by John Gilbert, to whatever period it may be ascribed, is one of his most superb achievements in book-illustration. Christmas with the Poets, 'embellished with fifty-three tinted illustrations by Birket Foster' (Bell and Daldy), can hardly be mentioned with approval, despite the masterly drawings of a great illustrator. As a piece of book-making, its gold borders and weak 'tinted' blocks, printed in feeble blues and browns, render it peculiarly unattractive. Yet in all honesty one must own that its art is far more thorough and its taste possibly no worse essentially than many of the deckle-edged superfluities with neo-primitive designs which are popular at the present time. The work of this artist is perhaps somewhat out of favour at the moment, but its neglect may be attributed to the inevitable reaction which follows undue popularity. There are legends of the palmy days of the Old Water-Colour Society, when the competition of dealers to secure drawings by 'Birket Foster' was so great that they crowded round the doors before they opened on the first day, and one enterprising trader, crushing in, went straight to the secretary and said, 'I will buy the screen,' thereby forestalling his rivals who were hastily jotting down the works by this artist hung with others upon it. But even popular applause is not always misdirected; and the master of English landscape, despite a certain prettiness and pettiness, despite a little sentimentality, is surely a master. There are 'bests' and bests so many; and if Birket Foster is easily best of his kind, and the fact would hardly be challenged, then as a master we may leave his final place to the future, sure that it is always with the great who have succeeded, and not with the merely promising who just escape success. Among the minor volumes of this year, now especially scarce, are Dr. George Mac Donald's Dealings with the Fairies, with illustrations by Arthur Hughes; and several of Strahan's children's books: The Gold Thread, by Dr. Norman Macleod, with illustrations by J. D. Watson, J. M'Whirter, and others; and The Postman's Bag, illustrated by J. Pettie and others. A curious volume, Spiritual Conceits, 'illustrated by Harry Rogers,' is printed throughout in black letter, and, despite the title, would be described more correctly to-day as 'decorated' by the artists, for the engravings are 'emblematical devices' more or less directly inspired by the emblem books of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. As one of the few examples of conventional design of the period, it is interesting. New copies are by no means scarce, so it would seem to have been printed in excess of the demand, which, judging by the laudatory criticism it received, could not have been meagre.

BIRKET FOSTER

'PICTURES OF ENGLISH
LANDSCAPE,' 1864

THE GREEN LANE

BIRKET FOSTER

'PICTURES OF ENGLISH
LANDSCAPE,' 1864

THE OLD CHAIR-MENDER
AT THE COTTAGE DOOR

1862, the year of the second great International Exhibition, might have been expected to yield a full crop of lavishly produced books, but as a matter of fact there are singularly few. Two important exceptions occur: Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, with the title-page and frontispiece by her brother, and The New Forest, by J. R. Wise, with drawings by Walter Crane, 'a very young artist, whom we shall be glad to meet with again,' as a contemporary criticism runs. Yet, on the whole the men of the sixties appear to have exhausted their efforts on the new magazines which had just attained full vigour; hence, as we might expect, publishers refrained from competing with the annual volumes, which gave at least twice as much for seven shillings and sixpence as they had hitherto included in a guinea table-book. Birket Foster's Pictures of English Landscape, with pictures in words by Tom Taylor (Routledge 1863), contains thirty singularly fine drawings engraved by Dalziels, of which the editor says: 'It is still a moot point among the best critics how far wood-engraving can be profitably carried—whether it can attempt, with success, such freedom and subtlety of workmanship as are employed, for example, on the skies throughout this series, or should restrict itself to simple effects, with a broader and plainer manner of execution.' Its companion was styled Beauties of English Landscape, and appeared much later.

Early English Poems, Chaucer to Pope (Sampson Low, 1863), is another book of the autumn of 1862, which like the rest is a quarto, with an elaborately designed cover and the usual hundred blocks delightfully engraved, after John Gilbert, Birket Foster, George Thomas, T. Creswick, R.A., R. Redgrave, R.A., E. Duncan, and many others. Although there is no reference to the fact in the book itself, many of the illustrations had already done duty in other books, or possibly did duty afterwards, for, without a tedious collation of first editions, it is difficult to discover the first appearance of any particular block. Probably this was the original source of many blocks which afterwards were issued in all sorts of volumes, so frequently that their charm is somewhat tarnished by memories of badly printed clichés in children's primers and the like.

FREDERICK SHIELDS

DEFOE'S 'HISTORY OF
THE PLAGUE,' 1862

THE PLAGUE-CART

The Life of St. Patrick, by H. Formby, is said to be illustrated by M. J. Lawless, but the labour in tracking it was lost; for, whoever made the designs, the wood-engravings are of the lowest order, and the book no more interesting than an illustrated religious tract is usually. A sumptuously produced volume, Moral Emblems (Longmans), 'from Jacob Cats and Robert Fairlie,' contains 'illustrations freely rendered from designs found in their works,' by John Leighton. The text is by Richard Pigot, whose later career affords us a moral emblem of another sort; if indeed he be the hero of the Parnell incident, as contemporary notices declared. Its two hundred and forty-seven blocks were engraved by different hands—Leighton, Dalziel, Green, Harral, De Wilde, Swain, and others, all duly acknowledged in the contents. It is only fair to say that the decorators rarely fall to the level of the platitudes, interspersed with Biblical quotations, which form the text of the work. Among other volumes worth mentioning are: Papers for Thoughtful Girls, by Sarah Tytler, illustrated by J. E. Millais; Children's Sayings, with four pictures by Walter Crane; Stories of Old, two series, each with seven illustrations by the same artist; Stories little Breeches told, illustrated by C. H. Bennett; and volumes of Laurie's Shilling Entertainment Library, including probably (the date of the first edition is not quite clear) Defoe's History of the Plague, with singularly powerful designs by Frederick Shields,—'Rembrandt-like in power,' Mr. Joseph Pennell has rightly called them; and Puck on Pegasus, a volume of humorous verses by H. Cholmondeley Pennell, illustrated, and well illustrated, by Leech, Tenniel, Doyle, Millais, Sir Noel Paton, 'Phiz,' Portch, and M. Ellen Edwards. The Doyle tailpiece is the only one formally attributed, but students will have little difficulty in identifying the work of the various hands represented in its pages. A volume, artless in its art, that has charmed nevertheless for thirty years, and still amuses—Lear's Book of Nonsense appeared this year; but luckily its influence has been nil so far, except possibly upon modern posters; Wordsworth's Poems for the Young, with fifty illustrations by John Pettie and J. M'Whirter; an illustrated edition of Mrs. Alexander's Hymns for Little Children, mildly exciting as works of art, Famous Boys (Darton), illustrated by T. Morten; One Year, with pictures by Clarence Dobell (Macmillan), and Wood's Natural History, with fine drawings by Zwecker, Wolf, and others, are also in the sterile crop of the year 1862. Passages from Modern English Poets (1862), illustrated by the Junior Etching Club, an important book of its sort, is noticed elsewhere.

In 1863 Millais' Parables of our Lord was issued, although it is dated 1864. Of the masterpieces it contained a reviewer of the period wrote: 'looked at with unfeeling eyes there is little to commend them to the average class of book-buyers.' This, which is no doubt a fairly representative opinion, may be set against the wide appreciation by artists they aroused at the time, and ever since, merely to show that the good taste of the sixties was probably confined to a minority, and that the public in 1867 or 1897, despite its pretence of culture, is rarely moved deeply by great work. It is difficult to write dispassionately of this book. Granted that when you compare it with the drawings of some of the subjects which are still extant, you regret certain shortcomings on the part of the engravers; yet, when studied apart from that severe test, there is much that is not merely the finest work of a fine period, but that may be placed among the finest of any period. We are told in the preface that 'Mr. Millais made his first drawing to illustrate the Parables in August 1857, and the last in October 1863; thus he has been able to give that care and consideration to his subjects which the beauty as well as the importance of The Parables demanded.' It is not necessary to describe each one of the many illustrations. Those which appeared in Good Words are printed with the titles they first bore in the notice of that magazine. The other eight are: The Tares, The Wicked Husbandman, The Foolish Virgins, The Importunate Friend, The Marriage Feast, The Lost Sheep, The Rich Man and Lazarus, and The Good Shepherd, all engraved by the brothers Dalziel, who (to quote again from the preface), 'have seconded his efforts with all earnestness, desiring, as far as their powers would go, to make the pictures specimens of the art of wood-engraving.' Here it would be superfluous to ask whether the designs could have been better engraved, or even whether photogravure would not have retained more of the exquisite beauty of the originals. As they are, remembering the conditions of their production, we must needs accept them; and the full admiration they demand need not be dashed by useless regret. In place of blaming Dalziels, let us rather praise lavishly the foresight and sympathy which called into being most of the books we now prize. Indeed, a history of Dalziels' undertakings fully told would be no small part of a history of modern English illustration. If any one who loves art, especially the art of illustration, does not know and prize these Parables, then it were foolish to add a line in their praise, for ignorance of such masterpieces is criminal, and lukewarm approval a fatal confession.

J. E. MILLAIS

'THE PARABLES OF OUR
LORD,' ROUTLEDGE, 1864

THE PRODIGAL
SON

J. E. MILLAIS

'THE PARABLES OF OUR
LORD,' 1864

THE TARES

J. E. MILLAIS

'THE PARABLES OF OUR
LORD,' ROUTLEDGE, 1864

THE SOWER

It is difficult to place any book of 1863 next in order to The Parables; despite many fine publications, there is not one worthy to be classed by its side. Perhaps the most important in one sense, and the least in another, is Longmans' famous edition of the New Testament, upon the preparation of which a fabulous amount of money was spent. Yet, although an epoch-making book to the wood-engraver, it represents rather the end of an old school than the beginning of a new. Its greatly reduced illustrations, wherein a huge wall-painting occupies the space of a postage-stamp, the lack of spontaneity in its formal 'correct' borders, impress us to-day more as curiosities than as living craft. All the same, it was considered a marvellous achievement; but its spirit, if it ever existed, has evaporated with age; indeed, one cannot help thinking that it was out of date when it appeared. Ten years earlier it would have provoked more hearty approval; but, with Millais' treatment of the similar subjects, who could look at this precise, unimaginative work? That it ever exercised any influence on wood-engraving is doubtful, and that it repaid, even in part, its cost and labour is still more problematical. Bound, if memory can be trusted, in sham carved and pierced oak, it may be still encountered among the rep and polished walnut of the period, a monument of misapplied endeavour. Its ideal seems to have been to imitate steel-plates by wood-blocks. Just as Crusaders' tombs had been modelled in Parian to do duty as match-boxes, and a thousand other attempts, then and since, with the avowed intention of imitation, have attracted no little common popularity; so its tediously minute handiwork no doubt won the approbation of those whose approval is artistic insult. One has but to turn to the tiny woodcuts of Holbein's Dance of Death to find that size is of no importance; a netsuke may be as broadly treated as a colossus, but the art of the miniature is too often miniature art. Therefore, side by side with the splendour of Millais, this mildly exciting 'art-book' comes as a typical contrast. No matter how Millais was rewarded, the mere engraver in this case must have been paid more, if contemporary accounts are true; yet the result is that nobody wants the one, and every artist, lay or professional, who is awake to really fine things, treasures a chance impression of a Parable, torn out of Good Words, as a thing to reverence.

On turning back to a scrap-book, where a number of them were preserved by the present writer in the late sixties, the old surprise comes back with irresistible force to find that things which he then ranked first still maintain their supremacy. At that time, when the wonders of Japanese Art were a sealed book, the masterpieces of Dürer and Rembrandt, the triumphs of Whistler, and the exquisite engravings of the French wood-engravers, past and present, all unknown to him, he, in common with dozens of others, was conscious that here was something so great that it was almost uncanny, for, obvious and simple as it looked, it yet accomplished what all others seemed only to attempt. There are very few pictures which after thirty years retain the old glamour; but while the Longmans' New Testament when seen anew raises no thrill of appreciation, the Parables appear as astoundingly great to one familiar with modern illustrations as they did to an ignorant boy thirty years ago. Other fetishes have gone unregretted to the lumber-room, but the Millais of 1863 is a still greater master in 1896. They builded better than they knew, these giants of the sixties, and that the approval of another generation indorses the verdict of the best critics of their own may be taken as a promise of abiding homage to be paid in centuries yet to come.

Curiously enough, among some literary notes for Christmas 1863, we find that 'early next year Messrs. Dalziel hoped to issue their Bible pictures,' and the writer goes on to praise several of the drawings—notably the Leightons, which were even then engraved: this note, nearly twenty years before the book actually appeared, is interesting, but it must not be thought that the time was devoted entirely to the engraving or in waiting for the perfection of photographic transfer to wood.

An English edition of Michelet's The Bird, illustrated by Giacomelli (Nelson), was issued this year, and the highly wrought naturalistic details of the engravings became extremely popular. Its 'pretty' finish, and tame, colourless effect influenced no little work of the period, and, coupled with the clichés of Gustave Doré engravings, so lavishly reprinted here about this date, did much to promote a style of wood-engraving which found its highest expression in the pages of American magazines years afterwards, and its lowest in the 'decorated' poems of cheap 'snippet' weeklies, which to-day are yet imitated unconsciously by those who work in wash for half-tone processes.

The next important volume of the year, after Millais' Parables, judged by our standard, is unquestionably Dalziels' edition of The Arabian Nights (Ward, Lock, and Tyler)—'illustrated by A. Boyd Houghton,' one feels tempted to add to the title. But although the book is often referred to as the work of one artist, as a matter of fact it is the work of many. Houghton does not even contribute the largest number; his eighty-seven designs are beaten by T. Dalziel's eighty-nine. Nor is he the greatest draughtsman therein, for there are two by Millais. Still, notwithstanding these, and eight by John Tenniel, ten by G. J. Pinwell, one by T. Morten, two by J. D. Watson, and six by E. Dalziel, it is for Houghton's sake that the book has suddenly assumed importance, even in the eyes of those who do not search through the volumes of the sixties for forgotten masterpieces, but are content with Once a Week, the Cornhill Gallery, and Thornbury's Legendary Ballads. One thing is beyond doubt: that with the Arabian Nights and the others on this short list you have a National Gallery of the best things—not the best of all possible collections, not even an exhaustive collection of specimens of each, but a good working assortment that suffices to uphold the glory of 'the golden decade,' and can only be supplemented but not surpassed by the addition of all the others.

The book was issued in weekly numbers, as you see on opening a first edition of the volume at the risk of breaking its back. Close to the fold appears the legend, 'Printed by Dalziel Brothers, the Camden Press, N.W.,' etc. It was eventually issued in two volumes in October 1864, but dated '1865.' Mr. Laurence Housman's volume, Arthur Boyd Houghton (Kegan Paul, 1896), and his excellent article in Bibliographica, are available for those who wish for a fuller appreciation of this fine book.

A. BOYD HOUGHTON

DALZIELS' 'ARABIAN
NIGHTS,' p. 149

NOUREDDIN ALI ON
HIS JOURNEY

By the side of the books already mentioned the rest seem almost commonplace, but another edition of The Pilgrim's Progress, with one hundred illustrations by T. Dalziel, must not be overlooked. These show that one of the famous engravers was also an artist of no mean importance, and explain much of the fine taste that distinguished the publications of the firm with which he was associated. Elsewhere the many original designs by other members of the firm go to prove this up to the hilt.

It is curious to find 1864 the date of the 'new' illustrated edition of The Ingoldsby Legends (Bentley).[6] Those familiar with contemporary volumes would have hazarded a time ten to fifteen years earlier, had the matter been open to doubt. It is profusely illustrated by Leech, Tenniel, and Cruikshank, but in no way a typical book of the sixties. English Sacred Poetry of the Olden Time (Religious Tract Society, 1864) was issued this year. It contains F. Walker's Portrait of a Minister (p. 184); The Abbey Walk (p. 6), and Sir Walter Raleigh (p. 60), by G. Du Maurier; ten drawings by J. W. North, three by C. Green, three by J. D. Watson, and many by Tenniel, Percival Skelton, and others, all engraved by Whymper; Our Life illustrated by Pen and Pencil (Religious Tract Society, undated), is a similar book with designs by J. D. Watson, Pinwell, C. H. Selous, Du Maurier, Barnes, J. W. North. Aytoun's Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers is another book of 1863 that is noticeable for its illustrations, from designs by [Sir] Noel Paton. Robinson Crusoe, with one hundred designs by J. D. Watson (Routledge); Wordsworth's Poetry for the Young, illustrated by J. Pettie and J. M'Whirter (Strahan, 1863); C. H. Bennett's London People, and the same artist's Mr. Wind and Madam Rain (Sampson Low); Hymns in Prose by Mrs. Barbauld, illustrated by Barnes, Whymper, etc.; Dr. Cumming's Life and Lessons of our Lord, with pictures by C. Green, P. Skelton, A. Hunt, and others; yet another Pilgrim's Progress, this time with illustrations by H. C. Selous and P. Priolo (Cassell), and another Robinson Crusoe, illustrated by G. H. Thomas (Cassell); The Family Fairy Tales, illustrated 'by a young lady of eighteen,' signed M. E. E., the first published works of M. Ellen Edwards, who soon became—and deservedly—one of the most popular illustrators of the day; Homes without Hands, by J. G. Wood, with animal drawings by F. W. Keyl; Hacco the Dwarf, with illustrations, interesting, because they are (I believe) the earliest published work by G. J. Pinwell; and Golden Light (Routledge), with eighty drawings by A. W. Bayes, are some of the rest of the books of this year that must be dismissed with a bare record of their titles.

The Lake Country, with illustrations drawn and engraved by W. J. Linton (Smith and Elder, 1864), is of technical rather than general interest. Champions of the 'white line' will find practical evidence of its masterly use in the engravings. The Victorian History of England (Routledge, 1864) has at least one drawing by A. B. Houghton, but, so far as a rapid turn over of its pages revealed, only one—the frontispiece. The Golden Harp (Routledge) appears to be a re-issue of blocks by J. D. Watson used elsewhere. What Men have said about Women (Routledge) is illustrated by the same artist, who is responsible—indirectly, one hopes—for coloured designs to Melbourne House, issued about this time. The Months illustrated with Pen and Pencil (Religious Tract Society, undated) contains sixty engravings by Butterworth and Heath, after J. Gilbert, Robert Barnes, J. W. North, and others; uniform in style with English Sacred Poetry, it does not reach the same level of excellence. A book, Words for the Wise (Nelson), illustrated by W. Small, I have failed to see; a critic calls attention to it as 'the work of a promising young artist hitherto unknown to us.' Pictures of English Life, with sixteen engravings by J. D. Cooper, after drawings by R. Barnes (Sampson Low), contains blocks of a size unusual in books. The superb drawings by Charles Keene to Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures (Bradbury and Evans) enrich this prolific period with more masterpieces.

FREDERICK WALKER

'ENGLISH SACRED POETRY'
R. T. S.

PORTRAIT OF
A MINISTER

G. J. PINWELL

'WAYSIDE POESIES,' 1867

KING PIPPIN

AUTUMN

---

[CHAPTER IX: SOME ILLUSTRATED BOOKS, 1865–1872]

With 1865 we reach the height of the movement—this and the following year being of all others most fertile in books illustrated by the best representative men. It saw Rossetti's frontispiece and title to The Prince's Progress (Macmillan, 1866), these two designs being almost enough to make the year memorable. A Round of Days (Routledge), one of the finest of the illustrated gift-books, contains Walker's Broken Victuals (p. 3), One Mouth More (p. 58), and the well-known Four Seasons (pp. 37, 39, 41, 43), for one of which the drawing on wood is at South Kensington Museum. A. Boyd Houghton appears with fourteen examples (pp. 1, 2, 5, 19, 20, 21, 22, 30, 47, 48, 71, 73, 77, 78), J. W. North with three exquisite landscapes (pp. 15, 17, 18), G. J. Pinwell with five subjects, Paul Gray with one (p. 81), J. D. Watson with five (pp. 26, 28, 62, 64, 66), T. Morten with one (p. 79), A. W. Bayes with two, T. Dalziel with seven, and E. Dalziel with two. These complete its contents, excepting two delicately engraved studies of heads after Warwick Brookes. The book itself is distinctly a lineal descendant from the annuals of the earlier half of the century; a typical example of a not very noble ideal—a scrap-book of poems and pictures made important by the work of the artists.

Yet, with full recognition of the greater literalism of reproductive process to-day, one doubts if even The London Garland (Macmillan, 1895), which most nearly approaches it, will maintain its interest more fully, after thirty years' interval, than does this sumptuous quarto, and a few of its fellows. That we could get together, at the present time, as varied and capable a list of artists is quite possible; but where is the publisher who would risk paying so much for original work designed for a single book, when examples by the same men are to be obtained in equally good reproductions, and not less well printed in many of the sixpenny weeklies and the monthly magazines? The change of conditions seems to forbid a revival of volumes of this class, although the Yellow Book, The Pageant, The Savoy, and The Quarto, are not entirely unrelated to them.

To 1864 belongs formally The Cornhill Gallery, a hundred impressions from the original blocks of pictures. Among the early volumes issued for Christmas 1865, this is, perhaps, the most important book, but, as its contents are fully noticed elsewhere, no more need be said here. It is amusing to read that a critic disliked 'Mr. Leighton's unpleasant subjects'—the Romola designs! Dalziels' Illustrated Goldsmith (Ward and Lock, 1865), may be considered, upon the whole, the masterpiece of G. J. Pinwell, who designed the hundred illustrations which seemed then to be accepted as the only orthodox number for a book. How charming some of these are every student of the period knows. Pinwell, as certain original drawings that remain prove only too clearly, suffered terribly at the engraver's hands, and, beautiful as many of the designs are, one cannot avoid regret that they were not treated more tenderly. It is quite possible that bold work was needed for the serial issue in large numbers, and that the engravers simplified the drawings of set purpose; but the delicacy and grace of the originals are ill-replaced by the coarser modelling of the faces and the quality of the 'line' throughout. This year saw also Home Thoughts and Home Scenes, a book with thirty-five drawings of children, by A. Boyd Houghton (Routledge, 1865); which was afterwards reprinted as Happy Day Stories. This book is absolutely essential to any representative collection of the period, but nevertheless its designs can hardly be regarded as among the artist's most masterly works.

Warne's edition of The Arabian Nights (1866), with sixteen drawings, eight by A. Boyd Houghton, must not be confused with the other edition to which he contributed quite distinct subjects. This, and Don Quixote (Warne) appear in the Christmas lists for 1865. The great Spanish novel hardly seems to have sustained the artist to his finest achievements throughout. It contains 100 most interesting designs; some that reveal his full accomplishment. At the same time it fails to astound you, as the Arabian Nights have a knack of doing again and again, whenever you turn over their pages.

G. J. PINWELL

DALZIELS' 'ILLUSTRATED
GOLDSMITH,' p. 155

WHAT, BILL! YOU
CHUBBY ROGUE

FREDERICK WALKER

'A ROUND OF DAYS'

AUTUMN

This was a great year for Gustave Doré. So many English editions of his books were issued that a summary of the year's art begins with an apology for calling it 'l'année dorée.' Among these Don Quixote gained rapid and firm hold of popular fancy. Many people who have risen superior to Doré to-day, and speak of him with contempt now, at that time grovelled before the French artist's work. A contemporary critic writes of him as one who, 'by common consent occupies the first place of all book-illustrators of all time.' As he is not in any sense an English illustrator we need not attempt to appraise his work here, but it influenced public taste far more than it influenced draughtsmen; yet the fact that Don Quixote, as Houghton depicted him, even now fails to oust the lean-armoured, grotesque hero (one of Doré's few powerful creations), may be the reason for Houghton's version failing to impress us beyond a certain point.

A book of the year, Ballads and Songs of Brittany, from the French of Hersart de la Villemarqué, by Tom Taylor (Macmillan), should be interesting to-day, if only for the two steel plates after Tissot, which show that, in his great Eastern cycle of Biblical drawings, he reverts to an earlier manner, which he had employed before the mondaine and the demi-monde attracted him. The book contains also four Millais', and a fine Keene, which, with most of the other subjects, had already appeared with the poems in Once a Week.

Enoch Arden (E. Moxon & Co., 1866), with twenty-five most dainty drawings by Arthur Hughes, is said, in some contemporaneous announcements of the season, to be the first successful attempts at photographing the designs on wood; but we have already noticed the fine example of Mr. Bolton's new process for photographing on wood, a bas-relief after Flaxman, in the Lyra Germanica (1861). Another table-book, important so far as price is concerned, is The Life of Man Symbolised (Longmans, 1866), with many illustrations by John Leighton, F.S.A. Gems of Literature, illustrated by Noel Paton (Nimmo); Pen and Pencil Pictures from the Poets (Nimmo), with forty illustrations by Keeley Halswelle, Pettie, M'Whirter, W. Small, J. Lawson, and others; and Scott's Poems, illustrated by Keeley Halswelle, were also issued at this time. An epoch-making book of this season, Alice in Wonderland (Macmillan), with Tenniel's forty-two immortal designs, needs only bare mention, for who does not know it intimately?

A very interesting experiment survives in the illustration to Watts's Divine and Moral Songs (Nisbet, 1865). This book, edited by H. Fitzcock, the enthusiastic promoter of graphotype, enlisted the services of notable artists, whose tentative efforts, in the first substitute for wood-engraving that attained any commercial recognition, make the otherwise tedious volume a treasure-trove. The Du Maurier on page 14, the J. D. Watson (p. 22), T. Morten (p. 43), Holman Hunt (p. 49), M. E. Edwards (p. 62), C. Green (p. 9), and W. Cave Thomas (p. 75), are all worth study. A not very important drawing, The Moon Shines Full, by Dr. C. Heilbuth (p. 3), is a very successful effort to rival the effect of wood-engraving by mechanical means. The titles of the poems come with most grotesque effect beneath the drawings. An artist in knickerbockers, by Du Maurier, entitled 'The excellency of the Bible,' for instance, is apt to raise a ribald laugh; and some of the Calvinistic rhymes and unpleasant theology of the good old doctor are strangely ill-matched with these experiments in a medium which evidently interested the draughtsman far more than the songs which laid so heavy a burden on the little people of a century ago.

Legends and Lyrics, by A. A. Procter (Bell and Daldy, 1865), is another quarto edition of a popular poet, but here, in place of the usual hundred Birket Fosters, Gilberts, and the rest, we have but nineteen engravings; but they are all full pages. Charles Keene's two subjects are The Settlers and Rest (a night bivouac of soldiers); John Tenniel with A Legend of Bregenz, and Du Maurier with A Legend of Provence and The Requital, also represent the Punch contingent. The others are by W. T. C. Dobson, A. R. A., L. Frolich, T. Morten, G. H. Thomas, Samuel Palmer, J. D. Watson, W. P. Burton, J. M. Carrick, M. E. Edwards, and William H. Millais; all engraved by Horace Harral, who cannot be congratulated upon his rendering of some blocks. A very charming set of drawings by J. E. Millais will be found in Henry Leslie's Little Songs for me to sing (Cassell, undated). The subjects, seven in number, are slightly executed studies of childhood by a master-hand at the work. The first volume of Cassell's Shakespeare, which contains a large number of drawings by H. C. Selous, was issued this year.

G. J. PINWELL

'WAYSIDE POESIES'

THE LITTLE CALF

FREDERICK WALKER

'WAYSIDE POESIES'

THE BIT O'
GARDEN

A fine collection of reprinted illustrations is Pictures of Society (Sampson Low, 1866); its blocks are taken from Mr. James Hogg's publications, London Society and The Churchman's Family Magazine, and include the fine Sandys, The Waiting Time, and M. J. Lawless's Silent Chamber, both reproduced here by his permission. It is a scarce but very interesting, if unequal, book.

The minor books at this time are rich in drawings by most of the artists who are our quest in this chronicle. The number, and the difficulty of ascertaining which of them contain worthy designs, must be the excuse for a very incomplete list, which includes Keats's Poetical Works, with a hundred and twenty designs by G. Scharf; The Children's Hour (Hunter, Edinburgh), W. Small, etc.; Jingles and Jokes for Little Folks, Paul Gray, etc.; The Magic Mirror, W. S. Gilbert (Strahan); Dame Dingle's Fairy Tales, J. Proctor (Cassell); Ellen Montgomery's Bookshelf, twelve plates in colour by J. D. Watson (Nisbet); An Old Fairy Tale, R. Doyle (Routledge); What the Moon saw, eighty illustrations by A. W. Bayes (Routledge); Ernie Elton the Lazy Boy, Patient Henry, The Boy Pilgrims, all illustrated by A. Boyd Houghton and published by Warne; Sybil and her Snowball, R. Barnes (Seeley); Stories told to a Child, Houghton, etc. (Strahan); Aunt Sally's Life, G. Thomas, (Bell); Mother's Last Words, M. E. Edwards, etc. (Jarrold), and Watts's Divine Songs (Sampson Low), with some fine Smalls and Birket Fosters.

Although the style of work that prevailed in 1865–66 was so widely popular, it did not find universal approval. Critics deplored the 'sketchy' style of Dalziels' engraving and, comparing it unfavourably with Longmans' New Testament, moaned, 'when shall we find again such engraving as in Mulready's drawings by Thompson.' In Don Quixote they owned Houghton's designs were clever, but thought, 'on the whole, the worthy knight deserved better treatment.' And so all along the line we find the then present contrasted with the golden past; even as many look back to-day to the golden 'sixties' from the commonplace 'nineties.' This time saw the beginning of the superb toy-books by Walter Crane—which are his masterpieces, and monuments to the skill and taste of Edmund Evans, their engraver and printer. For wood-block printing in colours, no western work has surpassed them even to this date.

Poems by Jean Ingelow (Longmans, 1867) is a very notable and scarce volume, which was published in the autumn of 1866. It contains twenty drawings by G. J. Pinwell, of which the seven to The High Tide are singularly fine; but that they suffered terribly at the engraver's hands some originals, in the possession of Mr. Joseph Pennell, prove only too plainly. J. W. North is represented by twenty-four, A. Boyd Houghton by sixteen, J. Wolf by nine, E. J. Poynter by one, W. Small by four, E. Dalziel by three, and T. Dalziel by twenty. The level of this fine book is singularly high, and it must needs be placed among the very best of one of the most fruitful years.

Another book published at this time, Ballad Stories of the Affections, by Robert Buchanan (Routledge, undated), contains some singularly fine examples of the work of G. J. Pinwell, W. Small, A. B. Houghton, E. Dalziel, T. Dalziel, J. Lawson, and J. D. Watson, engraved by the Brothers Dalziel; Signelil (pp. 7 and 9), Helga and Hildebrand (p. 17), The Two Sisters (p. 29), and Signe at the Wake (frontispiece) show Houghton at his best; Maid Mettelil (p. 47) exhibits Pinwell in an unusually decorative mood. Indeed, the thirty-four illustrations are all good, and the book is decidedly one of the most interesting volumes of the period, and unfortunately one least frequently met with to-day.

J. W. NORTH

'WAYSIDE POESIES'

GLEN OONA

J. W. NORTH

FROM THE ORIGINAL DRAWING

GLEN OONA

J. W. NORTH

'WAYSIDE POESIES,' 1867

THE NUTTING

J. W. NORTH

'WAYSIDE POESIES'

AFLOAT

If Wayside Poesies (Routledge, 1867) is not the finest illustrated book of the Christmas season of 1866, it is in the very front rank. Its eighteen drawings by G. J. Pinwell are among the best things he did; the five by Fred Walker are also well up to his best manner, and the nineteen by J. W. North include some of the most exquisite landscapes he ever set down in black and white. It was really one of Messrs. Dalziels' projects, and its publishers were only distributors; so that the credit—and it is not slight—of producing this admirable volume belongs to the popular engravers whose names occur in one capacity or another in almost every paragraph of this chronicle. Still more full of good things, but all reprinted, is Touches of Nature by Eminent Artists (Strahan, 1866). This folio volume, 'into which is gathered much of the richest fruit of Strahan and Company's magazines,' does not belie its dedication. As almost every one of its ninety-eight subjects is referred to in the record of the various magazines whence they were collected, it will suffice to note that it contains three by Sandys, nine by Fred Walker, four by Millais, five by A. Boyd Houghton, eight by G. J. Pinwell, two by Lawless, and many by J. W. North, W. Small, J. Pettie, G. Du Maurier, J. Tenniel, J. D. Watson, Robert Barnes, with specimens of Charles Keene, J. Mahoney, Marcus Stone, W. Orchardson, F. J. Shields, Paul Gray, H. H. Armstead, and others.

A volume of even greater interest is Millais's Collected Illustrations (Strahan, 1866). The eighty drawings on wood include many subjects originally published in Lays of the Holy Land, Once a Week, Tennyson's Poems, Good Words, Orley Farm, etc. etc. Copies in good condition are not often in the market; but it should be the blue riband of every collector, for the blocks here receive more careful printing than that allowed by the exigencies of their ordinary publication, and, free from any gold border, set on a large and not too shiny page, they tell out as well as one could hope to find them. As you linger over its pages you miss many favourites, for it is by no means an exhaustive collection even from the sources mentioned; but it is representative and full of superb work, interspersed though it be with the less fine things done while the great draughtsman was still hampered by the conventions of Mulready and Maclise.

Idyllic Pictures (Cassell, 1867) is another reprinted collection, this time selected entirely from one magazine, The Quiver. It contains a fine Sandys here called October, elsewhere The Advent of Winter, whereof the artist complained bitterly of the 'cutting.' In March 1884, the Art Journal contained a very excellent paper on 'Frederick Sandys,' by J. M. Gray, where the original drawing for this subject is reproduced by process. The more important things in Idyllic Pictures are: G. J. Pinwell's Faded Flowers (p. 13), Sailor's Valentine (p. 47), The Angel's Song (p. 73), The Organ-man (p. 121), and Straight On (p. 169); A. Boyd Houghton's Wee Rose Mary (p. 89), St. Martin (p. 181), and Sowing and Reaping (p. 189); Paul Gray's Cousin Lucy (Frontispiece), A Reverie (p. 17), By the Dead (p. 21), Mary's Wedding-day (p. 141), and The Holy Light (p. 193); W. Small's Between the Cliffs (p. 29), My Ariel (p. 43), A Retrospect (p. 85), Babble (p. 109), and Church Bells (p. 173); T. Morten's Izaak Walton (p. 69) and Hassan (p. 81); M. E. Edwards's A Lullaby (p. 49), Seeing Granny (p. 117), and Unrequited (p. 129), with others by the artists already named, and R. Barnes, H. Cameron, R. P. Leitch, C. J. Staniland, and G. H. Thomas.

Two Centuries of Song, selected by Walter Thornbury (Sampson Low, 1867), is a book almost exactly on the lines of those of the earlier sixties, which seems at first sight to be out of place amid the works of the newer school. It has nineteen full-page drawings, set in ornamental borders, which, printed in colours, decorate (? disfigure) every page of the book. The illustrations, engraved by W. J. Linton, Gavin Smith, H. Harral, are by eminent hands: H. S. Marks, T. Morten, W. Small, G. Leslie, and others. The frontispiece, Paying Labourers, temp. Elizabeth, by the first named, is very typical; Phyllis, by G. Leslie, a pretty half-mediæval, half-modern 'decorative' subject; and Colin and Phœbe, by W. Small, a delightful example of a broadly-treated landscape, with two figures in the distance—a really notable work. In my own copy, freely annotated with most depreciatory criticisms of text and pictures in pencil by a former owner, the illustration (p. 138) has vanished, but on its fly-leaf the late owner has written—

'This verse its picture had,
A vulgar lass and lout;
The wood-cut was so bad
That I would cut it out.'

That it is signed G. W. is a coincidence more curious than pleasing to me, and I quote the quatrain chiefly to show that the term 'wood-cut' for 'wood-engraving' has been in common use unofficially, as well as officially, all through this century. Nevertheless it is a distinct gain to differentiate between the diverse methods, by refusing to regard the terms as synonymous.

G. DU MAURIER

'STORY OF A FEATHER'
p. 63

'SEND THE CULPRIT
FROM THE HOUSE
INSTANTLY'

G. DU MAURIER

'STORY OF A FEATHER'
p. 14

'HE FELT THE SURPASSING
IMPORTANCE OF
HIS POSITION'

T. MORTEN

'THE QUIVER'

IZAAK WALTON

Foxe's Book of Martyrs (Cassell, undated), issued about this time, has a number of notable contributors; but the one-sided gruesome record of cruelties which, whether true or false, are horribly depressing, has evidently told upon the artists' nerves. The illustrators, according to its title-page, are: 'G. H. Thomas, John Gilbert, G. Du Maurier, J. D. Watson, A. B. Houghton, W. Small, A. Pasquier, R. Barnes, M. E. Edwards, T. Morten, etc.' Some of the pictures have the names of artist and engraver printed below, while others are not so distinguished. Those most worthy of mention are by A. Boyd Houghton (pp. 389, 480, 508, 572, 596, and 668), S. L. Fildes (p. 493), G. Du Maurier (p. 541), and W. Small (pp. 333, 365, 624). Among artists not mentioned in the title-page are F. J. Skill, J. Lee, J. Henley, and F. W. Lawson. The first volume of Cassell's History of England appeared this year with many engravings after W. Small and others.

Another book of the season worth noting is Heber's Hymns (Sampson Low, 1867). It contains 100 illustrations by T. D. Scott, W. Small, H. C. Selous, Wilfrid Lawson, Percival Skelton, and others; but they can hardly be styled epoch-making. Christian Lyrics (Sampson Low, 1868) (re-issued later in Warne's Chandos Classics), contains 250 illustrations by A. B. Houghton, R. Barnes, and others.

The Story of a Feather (Bradbury, Evans, and Co. 1867), illustrated by G. Du Maurier, is a book that deserves more space than can be allowed to it. It holds a large number of drawings, some of which, especially the initial vignettes, display the marvellously fecund and dramatic invention of the artist. The Spirit of Praise (Warne, 1867) is an anthology of sacred verse, containing delightful drawings by W. Small (pp. 57, 97, 149, 189), by Paul Gray (p. 89), by G. J. Pinwell (pp. 19, 157), by A. Boyd Houghton (p. 53), and others by J. W. North and T. Dalziel.

To 1866 belongs most probably Gulliver's Travels, illustrated with eighty designs by 'the late T. Morten,' in which the ill-fated artist is seen at his best level; they display a really convincing imagination, and if, technically speaking, he has done better work elsewhere, this is his most successful sustained effort.

Moore's Irish Melodies (Mackenzie) contains many illustrations by Birket Foster, Harrison Weir, Cope, and others. Art and Song has thirty original illustrations engraved on steel, which naturally looks very out of date among its fellows. A New Table-Book by Mark Lemon (Bradbury) is illustrated by F. Eltze. Mackay's 1001 Gems of Poetry (Routledge) numbers among its illustrations at least one Millais.

Books containing designs by artists whose names appear after the title, may be noted briefly here. Little Songs for Little Folks, J. D. Watson; Æsop's Fables, with 114 drawings by Harrison Weir (Routledge); Washerwoman's Foundling, W. Small (Strahan); Lilliput Levée, J. E. Millais, G. J. Pinwell, etc. (Strahan); Roses and Holly (Nimmo); Moore's Irish Melodies, Birket Foster, H. Weir, C. W. Cope, etc. (Mackenzie); Chandos Poets: Longfellow, A. Boyd Houghton, etc. (Warne); Things for Nests (Nisbet). The popularity of the illustrator at this time provoked a critic to write: 'Book-illustration is a thriving fad. Jones fecit is the pendant of everything he does. The dearth of intellectual talent among book-illustrators is amazing. The idea is thought less of than the form. Mental growth has not kept pace with technical skill'—a passage only worth quoting because it is echoed to-day, with as little justice, by irresponsible scribblers.

In another criticism upon this year's books we find: 'For the pre-Raphaelite draughtsman and the pre-Bewick artist, who love scratchy lines without colour, blocks which look like spoilt etchings, and the first "proofs" of artists' work untouched by the engraver, nothing can be better.' It was the year of Doré's Tennyson, and Doré's Tupper, a year when the fine harvests were nearly at an end, when a new order of things was close at hand, and the advent of The Graphic should set the final seal to the work of the sixties and inaugurate a new school.

But, although the Christmas of 1866 saw the ingathering of the most fertile harvest, the next three years must be not overlooked. In 1867 Lucile, with Du Maurier's designs, carries on the record; and North Coast and other Poems, by Robert Buchanan (Routledge, 1868), nobly maintains the tradition of Dalziels. It contains fifty-three drawings: thirteen by Houghton, six by Pinwell, two by W. Small, one by J. B. Zwecker, three by J. Wolf, twenty-five by T. and three by E. Dalziel, and the engraving is at their best level, the printing unusually good.

T. MORTEN

'GULLIVER'S TRAVELS'
CASSELL

GULLIVER IN LILLIPUT

T. MORTEN

'GULLIVER'S TRAVELS'
CASSELL

THE LAPUTIANS

Golden Thoughts from Golden Fountains (Warne, 1867) is another profusely illustrated anthology, on the lines of those which preceded it. The first edition was printed in sepia throughout, but the later editions printed in black do more justice to the blocks. In it we find seventy-three excellent designs by A. Boyd Houghton, G. J. Pinwell, W. Small, J. Lawson, W. P. Burton, G. Dalziel, T. Dalziel, and others; if the book, as a whole, cannot be placed among the best of its class, yet all the same it comprises some admirable work. The Savage Club Papers, 1867 (Tinsley), has also a galaxy of stars in its list of illustrators, but their sparkle is intermittent and feeble. True that Du Maurier, A. Boyd Houghton, J. D. Watson, and a host of others drew, and Dalziels, Swain, Harral, and the rest engraved their work; but all the same it is but an ephemeral book. Krilof and His Fables (Strahan, 1867) enshrines some delightful, if slight, Houghtons, and many spirited animal drawings by Zwecker. Wood's Bible Animals is also rich in fine zoological pictures. The Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity (Nisbet, 1867) would be notable if only for its three designs by Albert Moore, who appears here as an illustrator, probably the only time he ever contributed to any publication. Notwithstanding two or three powerful and fantastic drawings by W. Small, the rest are a very mixed lot, conceived in all sorts of manners. The Illustrated Book of Sacred Poems (Cassell, undated) is a big anthology, with a silver-print photograph by way of frontispiece. It contains a rather fine composition, Side by Side (p. 17), with no signature or other means of identification. W. Small (p. 21), J. D. Watson (pp. 69, 89, 105, 200, 209), M. E. Edwards, H. C. Selous, J. W. North, and many others are represented; but the engravers, for the most part, cannot be congratulated upon their interpretation of the artists' designs.

Other books worth mention are: The Mirage of Life, with twenty-nine characteristic illustrations by John Tenniel (Religious Tract Society); The Story without an End, illustrated by E. V. B.; Cassell's Illustrated Readings, two volumes with a mass of pictures of unequal merit, but the omnivorous collector will keep them for the sake of designs by F. Barnard, J. D. Watson, J. Mahoney, W. Small, S. L. Fildes, and many another typical artist of the sixties, in spite of the unsatisfactory blocks; Fairy Tales, by Mark Lemon, illustrated by C. H. Bennett and Richard Doyle; Pupils of St. John the Divine, illustrated by E. Armitage (Macmillan); Puck on Pegasus (the new and enlarged edition); Poetry of Nature, illustrated by Harrison Weir; and Original Poems by J. and E. Taylor (Routledge, 1868), with a large number of designs by R. Barnes, A. W. Bayes, etc.

With 1868 the end is near; the few books of real merit which bear its date were almost all issued in the autumn of the previous year. The Savage Club Papers, 1868, is a book not worth detailed comment; Five Days' Entertainment at Wentworth Grange, by F. T. Palgrave (Macmillan), contains some charming designs by Arthur Hughes; Stories from Memel, illustrated by Walter Crane (W. Hunt and Co.), is a pleasant book of the year; and, about this time, other work by the same artist appeared in The Merrie Heart (Cassell). King Gab's Story Bag (Cassell), The Magic of Kindness (Cassell), and other children's books I have been unable to trace, nor the Poetry of Nature, edited by J. Cundall.

Lyra Germanica (Longmans), a second anthology of hymns translated from the German, contains three illustrations by Ford Madox Brown, At the Sepulchre, The Sower, and Abraham, six by Edward Armitage, R.A., and many headpieces and other decorations by John Leighton, which should not be undervalued because the taste of to-day is in favour of a bolder style, and dislikes imitation Gothic detail. Of their sort they are excellent, and may be placed among the earliest modern attempts to decorate a page, with some show of consistency of treatment. Compared with the so-called 'rustic' borders of earlier efforts, they at once assume a certain importance. The binding is similar to that upon the first series.

Tom Brown's School Days, illustrated by Arthur Hughes and S. P. Hall, is one of the most notable books of the year. It is curious that at the close of the period, as at its beginning, this artist is so much to the fore, although examples of his work appear at long intervals during the years' chronicle. Yet, as 1855 shows his work in the van of the movement, so also he supplies a goodly proportion of the interesting work which is the aftermath of the sixties, rather than the premature growth of the seventies. Tom Brown is too well known in its cheap editions, where the same illustrations are used, to require any detailed comment here. Gray's Elegy (illustrated in colour by R. Barnes, Birket Foster, Wimperis, and others) is of little importance.

A. BOYD HOUGHTON

'GOLDEN THOUGHTS FROM
GOLDEN FOUNTAINS'

LOVE

W. SMALL

'GOLDEN THOUGHTS FROM
GOLDEN FOUNTAINS'

MARK THE GREY-HAIRED
MAN

In 1869 The Nobility of Life (Warne), an anthology, edited by L. Valentine, is attractive, less by reason of its coloured plates after J. D. Watson, C. Green, E. J. Poynter, and others, than from its headpieces, by A. Boyd Houghton (pp. 26, 106, 122, 136, 146, 178), Francis Walker (pp. 82, 170), J. Mahoney (p. 98), which, subsidiary as they appear here, are in danger of being overlooked. Carmina Crucis (Bell and Daldy, 1860), poems by Dora Greenwell, has two or three decorative pieces, by G. D. L[eslie], which might be attributed to the influence of the Century Guild Hobby Horse, if direct evidence did not antedate them by twenty years. Miss Kilmansegg, illustrated by Seccombe; The Water Babies, Sir Noel Paton and P. Skelton; In Fairyland, R. Doyle (Longmans); Vikram and the Vampire, E. Griset (Longmans), and Æsop's Fables (Cassell), with one hundred clever and humorous designs, by the same artist, are among the few others that are worth naming.

Several series of volumes, illustrated by various hands, may be noticed out of their due order. For the date of the first volume is often far distant from the last, and yet, as the series maintained a certain coherency, it would be confusing to spread its record over a number of years and necessitate continual reiteration of facts.

The Choice Series of selections from the poets, published by Messrs. Sampson Low and Co., include several volumes issued some time before they were included as part of this series. The ideal of all is far more akin to that of the early fifties—when the original editions of several of these were first issued—than to that of the sixties. They include Bloomfield's Farmer's Boy (1857), Campbell's Pleasures of Hope (1855), Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (1857), Goldsmith's Deserted Village and Vicar of Wakefield, Gray's Elegy (1853), Keats's Eve of St. Agnes, Milton's L'Allegro, Warton's The Hermit, Wordsworth's Pastoral Poems, and Rogers's Pleasures of Memory (1864). All the volumes, but the last, have wood-engravings by various hands after drawings by Birket Foster, Harrison Weir, Gilbert and others; but in the Pleasures of Memory 'the large illustrations' are produced by a new method without the aid of an engraver, and some little indulgence is asked for them on the plea of the inexperience of the artists in this process. 'The drawing is made' (to continue the quotation) 'with an etching needle, or any suitable point, upon a glass plate spread with collodion. It is then photographed [? printed] upon a prepared surface of wax, and from this an electrotype is formed in relief which is printed with the type.' Samuel Palmer, J. D. Watson, Charles Green, and others are the artists to whom this reference applies, and the result, if not better than the best contemporary engraving, is certainly full of interest to-day.

The Golden Treasury Series (Macmillan and Co.) contains, in each volume, a vignette engraved on steel by Jeens, after drawings by J. E. Millais, T. Woolner, W. Holman Hunt, Sir Noel Paton, Arthur Hughes, etc.

Although the 'Household Edition' of Charles Dickens's complete works was issued early in the seventies, it is illustrated almost entirely by men of the sixties, and was possibly in active preparation during that decade. Fred Barnard takes the lion's share, the largest number of drawings to the most important volumes. His fame as a Dickens illustrator might rest secure on these alone, although it is supplemented by many other character-drawings of the types created by the author of Pickwick. To Sketches by Boz he supplies thirty-four designs, to Nicholas Nickleby fifty-nine, to Barnaby Rudge forty-six, to Christmas Books twenty-eight, to Dombey and Son sixty-four, to David Copperfield sixty, to Bleak House sixty-one, and to the Tale of Two Cities twenty-five. 'Phiz' re-illustrates The Pickwick Papers with fifty-seven designs, concerning which silence is best. J. Mahoney shows excellent work in twenty-eight drawings to Oliver Twist and fifty-eight each to Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend; Charles Green's thirty-nine illustrations to the Old Curiosity Shop are also admirable. F. A. Fraser is responsible for thirty to Great Expectations, E. G. Dalziel for thirty-four to Christmas Stories (from All the Year Round), twenty-six to the Uncommercial Traveller, and a few to minor pieces, issued with Edwin Drood, which contain S. L. Fildes's excellent designs. H. French contributes twenty to Hard Times, A. B. Frost illustrates American Notes, J. Gordon Thomson Pictures from Italy, and J. M'L. Ralston supplies fifteen for A Child's History of England. To re-embody characters already stereotyped, for the most part, by the earlier plates of the original editions, was a bold enterprise: that it did not wholly fail is greatly to its credit. It is quite possible that as large a number of readers made their first acquaintance with the dramatis personæ of the novels in these popular editions as in the older books, and it would be interesting to discover what they really felt when the much-vaunted copper-plates afterwards fell under their notice. The sentiment of English people has been amply expended on the Hablot K. Browne designs. Cruikshank is still considered a great master by many people; but if one could 'depolarise' their pictures (to use Wendell Holmes's simile), and set them before their admirers free from early associations, free from the glamour of Dickens romance, and then extract a frank outspoken opinion, it would be, probably, quite opposite to that which they are now ready to maintain.

Recognising that the old illustrations are still regarded with a halo of memory and romance, not unlike that which raises Mumbo Jumbo to a fetish among his worshippers, a wish to estimate anew the intrinsic value, considered as works of art, of these old illustrations, is not provoked by merely destructive tendencies. So long as Thackeray's drawing of Amelia is accepted as a type of grace and beauty, how can the believer realise the beauty of Millais's Was it not a lie? in Framley Parsonage. In the earlier and later engravings alike, the costume repels; but in the one there is real flesh and blood, real passion, real art, in the other a merely conventional symbol, which we agree to accept as an interesting heroine, in the way a child of five accepts the scratches on his slate as real pirates and savages. There is little use in trying to appreciate the best, if the distinctly second-best is reverenced equally; and so, at any cost of personal feeling, it is simply the duty of all concerned to rank the heroes of the sale-room, 'Phiz,' Cruikshank, and Leech at their intrinsic value. This is by no means despicable. For certain qualities which are not remotely connected with art belong to them; but the beauty of truth, the knowledge born of academic accomplishment, or literal imitation of nature, were alike absolutely beyond their sympathy. Hence to praise their work as one praises a Dürer, a Whistler, or a Millais, is apt to confuse the minds of the laity, already none too clear as to the moment when art comes in. This protest is not advanced to prove that every drawing mentioned in these pages surpasses the best work of the men in question, but merely to suggest whether it would not be better to recognise that the praise bestowed for so many years was awarded to a conventional treatment now obsolete, and should not be regarded as equivalent to that bestowed upon works of art which owe nothing to parochial conventions, and are based on unalterable facts, whether a Hokousaï or a Menzel chances to be the interpreter.

The Chandos Poets (Warne), a series of bulky octavos, with red-line borders, are of unequal merit. Some, Willmott's Poets of the Nineteenth Century, James Montgomery's Poems, Christian Lyrics, and Heber's Poetical Works, appear to be merely reprints of earlier volumes with the original illustrations; others have new illustrations by men of the sixties. The Longfellow has several by A. Boyd Houghton, who is also represented by a few excellent designs in the Byron; Legendary Ballads (J. S. Roberts) has three full-page designs, by Walter Crane, to Thomas of Ercildoune (p. 357), The Jolly Harper (p. 462), and Robin Hood (p. 580). Later volumes, with designs by F. A. Fraser and H. French, do not come into our subject.

Other series of the works of 'standard poets,' as they were called, all resplendent in gold and colours, and more or less well illustrated, were issued by Messrs. Routledge, Nimmo, Warne, Cassell, Moxon, and others, beginning in the fifties. Here and there a volume has interest, but one suspects that many of the plates had done duty before, and those which had not are not always of great merit; as, for instance, the drawings by W. B. Scott to the poetical works of L. E. L. (Routledge). In these various books will be found, inter alia, examples of Sir John Gilbert, Birket Foster, E. H. Corbould, W. Small, and Keeley Halswelle.

Hurst and Blackett's Standard Library is the title of a series of novels by eminent hands in single volumes, each containing a frontispiece engraved on steel. That to Christian's Mistake is by Frederick Sandys, engraved by John Saddler. John Halifax, Nothing New, The Valley of a Hundred Fires, and Les Misérables, each have a drawing by Millais, also engraved by John Saddler. In Studies from Life Holman Hunt is the draughtsman and Joseph Brown the engraver. No Church, Grandmother's Money, and A Noble Life, contain frontispieces by Tenniel, Barbara's History, one by J. D. Watson, and Adèle, a fine design by John Gilbert. Others by Leech and Edward Hughes are not particularly interesting. The steel engraving bestowed upon most of these obliterated all character from the designs, and superseded the artist's touch by hard unsympathetic details; but, all the same, compositions by men of such eminence deserve mention.

With 1870 the end of our subject is reached; it is the year of Edwin Drood, which established S. L. Fildes's position as an illustrator of the first rank; it also has a pleasant book of quasi-mediæval work, Mores Ridicula, by J. E. Rogers (Macmillan), (followed later by Ridicula Rediviva and The Fairy Book, by the author of John Halifax, with coloured designs by the same artist), of which an enthusiastic critic wrote: 'Worthy to be hung in the Royal Academy side by side with Rossetti, Sandys, Barnes, and Millais'; Whymper's Scrambles on the Alps, a book greatly prized by collectors, with drawings by Whymper and J. Mahoney; The Cycle of Life (S.P.C.K.); and Episodes of Fiction (Nimmo, 1870) containing twenty-eight designs by R. Paterson, after C. Green, C. J. Staniland, P. Skelton, F. Barnard, Harrison Weir, and others. Novello's National Nursery Rhymes, by J. W. Elliott, published in 1871, belongs to the sixties by intrinsic right. It includes two delightful drawings by A. Boyd Houghton—one of which, Tom the Piper's Son (owned by Mr. Pennell), has been reproduced from the original by photogravure in Mr. Laurence Housman's monograph—and many by H. S. Marks, W. Small, J. Mahoney, G. J. Pinwell, W. J. Wiegand, Arthur Hughes, T. and E. Dalziel, and others.

H. Leslie's Musical Annual (Cassell, 1870) contains a fine drawing, The Boatswain's Leap, by G. J. Pinwell, and a steel engraving, A Reverie, after Millais, which was re-issued in The Magazine of Art, September 1896. Pictures from English Literature (Cassell) is an excuse for publishing twenty full-page engravings after elaborate drawings by Du Maurier, S. L. Fildes, W. Small, J. D. Watson, W. Cave Thomas, etc. etc. This anthology, with a somewhat heterogeneous collection of drawings, seems to be the last genuine survivor of the old Christmas gift-books, which is lineally connected with the masterpieces of its kind.

Soon after the inevitable anthology of poems reappeared, in humbler pamphlet shape, as a birthday souvenir, or a Christmas card, embellished with chromo-lithographs, as it had already been allied with photographic silver-prints; but it is always the accident of the artists chosen which imparts permanent interest to the otherwise feeble object; whether it take the shape of a drawing-room table-book, gaudy, costly, and dull, or of a little booklet, it is a thing of no vital interest, unless by chance its pictures are the work of really powerful artists. The decadence of a vigorous movement is never a pleasant subject to record in detail. Fortunately, although the king died, the king lived almost immediately, and The Graphic, with its new ideals and new artists, quickly established a convention of its own, which is no less interesting. If it does not seem, so far as we can estimate, to have numbered among its articles men who are worthy in all respects to be placed by Rossetti, Millais, Sandys, Houghton, Pinwell, Fred Walker, and the rest of the typical heroes of the sixties, yet in its own way it is a worthy beginning of a new epoch.

Before quitting our period, however, a certain aftermath of the rich harvest must not be forgotten; and this, despite the comparatively few items it contains, may be placed in a chapter by itself.

FREDERICK SANDYS

'ONCE A WEEK'
VOL. VII. p. 266

DEATH OF KING
WARWOLF

---

[CHAPTER X: THE AFTERMATH, A FEW BELATED VOLUMES]

That Thornbury's Legendary Ballads (dated 1876) should be regarded as a most important volume in a collection of the 'sixties' is not odd, when you find that its eighty-one illustrations were reprinted from Once a Week. Many of the drawings were republished in this book, with the poem they originally illustrated; others, however, were joined to quite different text. If the memories of those living are to be trusted, not a few of the artists concerned were extremely annoyed to find their designs applied to new purposes. To take a single instance, the Sandys design to King Warwolf re-accompanied the poem itself, but the drawing by John Lawson, which is herein supposed to illustrate the lines,

'And then there came a great red glare
That seemed to crimson fitfully
The whole broad Heaven.'

was first published with a poem, Ariadne, by W. J. Tate, in August 1866, long after King Warwolf first appeared. Its design is obviously based on this passage:

'My long hair floating in the boisterous wind,
My white hands lightly grasping Theseus' knees,
While he, his wild eyes staring, urged his slaves
To some last effort of their well-tried skill.'

But it requires a great effort of perverted imagination to drag in the picture, which shows a Greek hero on one ship, watching, you suppose, the dying Norse king on another ship; when the ballad infers, and the dramatic situation implies, that the old monarch put out at once across the bar, and his people from the shore watched his ship burn in the night. To wrench such a picture from its context, and apply it to another, was a too popular device of publishers. As, however, it preserves good impressions of blocks otherwise inaccessible, it would be ungracious to single out this particular instance for blame. Yet all the same, those who regard the artist's objection to the sale of clichés for all sorts of purposes, as a merely sentimental grievance, must own that he is justified in being annoyed, when the whole intention of his work is burlesqued thereby.

A contemporary review says that the illustrations had 'appeared before in Once a Week, The Cornhill, and elsewhere.' It would be a long and ungrateful task to collate them, but, so far as my own memory can be trusted, they are all from the first named. In place of including a description of the book itself, a few extracts, from a review by Mr. Edmund Gosse in the Academy (February 1876, p. 177), will not only give a vivid appreciation of the work of two of the artists, but show that twenty years ago the book was prized as highly as we prize it to-day. He says: 'We have thought the illustrations sufficiently interesting to demand a separate notice for themselves, the more so as in many cases they are totally unconnected with Mr. Thornbury's poems.... We are heartily glad to have collected for us some of the most typical illustrations of a school that is, above all others, most characteristic of our latest development in civilisation, and of which the principal members have died in their youth, and have failed to fulfil the greatness of their promise.

'The artists represented are mainly those who immediately followed the so-called pre-Raphaelites, the young men who took up many of their principles, and carried them out in a more modern and a more quiet way than their more ambitious masters. Mr. Sandys, who pinned all his early faith to Holbein, and Messrs. Walker, Pinwell, Lawless, and Houghton, who promised to form a group of brother artists unrivalled in delicacy and originality of sentiment, are here in their earliest and strongest development.... M. J. Lawless contributes no less than twenty designs to the volume. We have examined these singular and beautiful drawings, most of them old favourites, with peculiar emotion. The present writer [Mr. Edmund Gosse] confesses to quite absurd affection for all the few relics of this gifted lad, whose early death seems to have deprived his great genius of all hope of fame. Years ago these illustrations, by an unknown artist, keenly excited a curiosity which was not to be satisfied till we learned, with a sense of actual bereavement, that their author was dead. He seems to have scarcely lived to develop a final manner; with the excessive facility of a boy of high talent we find him incessantly imitating his elder rivals, but always with a difference.... No doubt, in M. J. Lawless, English art sustained one of the sharpest losses it ever had to mourn.

W. HOLMAN HUNT

WILLMOTT'S 'SACRED
POETRY,' 1862

THE LENT
JEWELS

J. LAWSON

'ONCE A WEEK'
VOL. II. N. S. p. 127

ARIADNE

'Of Pinwell no need to say so much. He has lived, not long enough indeed to fulfil the great promise of his youth, but to ensure his head a lasting laurel. There have been stronger intellects, purer colourists, surer draughtsmen among his contemporaries, but where shall we seek a spirit of poetry more pathetic, more subtle, more absolutely modern than his? The critics are for ever urging poets and painters to cultivate the materials that lie about them in the common household-life of to-day. It is not so easy to do so; it is not to be done by writing "idylls of the gutter and the gibbet"; it is not to be done by painting the working-man asleep by his baby's cradle. Perhaps no one has done it with so deep and thorough a sympathy as Pinwell; and it is sympathy that is needed, not curiosity or pity.' But it would be hardly fair to quote further from Mr. Gosse's appreciation twenty years ago of artists still living. The volume contains eight designs by Sandys, namely, Labours of Thor (Harold Harfagr), King Warwolf, The Apparitor of the Secret Tribunal (Jacques de Caumont), Tintoretto (Yet once more on the organ play), The Avatar of Zeus (The King at the Gate), The search of Ceres for Proserpine (Helen and Cassandra), The Boy Martyr, The Three Statues of Egina, and The Miller's Meadow (The Old Chartist); the alternative title given in brackets is that of the original as it first appeared in Once a Week. To show how carelessly the author treated the artists, to whom, in a flowery preface, he says he owes so much, 'for they have given to his airy nothings a local habitation and a name, and have caught and fixed down on paper, like butterflies in an entomologist's cabinet, many a fleeting Cynthia of his brain,' it will suffice to quote his profuse acknowledgments to 'Mr. Poynter, an old schoolfellow of the author's, and now Professor in the London University, [who] has expended all his learning, taste, and thought in the The Three Statues. The drapery might be copied by a sculptor, it is arrayed with such fine artistic feeling, and over the whole the artist has thrown the solemnity of the subject, and has shown, in Pluto's overshadowing arm, the vanity of all things under the sun—even the pure ambition of a great artist.' This charming eulogy, be it noted, is bestowed on a drawing that is by Frederick Sandys!!! not by Poynter, who is unrepresented in the book.

The four Whistlers of Once a Week are all here, absurdly renamed. There are twenty by M. J. Lawless, seven by T. Morten, ten by J. Lawson, one by A. Boyd Houghton, two by Fred Walker, eight by G. J. Pinwell, six by W. Small, three by J. Tenniel, three by F. Eltze, and one each by J. D. Watson, C. Keene, G. Du Maurier, Towneley Green, C. Green, T. R. Macquoid, P. Skelton, A. Fairfield, E. H. Corbould, and A. Rich. The book is well printed, and a treasure-house of good things, which appear to more advantage upon its 'toned paper' than in the pages of the periodical where they first saw daylight.

The preface to Dalziels' Bible Gallery is dated October 1880, so that the volume was probably issued for the season of 1880–81. As we have seen, the work was in active preparation in the early sixties. It contained sixty-nine blocks excellently printed upon an India tint. These include nine by the late Lord Leighton, P.R.A., three by G. F. Watts, R.A., five by F. R. Pickersgill, R.A., twelve by E. J. Poynter, R.A., three by E. Armitage, R.A., two by H. H. Armstead, R.A., one by Sir E. Burne-Jones, one by Holman Hunt, three by Ford Madox Brown, six by Simeon Solomon, two by A. Boyd Houghton, two by W. Small, one by E. F. Brewtnall, fourteen by T. Dalziel, one by E. Dalziel, two by A. Murch, and one by F. S. Walker, and one by Frederick Sandys. The praise lavished on these designs is amply justified if you regard them as a whole; but, turning over the pages critically after a long interval, there is a distinct sense of disillusion. At the time they seemed all masterpieces; sixteen years after they stand confessed as a very mixed group, some conscientious pot-boilers, others absolutely powerful and intensely individual. The book is monumental, both in its ambitious intention and in the fact that it commemorates a dead cause. It is easy to disparage the work of the engravers, but when we see what fine things owe their very existence to Messrs. Dalziels' enterprise, it is but just to pay due tribute to the firm, and to regret that so powerful an agency is no longer actively engaged in similar enterprises.

EDWARD BURNE JONES

DALZIELS' 'BIBLE
GALLERY,' 1880

THE PARABLE OF THE
BOILING POT

SIR FREDERICK LEIGHTON, P.R.A.

DALZIELS' 'BIBLE GALLERY,' 1883

CAIN AND ABEL

SIR FREDERICK LEIGHTON, P.R.A.

DALZIELS' 'BIBLE
GALLERY,' 1880

MOSES VIEWING THE
PROMISED LAND

SIR FREDERICK LEIGHTON, P.R.A.

DALZIELS' 'BIBLE
GALLERY,' 1880

ABRAM AND
THE ANGEL

As copies are both scarce and costly, it may be well to call attention to a volume entitled Art Pictures from the Old Testament (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1897), wherein the whole sixty-nine reappear supplemented by twenty-seven others, which would seem to have prepared for the Bible Gallery, but not previously issued: thirteen of these added designs are by Simeon Solomon, two by H. H. Armstead, R.A., three by E. Armitage, R.A., three by F. R. Pickersgill, R.A., three by T. Dalziel, and one each by F. S. Waltges (sic), G. J. Pinwell, and E. G. Dalziel.

As impressions of the famous blocks are obtainable at a low cost, it would be foolish to waste space upon detailed descriptions. Of course the popular reprint ought not to be compared with the fine proofs of the great édition-de-luxe, which cost about twenty times as much. But for many purposes it is adequate, and gives an idea of the superb qualities of the Leighton designs, and the vigour and strongly dramatic force of the Poynters. It is interesting to compare Sir Edward Burne-Jones's original design for The Boiling Pot, reproduced in Pen-Drawing and Pen-Draughtsmen by Joseph Pennell (Macmillan, 1894), with the engraving, which is from an entirely different version of the subject. Other drawings on wood obviously intended for this work, but never used, can be seen at South Kensington Museum.

A few belated volumes still remain to be noticed—they are picked almost at random, and doubtless the list might be supplemented almost indefinitely: The Trial of Sir Jasper, by S. C. Hall (Virtue, undated), with illustrations by Gilbert, Cruikshank, Tenniel, Birket Foster, Noel Paton, and others, including W. Eden Thomson and G. H. Boughton. The latter, a drawing quite in the mood of the sixties, seems to be the earliest illustration by its author. Another design by H. R. Robertson, of a dead body covered by a cloth in a large empty room, is too good to pass without comment. Beauties of English Landscape, drawn by Birket Foster, is a reprint, in collected form, of the works of this justly popular artist; it is interesting, but not comparable to the earlier volume with a similar title. In Nature Pictures, thirty original illustrations by J. H. Dell, engraved by R. Paterson (Warne), the preface, dated October 1878, refers to 'years of patient painstaking labour on the part of artist and engraver'; so that it is really a posthumous child of the sixties, and one not unworthy to a place among the best.

Songs of Many Seasons, by Jemmett Brown (Pewtress and Co., 1876), contains two little-known designs by Walter Crane, two by G. Du Maurier and one by C. M. (C. W. Morgan). Pegasus Re-saddled (H. S. King, 1877), with ten illustrations by G. Du Maurier is, as its title implies, a companion volume to the earlier Puck on Pegasus, by H. Cholmondeley Pennell. The Children's Garland (Macmillan, 1873), contains fourteen capital things by John Lawson—no relative of 'Cecil' or 'F. W. Lawson.'

The Lord's Prayer, illustrated by F. R. Pickersgill, R.A., and Henry Alford, D.D. (Longmans, 1870), has a curiously old-fashioned air. One fancies, and the preface supports the theory, that its nine designs should be considered not as an aftermath to the sixties, but as a presage of the time, near the date of The Music-master. Their vigorous attempt to employ modern costume in dignified compositions deserves more than patronising approval. Any art-student to-day would discover a hundred faults, but their one virtue might prove beyond his grasp. Although engraved on wood by Dalziel, printed as they are upon a deep yellow tint, the pictures at first sight suggest lithographs, rather than wood-engravings. Rural England, by L. Seguin (Strahan, 1885) has many delightful designs by Millais and Pinwell, but all, apparently, reprints of blocks used in Good Words and elsewhere.

Possibly the whole series of Mr. Walter Crane's toy-books, which began to be issued in the mid-sixties, should be noticed here; but they deserve a separate and complete iconography. In fact, any attempt to go beyond the arbitrary date is a mistake, and this chapter were best cut short, with full consciousness of its being a mere fragment which may find place in some future volume, upon 'the seventies,' that I hope may find its historian before long.

EDWARD J. POYNTER, R.A.

DALZIELS' 'BIBLE
GALLERY,' 1880

JOSEPH BEFORE
PHARAOH

EDWARD J. POYNTER, R.A.

DALZIELS' 'BIBLE
GALLERY,' 1880

PHARAOH HONOURS
JOSEPH

A book of this sort, which aimed to be complete, should contain a critical summary of the period it attempts to record. But to extract from the mass of material a clearly-defined purpose, and build up a plausible theory to show that all the diverse tendencies could be traced to a common purpose, would surely be at best merely an academic argument. All that the sixties prove, to a very sincere if incapable student, seems to be that the artist, if he be indeed an artist, can make the meanest material serve his purpose. The men of the sixties tried obviously to do their best. They took their art seriously, if not themselves. It is tempting to affirm that the tendency now is for no one to take himself seriously, and even at times to look upon his art, whatever it may be, as merely a useful medium to exploit for his own ends. Yet such an opinion would be probably too sweeping; and one is driven back to the primal fact, that the energy and knowledge which results in masterly achievement is, and must always be, beyond rules, beyond schools, as it is beyond fashion or mood. A man who tries to do his best, if he be endowed with ripe knowledge and has the opportunity, will make a fine thing; which, whether intended for a penny paper, or a guinea gift-book, will possess both vitality and permanent value.

But the men of the sixties took themselves quite seriously; and this is surely evident from their drawings. Not a few committed suicide, or died from over-work; neither catastrophe being evidence of flippant content with the popularity they had achieved. Whether inspired by pure zeal for art, by rivalry, or by money-making, they felt the game well worth the candle, and did all they could do to play it fairly. Those of us to-day who try to do our best may be inept, ignorant, and attain only failure; yet the best is not achieved by accident, and the only moral of the sixties is the moral of the nineties: 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.'

Whether it be the triumph of a master or a pot-boiling illustrator, the real artist never takes his art lightly. Life, even reputation, he may play with, but his craft is a serious thing. In short, the study of the thousands of designs—some obviously burlesqued by the engraver, others admirably rendered—will not leave an unprejudiced spectator with a cut and dried opinion. That, as it happened, a number of really distinguished men enlisted themselves as illustrators may be granted, but each one did his own work in his own way; and to summarise the complex record in a sentence to prove that any method, or any manner, is a royal road to greatness is impossible. Yet no one familiar with the period can avoid a certain pride in the permanent evidence it has left, that English art in illustration, (no less than English music in the part-songs of the Elizabethan period), has produced work worthy to be entered on the cosmopolitan roll of fame. This is unquestionable; and being granted, no more need be said, for an attempt to appraise the relative value of totally distinct things is always a foolish effort.

---

[CHAPTER XI: CERTAIN INFLUENCES UPON THE ARTISTS OF THE SIXTIES]

Although it would be retraversing beaten paths to trace the illustrator of the sixties back to Bewick, or to still earlier progenitors in Dürer or the Florentines, there can be little doubt that the pre-Raphaelites gave the first direct impulse to the newer school. That their work, scanty as it is, so far as book-illustration is concerned, set going the impulse which in Kelmscott Press Editions, the Birmingham School, the Vale Press, Beardsley, Bradley, and a host of others on both sides of the Atlantic, is 'the movement' of the moment is too obvious to need stating. But for 'the sixties' proper, the paramount influence was Millais—the Millais after the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had disbanded. Despite a very ingenious attempt to trace the influence of Menzel upon the earlier men, many still doubt whether the true pre-Raphaelites were not quite ignorant of the great German. Later men—Fred Walker especially, and Charles Keene many years after—knew their Menzel, and appreciated him as a few artists do to-day, and the man in the street may at no distant future. But some of the survivors of the pre-Raphaelites, both formal and associated, deny all knowledge of Menzel at this date; others, however, have told Mr. Joseph Pennell that they did know his work, and that it had a distinct influence. Some who did not know him then regret keenly that they were unaware of his very existence until they had abandoned illustration for painting. All agree, of course, in recognising the enormous personality of one who might be called, without exaggeration, the greatest illustrator of the century; so that, having stated the evidence as it stands, no more need be added, except a suggestion that the theory of Menzel's influence, even upon those who declare they knew not the man, may be sound. An edition of Frederick the Great, by Kügler, with five hundred illustrations by Menzel, was published in England (according to the British Museum Catalogue, the book itself is undated) in 1844.[7] It is quite possible that any one of the men of the time might have seen it by chance, and turned over its pages ignorant of its artist's name. A few minutes is enough to influence a young artist, and the one who in all honesty declares he never heard of Menzel may have been thus unconsciously influenced. But, if a foreign source must be found, so far as the pre-Raphaelites are concerned, Rethel seems a far more possible agent. His famous prints, Death the Friend and Death the Avenger, had they met his eye, would doubtless have influenced Mr. Sandys, and many others who worked on similar lines.

FORD MADOX BROWN

DALZIELS' 'BIBLE
GALLERY,' 1880

ELIJAH AND THE
WIDOW'S SON

Whether Lasinio's 'execrable engravings,' as Ruskin calls them, or others, will be found to have exerted any influence, I have no evidence to bring forward. In fact the theory is advanced only as a working hypothesis, not as an argument capable of proof. It is possible that France at that time was an important factor as regards technique, as it has been since, and is still. But, without leaving our own shores, the logical sequence of development from Bewick, through Harvey, Mulready and others, does not leave very many terrible gaps. It is true that this development is always erratic—now towards the good, now to meretricious qualities.

The more one studies the matter, the more one fancies that certain drawings not intended for engraving by Mulready, and others by Maclise, must have had a large share in the movement which culminated about 1865 and died out entirely about 1870. But whatever the influence which set it going, the ultimate result was British; and, for good or evil, one cannot avoid a feeling of pride that in the sixties there was art in England, not where it was officially expected perhaps, but in popular journals.

It is quite possible that the revival of etching as a fine art, which took place early in the second half of this century, had no little direct influence on the illustration of the period. Many artists, who are foremost as draughtsmen upon wood, experimented with the etcher's needle. The Germ, 1850, was illustrated by etchings; but, with every desire to develop this suggestion, it would be folly to regard the much discussed periodical as the true ancestor of Once a Week and the rest; even the etching which Millais prepared for it, but never issued, would not suffice to establish such claim. Two societies, the Etching Club and the Junior Etching Club, are responsible for the illustration of several volumes, wherein the etched line is used in a way almost identical with the same artists' manner when drawing for the engraver. Indeed, the majority of these etchings would suffer little if reproduced by direct process to-day, as the finesse of rebroussage and the more subtle qualities of biting and printing are not present conspicuously in the majority of the plates.

The Poems by Tom Hood, illustrated by the Junior Etching Club, include two delightful Millais', The Bridge of Sighs and Ruth, a Lee Shore by Charles Keene, and two illustrations to the Ode to the Moon, and The Elm-tree by Henry Moore.

Passages from Modern English Poets, illustrated by the Junior Etching Club, was issued (undated), by Day and Son, in 1862, in a large octavo. In 1876 another edition in larger quarto, with the etchings transferred to stone, and printed as lithographs, was published by William Tegg. In this notable volume Millais is represented by Summer Indolence (p. 10), a most graceful study of a girl lying on her back in a meadow with a small child, who is wearing a daisy chain, seated at her side. Mr. J. McNeill Whistler contributes two delightful landscapes, The Angler (p. 7) and A River Scene (p. 45). In these the master-hand is recognisable at a glance, although the authorship of many of the rest can only be discovered by the index. They would alone suffice to make the book a treasure to light upon. To praise them would be absurd, for one can conceive no more unnecessary verbiage than a eulogy of Mr. Whistler's etchings—one might as well praise the beauty of June sunshine. There are many other good things in the book—a Tenniel, War and Glory (p. 3), four capital studies by Henry Moore (pp. 1, 16, 27, 28), which come as a revelation to those who only know him as a sea-painter. Four others by M. J. Lawless, an artist who has been neglected too long, The Drummer (p. 2), Sisters of Mercy (p. 12), The Bivouac (p. 30), and The Little Shipwrights (p. 36), are all interesting, if not quite so fascinating, as his drawings upon wood. H. S. Marks has a genre subject, A Study in the Egyptian Antiquity Department of the British Museum. This portentous title describes an etching of a country lad in smock-frock, who, with dazed surprise, is staring into vacancy amid the gigantic scarabs, the great goddess Pasht, and other familiar objects of the corridor leading to the Refreshment-room in the great Bloomsbury building, which people of Grub Street hurry through daily, with downcast eyes, to enjoy the frugal dainties that a beneficent institution permits them to take by way of sustenance during the intervals of study in the Reading-room. Another plate, Scene of the Plague in London, 1665, by Charles Keene, would hardly tempt one to linger before it, but for its signature. It is a powerful bit of work, but does not show the hand of the great Punch artist at its best. The rest of the contributions to this volume are by C. Rossiter, F. Smallfield, Viscount Bury, Lord G. Fitzgerald, J. W. Oakes, A. J. Lewis, F. Powell, J. Sleigh, H. C. Whaite, Walter Severn, and W. Gale. Two by J. Clark deserve mention. To find the painter of cottage-life, with all his Dutch realistic detail, in company with Mr. Whistler, is a curious instance of extremes meeting.

Without wishing to press the argument unduly, it is evident that etching which afterwards developed so bravely, and left so many fine examples, exerted also a secondary influence on the illustration of the sixties. Hence the somewhat extended reference to the few books which employed it largely for illustrations.

Those who would have you believe that the great English masters of illustration failed to obtain contemporary appreciation should note the three editions of this work as one fact, among a score of others, which fails to support their theory. Whether from a desire to extol the past or not, it is certain that those publishers who have been established more than a quarter of a century claim to have sold far larger editions of their high-priced illustrated volumes then than any moderately truthful publisher or editor would dare to claim for similar ventures to-day. Of course there were fewer books of the sort issued, and the rivalry of illustrated journalism was infinitely less; still the people of the fifties, sixties, and seventies paid their tribute in gold freely and lavishly, and if they offered the last insult of the populace—popularity—to these undoubted works of art, it prevents one placing artists of the period among the noble army of martyrs. Their payment was quite equal to that which is the average to-day, as a file-copy of one of the important magazines shows. They were reproduced as well as the means available permitted; the printing and the general 'get-up' of the books, allowing for the different ideals which obtained then, was not inferior to the average to-day, and, as a rule, the authorship of the drawings was duly acknowledged in the table of contents, and the artists 'starred' in contemporary advertisements. It is painful to own that even the new appreciation is not absolutely without precedent. One notable instance of depreciation cannot be forgotten. Mr. Ruskin, who never expressed admiration of the illustrations of the sixties, in Ariadne Florentina, chose the current number of the Cornhill Magazine for the text of a diatribe in which the following passages occur:—

'The cheap popular art cannot draw for you beauty, sense, or honesty; but every species of distorted folly and vice—the idiot, the blackguard, the coxcomb, the paltry fool, the degraded woman—are pictured for your honourable pleasure in every page, with clumsy caricature, struggling to render its dulness tolerable by insisting on defect—if, perchance, a penny or two may be coined out of the cockneys' itch for loathsomeness.... These ... are favourably representative of the entire art industry of the modern press—industry enslaved to the ghastly service of catching the last gleams in the glued eyes of the daily more bestial English mob—railroad born and bred, which drags itself about the black world it has withered under its breath. In the miserable competitive labour of finding new stimulus for the appetite—daily more gross, of this tyrannous mob, we may count as lost beyond any hope, the artists who are dull, docile, or distressed enough to submit to its demands. And for total result of our English engraving industry for the last hundred and fifty years, I find that practically at this moment [1876] I cannot get a single piece of true, sweet, and comprehensible art to place for instruction in any children's school.'

But ignoring Mr. Ruskin—if it be possible to ignore the absolute leader of taste in the sixties—we find little but praise. Yet the popularity of 1860–1870 naturally incurred the inevitable law of reaction, and was at its lowest ebb in the eighties; but now late in the nineties our revived applause is but an echo of that which was awarded to the work when it appealed not only by all its art, but with novelty and an air of being 'up to date' that cannot, in the course of things, be ever again its portion. We are not so much better than our fathers, after all, in recognising the good things of the sixties, or in trying to do our best in our way. Which is just what they tried to do in theirs.

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[CHAPTER XII: SOME ILLUSTRATORS OF THE SIXTIES]

Although space forbids biographical notice, even in the briefest form, of all the artists mentioned in the preceding pages, and it would be folly to summarise in a few hasty sentences the complete life-work of Sir J. E. Millais, P.R.A., Sir John Gilbert, R.A., Mr. Birket Foster, or Mr. G. Du Maurier, to take but a few instances; yet in the case of Mr. Arthur Hughes, the late M. J. Lawless, and others, to give more exact references to their published illustrations is perhaps easier in this way than any other, especially as a complete iconography of all the chief artists in the movement had perforce to be abandoned for want of space. Many illustrators—Ford Madox Brown, Charles Keene, A. Boyd Houghton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, W. B. Scott, Fred Walker, and J. Wolf—have already been commemorated in monographs; not confined, it is true, in every instance to the subject of this book, but naturally taking it as part of the life-work of the hero, even when, as in Rossetti's case, the illustrations form but an infinitesimally small percentage of the works he produced. The artists hereafter noticed have been chosen entirely from the collector's standpoint, and with the intention of assisting those who wish to make representative or complete collections of the work of each particular man.

* * * * *

George Housman Thomas (1824–1868) was born in London, December 4, 1824. When only fourteen he became apprenticed to G. Bonner, a wood-engraver, and at fifteen obtained the prize of a silver palette from the Society of Arts, for an original drawing, Please to remember the Grotto. After he had served his apprenticeship, in conjunction with Henry Harrison he set up in Paris as a wood-engraver. The firm became so successful that they employed six or seven assistants. He was then tempted to go to New York to establish an illustrated paper, which was also a success, although losses on other ventures forced the proprietors to give it up. This led the artist to turn his attention to another field of engraving for bank notes, which are estimated among the most beautiful of their kind. A few years later he returned to England, and became attached to the Illustrated London News. In 1848 a special expedition to Italy, which resulted in a long series of illustrations of Garibaldi's defence of Rome against the French, not merely established his lasting reputation, but incidentally extended his taste and knowledge by the opportunity it gave him for studying the works of the old masters. In 1854 a sketch of sailors belonging to the Baltic Fleet, which was published in the Illustrated London News, attracted the attention of the Queen, who caused inquiries to be made, which led to the artist being employed by Her Majesty to paint for her the principal events of her reign. Besides a series of important paintings in oil, he executed a large number of drawings and sketches which form an album of great interest.

'As an illustrator of books he was remarkable,' says his anonymous biographer,[8] 'for facility of execution and aptness of character.' His illustrations of Hiawatha (Kent and Co.), Armadale (Wilkie Collins), and The Last Chronicle of Barset (Anthony Trollope), are perhaps the most important; but London Society, Mrs. Gatty's Parables, Cassell's Magazine, The Quiver, Illustrated Readings, and many other volumes of the period, contain numerous examples of his work in this department. In the person of his brother, Mr. W. Luson Thomas, the managing director of the Graphic and the Daily Graphic, and his nephew, Carmichael Thomas, Art Director of the Graphic, the family name is still associated with the most notable movement in illustration during the period which immediately followed that to which this book is devoted.

* * * * *

FORD MADOX BROWN

DALZIELS' 'BIBLE
GALLERY' 1880

JOSEPH'S COAT

Sir John Everett Millais, Bart., P.R.A. (born June 8, 1829, died August 13, 1896).—As these proofs were being sent to press, the greatest illustrator of all (having regard to his place as the pioneer of the school which immediately succeeded the pre-Raphaelites, the number of his designs, and their superlative excellence), has joined the majority of his fellow-workers in the sixties. It would be impossible in a few lines to summarise his contributions to the 'black-and-white' of English art; that task will doubtless be undertaken adequately. But, if all the rest of the work of the period were lost, his contributions alone might justly support every word that has been or will be said in praise of 'the golden decade.' From the 1857 Tennyson to his latest illustration he added masterpiece to masterpiece, and, were his triumphant career as a painter completely ignored, might yet be ranked as a great master on the strength of these alone.

* * * * *

Paul Gray (1848–1868).—A most promising young illustrator, whose early death was most keenly regretted by those who knew him best, Paul Gray was born in Dublin, May 17, 1848. He died November 14, 1868. In the progress of this work mention has been made of all illustrations which it has been possible to identify; many of the cartoons for Fun, being unsigned, could not be attributed to him with certainty. The Savage Club Papers, First Series (Tinsley, 1863), contain his last drawing, Sweethearting. In the preface we read: 'When this work was undertaken, that clever young artist [Paul Gray] was foremost in offering his co-operation; for he whom we mourned, and whose legacy of sorrow one had accepted, was his dear friend. The shock which his system, already weakened by the saddest of all maladies, received by the sudden death of that friend was more than his gentle spirit could sustain. He lived just long enough to finish his drawing, and then he left us to join his friend.' In the record of the periodicals of the sixties will be found many references to his work, which is, perhaps, most familiar in connection with Charles Kingsley's Hereward the Wake.

* * * * *

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (b. 1828, d. 1882). The comparatively few illustrations by Rossetti have been described and reproduced so often, that it would seem superfluous to add a word more here. Yet, recognising their influence to-day, we must also remember that many people who are attracted by this side of Rossetti's art may not be familiar with the oft-told story of his career. He, more than any modern painter, would seem to be responsible for the present decorative school of illustrators, whose work has attracted unusual interest from many continental critics of late, and is recognised by them as peculiarly 'English.' While the man in the street would no doubt choose 'Phiz,' Cruikshank, Leech, Tenniel, Gilbert, Fred Walker, or Pinwell as typically 'English,' the foreigner prefers to regard the illustrations by Rossetti, his immediate followers, and his later disciples as representing that English movement, which the native is apt to look upon as something exotic and bizarre.

Yet it is not necessary to discuss Rossetti's position as founder of the pre-Raphaelite school, nor to weigh his claims to the leadership against those of Ford Madox Brown and Holman Hunt. But, without ignoring the black-and-white work of the two last named, there can be no doubt that it is Rossetti who has most influenced subsequent draughtsmen.

Nor at the time was his position as an illustrator misunderstood. When we find that he received £30 each for the small Tennyson drawings on wood, the fact proves at the outset that the market value of his work was not ignored by his publishers. At the present day when any writer on men of the sixties is accused of an attempt to 'discover' them, and the appreciation he bestows is regarded as an attempt to glorify the appreciator at the expense of the appreciated, it is well to insist upon the fact that hardly one of the men in favour to-day failed to meet with substantial recognition at the time. It was not their fate to do drawings for love, or to publish engravings at their own cost, or sell as cheap curios works which now realise a thousand times their first cost.

Drawings paid for at the highest market rate, or, to speak more accurately, at 'star' prices, published in popular volumes that ran through large editions, received favourably by contemporary critics, and frequently alluded to as masterpieces by writers in current periodicals, cannot be said to have been neglected, nor have they even been out of favour with artists.

That work, which has afforded so much lasting pleasure, was not achieved without an undue amount of pain, is easily proved in the case of Rossetti. So pertinent is a description by his brother, published lately, that it may be quoted in full, to remind the illustrators of to-day, who draw on paper and card-board at their ease to any scale that pleases them, how much less exacting are the conditions under which they work than those encountered by the artists who were forced to draw upon an unpleasant surface of white pigment spread upon a shining wooden block:—

'The Tennyson designs, which were engraved on wood and published in the Illustrated Tennyson, in which Millais, Hunt, Mulready, and others co-operated,' says Mr. William Michael Rossetti, 'have in the long run done not a little to sustain my brother's reputation with the public. At the time they gave him endless trouble and small satisfaction. Not indeed that the invention or the mere designing of these works was troublesome to him. He took great pains with them, but, as what he wrought at was always something which informed and glowed in his mind, he was not more tribulated by these than by other drawings. It must be said, also, that himself only, and not Tennyson, was his guide. He drew just what he chose, taking from his author's text nothing more than a hint and an opportunity. The trouble came in with the engraver and the publisher. With some of the doings of the engraver, Dalziel (not Linton, whom he found much more conformable to his notion), he was grievously disappointed. He probably exasperated Dalziel, and Dalziel certainly exasperated him. Blocks were re-worked upon and proofs sent back with vigour. The publisher, Mr. Moxon, was a still severer affliction. He called and he wrote. Rossetti was not always up to time, though he tried his best to be so. In other instances he was up to time, but his engraver was not up to his mark. I believe that poor Moxon suffered much, and that soon afterwards he died; but I do not lay any real blame on my brother, who worked strenuously and well. As to our great poet Tennyson, who also ought to have counted for something in the whole affair, I gather that he really liked Rossetti's designs when he saw them, and he was not without a perceptible liking and regard for Rossetti himself, so far as he knew him (they had first met at Mr. Patmore's house in December 1849); but the illustration to St. Cecilia puzzled him not a little, and he had to give up the problem of what it had to do with his work.'[9]

Later on, in the same volume, we find an extract from a letter dated February 1857, which Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to W. Bell Scott:—

'I have designed five blocks for Tennyson, save seven which are still cutting and maiming. It is a thankless task. After a fortnight's work my block goes to the engraver, like Agag delicately, and is hewn in pieces before the Lord Harry.

'ADDRESS TO DALZIEL BROTHERS

'O woodman spare that block,
O gash not anyhow!
It took ten days by clock,
I'd fain protect it now.

Chorus—Wild laughter from Dalziels' Workshop.'

Several versions of this incident are current, but Mr. Arthur Hughes's account has not, I think, been published. It chanced that one day, during the time he was working in Rossetti's studio, the engraver called, and finding Rossetti was out, poured forth his trouble and stated his own view of the matter with spirit. For his defence, as he put it, much sympathy may be awarded to him. The curious drawings executed in pencil, ink, and red chalk, crammed with highly-wrought detail, that were to be translated into clean black and white, were, he declared, beyond the power of any engraver to translate successfully. How Mr. Hughes pacified him is a matter of no importance; but it is but fair to recollect that, even had the elaborate designs been executed with perfection of technique, any engraver must have needs encountered a task of no ordinary difficulty. When, however, the white coating had been rubbed away in parts, and all sorts of strokes in pen, pencil, and pigment added, it is not surprising that the paraphrase failed to please the designer. Although the drawings naturally perished in the cutting, and cannot be brought forward as decisive evidence, we may believe that the engraver spoilt them, and yet also believe that no craftsman who ever lived would have been absolutely successful.

The number of Rossetti's book-illustrations is but ten in all, according to the list given in Mr. William Sharp's admirable monograph. To these one might perhaps add the frontispiece to that volume; as although the pen-drawing, A sonnet is a moment's monument, was never intended for reproduction, it forms a most decorative page. There is also a design for a frontispiece to the Early Italian Poets, which was first reproduced in the English Illustrated Magazine, No. 1. The actual frontispiece was etched but never used, and the exquisitely dainty version survives only in two impressions from the plate, both owned by Mr. Fairfax Murray. Another frontispiece, to The Risen Life,[10] a poem by R. C. Jackson, in a cover designed by D. G. R. (R. Elkins and Co., 10 Castle St., East Oxford St., W., 1884), belongs to the same category, in which may be placed The Queen's Page, drawn in 1854, and reproduced in Flower Pieces by Allingham (Reeves & Turner, 1888). The ten which were all (I believe) drawn upon the wood include: Elfen-mere, published first in William Allingham's The Music-master, 1855, and afterwards reprinted in a later volume, Life and Phantasy, and again in Flower Pieces (1888), by the same author. This design 'revealed to young Burne-Jones' (so his biographer, Mr. Malcolm Bell, has recorded) that there existed a strange enchanting world beyond the hum-drum of this daily life—a world of radiant, many-coloured lights, of dim mysterious shadows, of harmonies of form and line, wherein to enter is to walk among the blest—that far-off world of Art into which many a time since he has made his way and brought back visions of delight to show his fellow-men. The first suspicion of that land of faëry came to him when, in a small volume of poems by William Allingham, he found a little wood-cut, 'Elfen-mere,' signed with a curious entwinement of the initials D. G. R. The slumbering spirit of fancy awoke to life within him and cast her spells upon him never to be shaken off.'

In the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856, Mr. Burne-Jones wrote of this very design: 'There is one more I cannot help noticing, a drawing of higher finish and pretension than the last, from the pencil of Rossetti, in Allingham's Day and Night Songs, just published. It is, I think, the most beautiful drawing for an illustration I have ever seen: the weird faces of the maids of Elfen-mere, the musical, timed movement of their arms together as they sing, the face of the man, above all, are such as only a great artist could conceive.'

This picture, 'three damsels clothed in white,' who came

'With their spindles every night;
Two and one, and three fair maidens,
Spinning to a pulsing cadence,
Singing songs of Elfen-mere,'

reproduced here, is still issued in William Allingham's volume of poems entitled Flower Pieces (Reeves and Turner, 1888).

Five illustrations to Moxon's edition of Tennyson's Poems, 1857, two in Christina Rossetti's The Goblin Market and other Poems, 1862, and two in The Princes Progress and other Poems, 1866, by the same author, complete the ten in question. As the Tennyson has been republished lately, and a monograph, Tennyson and his pre-Raphaelite Illustrators, by G. Somes Layard (Elliot Stock, 1894), has brought together every available scrap of material connected with the famous quintette of designs, it would be superfluous to describe them here in detail. Any distinctly recognised 'movement' is very rarely a crescendo, but nearly always a waning force that owes what energy it retains to the original impetus of its founder. Should this statement be true of any fashion in art, it might be most easily supported, if applied to Rossetti's ten drawings on wood, set side by side with the whole mass of modern 'decorative' illustration. Even a great artist like Howard Pyle has hardly added a new motive to those crowded into these wood-engravings. The lady by the casement, 'The long hours come and go,' upon the title-page of The Princes Progress, is an epitome of a thousand later attempts. Mr. Fairfax Murray has collected over a dozen studies and preliminary drawings for this little block, that would appal some of the younger men as evidence of the intense care with which a masterpiece was wrought of old. Highly-finished drawings were done over and over again until their author was satisfied. The frontispieces to Goblin Market and to The Prince's Progress, no less than the Tennyson designs, form, obviously enough, the treasure-trove whence later men have borrowed; too often exchanging the gold for very inferior currency. Without attempting to give undue credit to Rossetti, or denying that collateral influences—notably that of Walter Crane—had their share in the revival of the nineties, there can be no doubt that the strongest of the younger 'decorative' artists to-day are still fascinated by Rossetti—no less irresistibly than 'the young Burne-Jones' was influenced in 1855.

Therefore the importance of these ten designs cannot be exaggerated. Whether you regard their influence as unwholesome, and regret the morbidity of the school that founded itself on them, or prefer to see in them the germ of a style entirely English in its renaissance, which has already spread over that Continent which one had deemed inoculated against any British epidemic, the fact remains that Rossetti is the golden milestone wherefrom all later work must needs be measured. No doubt the superb work of Frederick Sandys, had it been more accessible to the younger artists when the new impetus to decorative black-and-white began to attract a popular audience, would have found hardly as ardent disciples.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

You should have wept her yesterday

'THE PRINCE'S PROGRESS'
1866

* * * * *

M. J. Lawless (born 1837, died 1864).—This artist, faithful to the best tradition of the pre-Raphaelite illustrators, seems to have left few personal memories. Born in 1837, a son of Barry Lawless, a Dublin solicitor, he was educated at Prior Park School, Bath, and afterwards attended several drawing schools, and was for a time a pupil of Henry O'Neil, R.A. He died August 6, 1864. Mr. Edward Walford, who contributes a short notice of Matthew James Lawless to the Dictionary of National Biography, has only the barest details to record. Nor do others, who knew him intimately, remember anything more than the ordinary routine of a short and uneventful life. But his artistic record is not meagre. In contemporary criticism we find him ranked with Millais and Sandys; not as equal to either, but as a worthy third. A fine picture of his, The Sick Call (from the Leathart Collection), was exhibited again in 1895 at the Guildhall.

But it is by his work as an illustrator he will be remembered, and, despite the few years he practised, for his first published drawing was in Once a Week, December 15, 1859 (vol. i. p. 505), he has left an honourable and not inconsiderable amount of work behind him. No search has lighted upon any work of his outside the pages of the popular magazines, except a few etchings (in the publications of the Junior Etching Club), three designs of no great importance in Lyra Germanica (Longmans, 1861), and a pamphlet, the Life of St. Patrick, with some shocking engravings, said by his biographer to be from Lawless's designs. In the chapters upon Once a Week, London Society, Good Words, etc., every drawing I have been able to identify is duly noted. It is not easy to refrain from eulogy upon the work of a draughtsman with no little individuality and distinction, who has so far been almost completely forgotten by artists of the present day. The selection of his work reproduced here by the courtesy of the owners of the copyright will, perhaps, send many fresh admirers to hunt up the rest of it for themselves.

* * * * *

Arthur Boyd Houghton (1836–1875) was born in 1836, the fourth son of his father, who was a captain in the Royal Navy. He visited India, according to some of his biographers; others say that he was never in the East, but that it was a brother who supplied him with the oriental details that appear in so many of his drawings. Be that as it may, his fellow-workers on the Arabian Nights pretended to be jealous of his Egyptian experience, and declared that it was no good trying to rival from their imaginings the scenes that he knew by heart. At present, when all men unite to praise him, it would almost lend colour to a belief that he was unappreciated by his fellows to read in a contemporary criticism: 'His designs were often striking in their effects of black and white, but were wanting in tone and gradation—a defect partly due to the loss of one eye.' This is only quoted by way of encouragement to living illustrators, who forget that their hero, despite sympathy and commissions, suffered also much the same misunderstanding that is often their lot. Against this may be set a criticism of yesterday, which runs:—

'As regards "the school of the sixties," now that it has moved away, we can rightly range the heads of that movement, and allowing for side impulses from the technique of Menzel, and still more from the magnetism of Rossetti's personality, we see, broadly speaking, that with Millais it arrived, with Houghton it ceased. Under these two leaders it gathered others, but within ten years its essential work was done. It has all gone now nobly into the past from the hands of men, some still living, some dead but yesterday.

'In Houghton's work, two things strike us especially, when we see it adequately to-day: its mastery of technique and style, and its temperament: the mastery so swift and spontaneous, so lavish of its audacities, so noble in its economies; the temperament so dramatic, so passionate, so satiric, and so witty. In many of his qualities, in vitality and movement, Houghton tops Millais. What is missing from his temperament, if it be a lack and not a quality, is the power to look at things coolly; he has not, as Millais, the deep mood of stoical statement, of tragedy grown calm. His tragic note is vindictive, a little shrill: when he sets himself to depict contemporary life, as in the Graphic America series, he is sardonic, impatient, at times morose: his humour carries an edge of bitterness. But in whatever mood he looks at things, the mastery of his aim is certain.'[11]

Drawn by A. Boyd Houghton.

Swan Electro-Engraving Co.

READING THE CHRONICLES

The mass of work accomplished in illustration alone, between his first appearance and his death in 1875, is amazing. There is scarce a periodical of any rank which has not at least one example from his pen. The curt attention given here to the man must be pardoned, as reference to his work is made on almost every page of this book. For an appreciative essay, that is a model of its class, one has but to turn to Mr. Laurence Housman's volume[12] which contains also five original drawings on wood (reproduced in photogravure) and eighty-three others from Dalziel's Arabian Nights (Ward, Lock & Co., 1863-65 and Warne, 1866), Don Quixote, the two volumes of Mr. Robert Buchanan's Poems—Ballad Stories of the Affections (1866), and North Coast (1868), Home Thoughts (1865), National Nursery Rhymes (1871), and The Graphic (1870).

* * * * *

Frederick Walker[13] (1840–1875), who was born in Marylebone on the 26th of May 1840, has been the subject of so many appreciations, and at least one admirable monograph, that a most brief notice of his career as an illustrator will suffice here. His father was a designer of jewelry and his grandfather had some skill in portrait-painting. How he began drawing from the Elgin marbles in the British Museum at the age of sixteen has been told often enough. Many boys of sixteen have done the same, but it is open to doubt if any one of them has absorbed the spirit of their models so completely as Fred Walker did. It would be hardly asserting too much to say for him that they replaced humanity, and that his male figures seem nearly always youths from the Parthenon in peasant costume. At seventeen or eighteen he was working at Leigh's life-class in Newman Street, and at the same time was employed in Mr. Whymper's wood-engraving establishment. His first appearance in Everybody's Journal is duly noted elsewhere, also his first drawing in Once a Week; but the peculiar affection he had inspired by his work has kept most of his critics from saying that some of his earliest designs, as we know them after engraving, appear distinctly poor. But, from the time he ceased to act as 'ghost' for Thackeray, and signed his work with the familiar F. W., his career shows a distinct and sustained advance until the ill-fated 1875, in which George Mason, G. J. Pinwell, and A. Boyd Houghton also died.

It is unnecessary to recapitulate in brief the various contributions to the Cornhill Magazine, Good Words, Once a Week, etc., which have already been noted in detail. Nor would it be in place here to dwell upon the personality of the artist; sufficient matter has been printed already to enable lovers of his works to construct a faithful portrait of their author—lovable and irritable, with innate genius and hereditary disease both provoking him to petulant outbursts that still live in his friends' memories. One anecdote will suffice. A group of well-known painters were strolling across a bridge on the Upper Thames. Walker, who was passionately fond of music, had been playing on a tin whistle, which one of the party, half in joke, half weary of the fluting, struck from his mouth, so that it fell into the stream below. In a moment Walker had thrown off his clothes, and, 'looking like a statue come to life, so exquisitely was he built,' plunged from the wall of the bridge, and, diving, rescued his tin whistle, which he bore to land in triumph. The trifling incident is an epitome of the character of the wayward boy, who kept his friends nevertheless. 'He did not seek beauty,' wrote an ardent student of his work, 'but it came, while Pinwell thought of and strove for beauty always, yet often failed to secure it.' That he knew Menzel, and was influenced by him, is an open secret; but he also owes much to the pre-Raphaelites—Millais especially. Yet when all he learned from contemporary artists is fully credited, what is left, and it is by far the largest portion, is his own absolutely—owing nothing to any predecessor, except possibly to the sculptors of Greece. He died in Scotland in June 1875, and was buried at the Marlow he painted so delightfully, leaving behind him the peculiar immortality that is awarded more readily to a half-fulfilled life than to one which has accomplished all it set out to do, and has outlived its own reputation.

* * * * *

George John Pinwell (1842–1875).—This notable illustrator, whose work bulks so largely in the latter half of the sixties, was born December 26, 1842, and died September 8, 1875. He studied at the Newman Street Academy, entering in 1862. At first his illustrations show little promise; some of the earliest, in Lilliput Levée, a book of delightful rhymes for children, by Matthew Browne, are singularly devoid of interest. No engraver's name appears on them, nor is it quite clear by what process they were reproduced. They are inserted plates, and, under a strong magnifying glass, the lines suggest lithography. The unfamiliar medium, supposing they were drawn in lithographic ink, or by graphotype, or some similar process, would account for the entire absence of the qualities that might have been expected. Some others, in Hacco the Dwarf and in The Happy Home, the latter in crude colours, are hardly more interesting.

A. BOYD HOUGHTON

'GOOD WORDS'
1862, p. 504

MY TREASURE

According to Mr. Harry Quilter,[14] Pinwell began life as a butterman's boy in the City Road, whose duty, among other things, was to 'stand outside the shop on Saturday nights shouting Buy! Buy! Buy!' Later on he seems to have been a 'carpet-planner.' If one might read the words as 'carpet-designer,' the fact of turning up about this time at Leigh's night-school, where he met Fred Walker, would not be quite so surprising.

Between Walker and Pinwell a friendship sprang up, but it seems to have been Thomas White who introduced the former to Once a Week, wherein his first contribution, The Saturnalia, was published, January 31, 1863. In 1864 he began to work for Messrs. Dalziel on the Arabian Nights and the Illustrated Goldsmith, which latter is his most important volume. In 1869 he became a member of the Old Water Colour Society, but his work as a colourist does not concern us here. Nor is it necessary to recapitulate the enormous quantity of his designs which in magazines and books are noticed elsewhere in these pages. Some illustrations to Jean Ingelow's Poems, notably seven to The High Tide, represent his best period. But he suffered terribly by translation at the engravers' hands. The immobility, which characterises so many of his figures, does not appear in the few drawings which survive. Mr. Pennell is the fortunate possessor of several of the designs for The High Tide; but the pleasure of studying these originals is changed to pain when one remembers how many others were cut away by the engraver. It is curious that three men, so intimately associated as Walker, Pinwell, and Houghton, should have preserved their individuality so entirely. It is impossible to confuse the work of any of them. Walker infused a grace into the commonplace which, so far as the engravings are concerned, sometimes escaped Pinwell's far more imaginative creations; while Houghton lived in a world of his own, wherein all animate and inanimate objects obeyed the lines, the swirling curves, he delighted in. If, as has been well said, Walker was a Greek—but a dull Greek—then Pinwell may be called a Naturalist with a touch of realism in his technique, while Houghton was romantic to the core in essence and manipulation alike.

* * * * *

Arthur Hughes.—In 1855 appeared The Music-master, the second enlarged and illustrated edition of Day and Night Songs, a book of poems by William Allingham, to which reference has been made several times in this chronicle. Of its ten illustrations, seven and a vignette are from the hand of Arthur Hughes. The artist thus early associated with the leaders of the pre-Raphaelite movement, and still actively at work, was never, technically, a member of the Brotherhood. In 1858, however, we find him one of the enthusiastic young artists Rossetti had gathered round him with a view to the production of the so-called frescoes in the Oxford Union. The oft-told tale of this noble failure need not be repeated here. Those who were responsible for the paintings in question appear more or less relieved to find that the work has ceased to exist. True, the majority of picture-lovers who have never seen them regard them, sentimentally, as the fine flower of pre-Raphaelite art, which faded before it was fully open. Judging from the restored fragments which remain, had they been permanent, they would not have been more than interesting curiosities; examples of the 'prentice efforts' of men who afterwards shaped the course of British art, not merely for their own generation, but, as we can see to-day, for a much longer time. The great difficulties of the task these ardent novices undertook so light-heartedly may or may not have checked the practice of wall-painting in England, if, indeed, one can speak of a check to a movement that never existed. To trace in detail the course of Mr. Hughes's work, from this date to the present, would be a pleasant and somewhat lengthy task. Yet, although greater men are less fully dealt with, a running narrative showing where the illustrations appeared will be more valuable than any attempt to estimate the intrinsic value of the work, or explain its attractive quality. That the work is singularly lovable, and has found staunch and ardent admirers amid varying schools of artists, is unquestionable. Without claiming that it equals the best work of the 'Brotherhood,' it has a charm all its own. The sense of delight in lovely things is present throughout, nor does its elegance often degenerate to mere prettiness. The naïve expression of a child's ideal of lovely forms, with a curiously well-sustained type of beauty, neither Greek nor Gothic, yet having a touch of paganism in its mysticism, is always present in it. With a peculiarly individual manner—so that the signature, which is usually to be found in some unobtrusive corner, is needless,—a student of illustration can 'spot' an Arthur Hughes at the most rapid glance as surely as he could identify a Du Maurier.

There are painters and draughtsmen of all periods, before whose work you are well content to cease from criticism, and to enjoy simply, with all their imperfections, the qualities that attract you. Passionate intensity, the perfection of academic draughtsmanship, dramatic composition as it is usually understood, may, or may not, be always evident. Whether they are or not is in this case of entirely secondary importance. Certain indefinable qualities, lovable and lasting, are sure to be the most noticeable, whether you light on a print that has escaped you hitherto, or turn up one that you have known since the day it was published. Like caters for the like, and this love which the work provokes from those to whom it appeals seems also its chief characteristic. In the whole mass of pictorial art you can hardly find its equal in this particular respect. The care and sorrow of life, its disillusions and injustice, are not so much forgotten, or set aside thoughtlessly, as recognised at their relative unimportance when contrasted with the widespread, yet absolutely indefinable thing, which it is convenient to term Love. Not, be it explained, Love in its carnal sense, but, in an abstract spiritual way, which seeks the quiet happiness in adding to the joy of others, and trusts that somehow, somewhere, good is the final end of ill.

It may be that this attempt to explain the impression of Mr. Hughes's work is a purely personal one, but it is one that intimate study for many years strengthens and raises to the unassailable position of a positive fact. At the risk of appearing mawkishly sentimental, even with the greater risk of reflecting sentimentality upon artistic work which it has not, this impression of Mr. Arthur Hughes's art must be set down unmistakably. Looking upon it from a purely technical aspect, you might find much to praise, and perhaps a little to criticise; but, taking it as an art addressed often enough to the purpose of forming artistic ideals in the minds of the young, you cannot but regret that the boys and girls of to-day, despite the army of artists of all ranks catering for them, cannot know the peculiar delight that the children of the sixties and early seventies enjoyed.

Arthur Hughes was born in London in 1832, and became a pupil of Soames of the Royal Academy Schools, exhibiting for the first time at the annual exhibition in 1854. In 1855 appeared, as we have just seen, The Music-master. The artist seems to have worked fitfully at illustrations, but his honourable labours in painting dispose of any charge of indolence, and, did but the scope of this work permit it, a still more interesting record of his artistic career could be made by including a list of pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Institute, the Grosvenor, the New Gallery, and elsewhere. Between 1855 and 1861 I have found no illustrations, nor does he himself recall any. In the latter year there are two designs in The Queen to poems by George Mac Donald and F. Greenwood. The next magazine illustration in order is At the Sepulchre in Good Words, 1864. In 1866 appeared an edition of Tennyson's Enoch Arden, with twenty-five illustrations by Arthur Hughes.' This noteworthy book is one of the essential volumes to those who make ever so small a collection of the books of the sixties. Although the work is unequal, it contains some of his most delightful drawings. In the same year London Society contained The Farewell Salutation. In 1867 George Mac Donald's Dealings with the Fairies was published. This dainty little book, which contains some very typical work, is exceptionally scarce. Another book which was published in 1868 is now very difficult to run across in its first edition, Five Days' Entertainment at Wentworth Grange, by F. T. Palgrave, illustrated with seventeen designs, the woodcuts (sic) being by J. Cooper, and a vignette engraved on steel by C. H. Jeens.

ARTHUR HUGHES

'GOOD WORDS'
1871, p. 33

THE LETTER

ARTHUR HUGHES

'GOOD WORDS'
1871, p. 183

THE DIAL—'SUN COMES,
MOON COMES'

To 1869 belongs the book with which the artist is most frequently associated, Tom Brown's School Days, by Tom Hughes, not a relative of the illustrator as the name might suggest. To descant on the merits of this edition to-day were foolish. When one hears of a new illustrated edition being contemplated, it seems sacrilege, and one realises how distinctly a newly illustrated Tom Brown would separate the generation that knew the book through Mr. Arthur Hughes's imagination from those who will make friends with it in company with another artist. Incidents like these bring home the inevitable change of taste with passing time more vividly than far weightier matters enforce it.

Good Words in 1869 contains two drawings to Carmina Nuptialia, and The Sunday Magazine the same year has a very beautiful composition, Blessings in Disguise. In 1870–1871 Good Words for the Young includes, in the first two volumes, no less than seventy-six illustrations by Mr. Hughes to At the Back of the North Wind, fourteen to The Boy in Grey, thirty to Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood, thirty to The Princess and Goblin, ten to Lilliput Revels, six to Lilliput Lectures, and two to King Arthur, besides one each to Fancy, The Mariner's Cave, and a notable design to The Wind and the Moon. In 1871 also belongs My Lady Wind (p. 38), Little Tommy Tucker (p. 46), in Novello's National Nursery Rhymes.

In 1870 Good Words contains four: The Mother and the Angel and three full-page designs, which rank among the most important of the artist's work in illustration, to Tennyson's Loves of the Wrens. This song-cycle, which the late Poet Laureate wrote expressly for Sullivan to set to music, was issued in 1870 in a sumptuous quarto. The publisher, Strahan, who at that time issued all Tennyson's work, had intended to include illustrations, and three were finished before the poet vetoed the project. These were cut down and issued with the accompanying lyrics in Good Words. Although the artist, vexed no doubt at their curtailment, and by no means satisfied with their engraving, does not rank them among his best things, few who collect his work will share his view. Despite the trespass beyond the limit of this book, it would be better to continue the list to date, and it is all too brief. In 1872 Good Words contains five of his designs, and Good Words for the Young twenty-four to Innocent's Island, and eight to Gutta-Percha Willie.

1872 saw two remarkably good volumes decorated by this artist, T. Gordon Hake's Parables and Tales (Chapman and Hall) and Sing Song, a book of nursery rhymes by Christina Rossetti (Routledge).

In 1873 ten to Sindbad the Sailor, and six or seven others appeared in Good Words for the Young, now entitled Good Things. To this year belongs also Speaking Likenesses by Christina Rossetti, with its dozen fanciful and charming designs; and a frontispiece and full page (p. 331), in Mr. George Mac Donald's England's Antiphon (Macmillan). In 1889 or 1890 The Graphic Christmas number contained two full-page illustrations by this artist. To 1892 belongs a delightful vignette upon the title-page of Mrs. George Mac Donald's Chamber Dramas. With a bare mention of seven drawings, inadequately reproduced in The London Home Monthly, 1895, the record of Mr. Arthur Hughes's work must close; Several designs to a poem by Jean Ingelow, The Shepherd's Lady, the artist has lost sight of, and the date of the first edition of Five Old Friends and a Young Prince, by Miss Thackeray, with a vignette, I have failed to trace at the British Museum or elsewhere. As Mr. Arthur Hughes, in the Music-master (1855), heads the list, so it seemed fit to mark his position by a fuller record than could be awarded to other of his contemporaries still living; partly because the comparatively small number of illustrations made a fairly complete record possible.

* * * * *

Frederick Sandys.—This most admirable illustrator 'was born in Norwich in 1832, the son of a painter of the place, from whom he received his earliest art-instruction. Among his first drawings was a series of illustrations of the birds of Norfolk, and another dealing with the antiquities of his native city. Probably he first exhibited in 1851, with a portrait (in crayons) of "Henry, Lord Loftus" which appears as the work of "F. Sands" in the catalogue of the Royal Academy to whose exhibitions he has contributed in all forty-seven pictures and drawings.'[15]

The above, extracted from Mr. J. M. Gray's article, 'Frederick Sandys and the woodcut designers of thirty years ago,' gives the facts which concern us here. A most interesting study of the same artist by the same critic, in the Art Journal,[16] supplies more description and analysed appreciation. The eulogy by Mr. Joseph Pennell in The Quarto[17] must not be forgotten. Further references to Mr. Sandys appear in a lecture delivered by Professor Herkomer at the Royal Institution, printed in the Art Journal, 1883, and in a review of Thornbury's Ballads by Mr. Edmund Gosse in The Academy.[18]

FREDERICK SANDYS

'CENTURY GUILD HOBBY-HORSE'
VOL. III. p. 147

DANAE IN THE
BRAZEN CHAMBER

FREDERICK SANDYS

DALZIELS' 'BIBLE
GALLERY,' 1880

JACOB HEARS THE VOICE
OF THE LORD

It is quite possible, although only thirteen of the thirty or so of illustrations by Frederick Sandys appeared in Once a Week, that these thirteen have been the most potent factor in giving the magazine its peculiar place in the hearts of artists. The general public may have forgotten its early volumes, but at no time since they were published have painters and pen-draughtsmen failed to prize them. During the years that saw them appear there are frequent laudatory references in contemporary journals, with now and again the spiteful attack which is only awarded to work that is unlike the average. Elsewhere mention is made of articles upon them which have appeared from time to time by Messrs. Edmund Gosse, J. M. Gray, Joseph Pennell, and others. During the 'seventies,' no less than in the 'eighties' or 'nineties,' men cut out the pages and kept them in their portfolios; so that to-day, in buying volumes of the magazine, a wise person is careful to see that the 'Sandys' are all there before completing the purchase. Therefore, should the larger public admit them formally into the limited group of its acknowledged masterpieces, it will only imitate the attitude which from the first fellow-artists have maintained towards them.

The original drawings, 'If,' Life's Journey, The Little Mourner, and Jacques de Caumont, were exhibited at the 'Arts and Crafts,' 1893. That a companion volume to Millais's Parables, with illustrations of The Story of Joseph, was actually projected, and the first drawings completed, is true, and one's regret that circumstances—those hideous circumstances, which need not be explained fully, of an artist's ideas rejected by a too prudish publisher—prevented its completion, is perhaps the most depressing item recorded in the pages of this volume.

That some thirty designs all told should have established the lasting reputation of an artist would be somewhat surprising, did not one realise that almost every one is a masterpiece of its kind. Owing to the courtesy of all concerned, so large a number of these are reproduced herewith that a detailed description of each would be superfluous. But, at the risk of repeating a list already printed and reprinted, it is well to condense the scattered references in the foregoing pages in a convenient paragraph, wherein those republished in Thornbury's Legendary Ballads (Chatto, 1876) are noted with an asterisk:—

The Cornhill Magazine: The Portent ('60), Manoli ('62), Cleopatra ('66); Once a Week: *Yet once more on the organ play, The Sailor's Bride, From my Window, *Three Statues of Ægina, Rosamund Queen of the Lombards (all 1861), *The Old Chartist, *The King at the Gate, *Jacques de Caumont, *King Warwolf, *The Boy Martyr, *Harold Harfagr (all '62), and Helen and Cassandra ('66); Good Words: Until her Death ('62), Sleep ('63); Churchman's Family Magazine: *The Waiting Time ('63); Shilling Magazine: Amor Mundi ('65); The Quiver: Advent of Winter ('66); The Argosy: 'If' ('65); The Century Guild Hobby Horse: Danae ('88); Wilmot's Sacred Poetry: Life's Journey, The Little Mourner; Cassell's Family Magazine: Proud Maisie ('81); and Dalziels' Bible Gallery: Jacob hears the voice of the Lord.

FREDERICK SANDYS

'THE QUIVER'

OCTOBER

In addition, it may be interesting to add notes of other drawings:—The Nightmare (1857)[19], a parody of Sir Isumbras at the Ford, by Millais, which shows a braying ass marked 'J. R.' (for John Ruskin), with Millais, Rossetti, and Holman Hunt on his back; Morgan le Fay, reproduced as a double-page supplement in The British Architect, October 31, 1879; a frontispiece, engraved on steel by J. Saddler, for Miss Muloch's Christian's Mistake (Hurst and Blackett), and another for The Shaving of Shagpat (Chapman and Hall, 1865); a portrait of Matthew Arnold, engraved by O. Lacour, published in The English Illustrated Magazine, January 1884; another of Professor J. R. Green, engraved by G. J. Stodardt, in The Conquest of England, 1883; and one of Robert Browning, published in The Magazine of Art shortly after the poet's death; Miranda, a drawing reproduced in The Century Guild Hobby Horse, vol. iii. p. 41; Medea, reproduced (as a silver-print photograph) in Col. Richard's poem of that name (Chapman and Hall, 1869); a reproduction of the original drawing for Amor Mundi, and studies for the same, in the two editions of Mr. Pennell's Pen-Drawing and Pen-Draughtsmen (Macmillan); a reproduction of an unfinished drawing on wood, The Spirit of the Storm, in The Quarto (No. 1, 1896); Proud Maisie in Pan (1881), reissued in Songs of the North, and engraved by W. Spielmayer (from the original in possession of Dr. John Todhunter) in the English Illustrated Magazine, May 1891, and the original drawing for the Advent of Winter and one of Two Heads, reproduced in J. M. Gray's article in the Art Journal (March 1884). Whether the Judith here reproduced was originally drawn for engraving I cannot say.

To add another eulogy of these works is hardly necessary at this moment, when their superb quality has provoked a still wider recognition than ever. Concerning the engraving of some Mr. Sandys complained bitterly, but of others, notably the Danae, he wrote in October 1880: 'My drawing was most perfectly cut by Swain, from my point of view, the best piece of wood-cutting of our time—mind I am not speaking of my work, but Swain's.' To see that the artist's complaint was at times not unfounded one has but to compare the Advent of Winter as it appears in a reproduction of the drawing (Art Journal, March 1884) and in The Quiver. 'It was my best drawing entirely spoilt by the cutter,' he said; but this was perhaps a rather hasty criticism that is hardly proved up to the hilt by the published evidence.

As a few contemporary criticisms quoted elsewhere go to prove, Sandys was never ignored by artists nor by people of taste. To-day there are dozens of men in Europe without popular appreciation at home or abroad, but surely if his fellows recognise the master-hand, it is of little moment whether the cheap periodicals ignore him, or publish more or less adequately illustrated articles on the man and his work. Frederick Sandys is and has been a name to conjure with for the last thirty years. Though still alive, he has gained (I believe) no official recognition. But that is of little consequence. There are laureates uncrowned and presidents unelected still living among us whose lasting fame is more secure than that of many who have worn the empty titles without enjoying the unstinted approval of fellow-craftsmen which alone makes any honour worthy an artist's acceptance.

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Sir Edward Burne-Jones.—The illustrations of this artist are so few that it is a matter of regret that they could not all be reproduced here. But the artist, without withholding permission, expressed a strong wish that they should not be reprinted. The two in Good Words have been already named. Others to a quite forgotten book must not be mentioned; but it is safe to say that no human being, who did not know by whom they were produced, would recognise them. A beautiful design[20] for a frontispiece to Mr. William Morris's Love is Enough was never engraved. The Nativity in Gatty's Parables from Nature, and the one design in the Dalziel Bible have already been named. Many drawings for Cupid and Psyche, the first portion of a proposed illustrated folio edition of The Earthly Paradise, were actually engraved, some of the blocks being cut by Mr. Morris himself. Several sets of impressions exist, and rumour for a long time babbled of a future Kelmscott Press edition. Of his more recent designs nothing can be said here; besides being a quarter of a century later than the prescribed limits of the volume, they are as familiar as any modern work could be.

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Walter Crane.—This popular artist was born in Liverpool, August 15, 1845, his father being sometime secretary and treasurer of the (then) Liverpool Academy. After a boyhood spent mostly at Torquay the family came to London in 1857. In 1859 he became a pupil of Mr. W. J. Linton, the well-known engraver, and remained with him for three years. About 1865 he first saw the work of Burne-Jones at the Society of Painters in Water Colours. These drawings, and some Japanese toy-books which fell in his way, have no doubt strongly influenced his style; but the earlier pre-Raphaelites and the Once a Week school had been eagerly studied before. Although Mr. Crane, with his distinctly individual manner, is not a typical artist of the sixties any more than of the seventies, or of to-day, and although his style had hardly found its full expression at that time, except in the toy-books, yet no record of the period could be complete without a notice of one whose loyalty to a particular style has done much to found the modern 'decorative school.'

WALTER CRANE

'GOOD WORDS'
1863, p. 795

TREASURE-TROVE

His first published drawing, A man in the coils of a serpent, appears in a quite forgotten magazine called Entertaining Things, vol. i. 1861, p. 327 (Virtue); others, immature, and spoilt by the engraver, are in The Talking Fire-irons and similar tracts by the Rev. H. B. Power. In many of the magazines, of which the contents are duly noted,—Good Words, Once a Week, The Argosy, London Society, etc.—reference has been already made to each of his drawings as it appeared therein. A bibliography of his work, to be exhaustive, would take up more room than space permitted here. As it will be the task of the one, whoever he may be, who undertakes to chronicle English illustrations of the seventies, it may be left without further notice. For, with the exception of the New Forest (1862), all the other books which may be called masterpieces of their order, Grimms' Household Stories, The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde, The Baby's Bouquet, Baby's Opera, Æsop's Fables, Flora's Feast, Queen Summer, the long series of Mrs. Molesworth's children's books, many 'coloured boards' for novels, and the rest, belong to a later period.

To find that a large paper copy of Grimms' Household Stories fetched thirty-six pounds at Lord Leighton's sale is a proof that collectors of 'Cranes' are already in full cry. Two hundred and fifty copies of this book were issued in large paper; the copy in question, although handsomely bound, did not derive its value solely from that fact. Modern readers rubbed their eyes to find a recent édition de luxe fetching a record price; but, if certain signs are not misleading, the market value of many books of the sixties will show a rapid increase that will surprise the apathetic collector, who now regards them as commonplace. To believe that the worth of anything is just as much as it will bring is a most foolish test of intrinsic value; but, should the auctioneer's marked catalogue of a few years hence show that 'the sixties' produced works which coax the reluctant guineas out of the pockets of those who a short time before would not expend shillings, it will but reflect the well-seasoned verdict of artists for years past. In matters of science and of commerce the man in the street acts on the opinion of the expert, but in matters of art he usually prefers his own. If, when he wakens to the intrinsic value of objects about which artists know no difference of opinion, he has to pay heavily for his conceited belief in his own judgment, it is at once poetic justice and good common sense.

Space forbids, unfortunately, detailed notices of Fred Barnard, C. H. Bennett, T. Morten, George Du Maurier, John Pettie, R.A., and many other deceased artists whose works have been frequently referred to in previous chapters.

Fairly complete iconographies had been prepared of the works of Mr. Birket Foster, Sir John Gilbert, and Ernest Griset. These, and other no less important lists, have also been omitted for the same reason.

Nor is it necessary to include here notices of artists whose fame has been established in another realm of art—such as Mr. Whistler, Mr. Luke Fildes, R.A., Professor Herkomer, R.A., Messrs. W. Q. Orchardson, R.A., H. S. Marks, R.A., H. H. Armstead, R.A., Edmund J. Poynter, R.A., G. H. Boughton, J. W. North, R.A., and George Frederick Watts, R.A.

Others, including W. Small, Charles Green, Sir John Tenniel, would each require a volume, instead of a few paragraphs, to do even bare justice to the amazing quantity of notable illustrations they have produced. Fortunately most of them are still alive and active, so that a more worthy excuse remains for omitting to give a complete iconography of each one here, for they belong to a far more extended period than is covered by this book.