Meanwhile, books with illustrations en taille douce were being issued in some numbers both at Paris and at Amsterdam. In the former city François Chauveau (1613-76), in the latter Jan and Casper Luyken are credited by Mr. Hind (A Short History of Engraving and Etching, 1908) with having produced “hosts of small and undistinguished plates,” and these damning epithets explain how it is that even patriotic French collectors like Eugène Paillet and Henri Béraldi thought it wise to leave the illustrated books of the seventeenth century severely alone.
We meet the first advance guard of the brilliant French eighteenth century school of book-illustration in 1718, when a pretty little edition of Les Amours de Daphnis et Chloé (as translated by Bishop Amyot from the Greek of Longus) made its appearance with twenty-eight plates by Benoît Audran, after the designs of no less a person than the Regent of France, and duly labelled and dated “Philippus in. et pinx. 1714.” The plates vary very much in charm, but that with the underline Chloé sauve Daphnis par le son de sa flûte certainly possesses it, and one of the double-plates in the book, Daphnis prend ses oyseaux pendant l’Hyver pour voir Chloé, is really pretty. We find no other book to vie with this until we come to a much larger and more pretentious one, the works of Molière in six volumes, royal quarto, published in 1734. This was illustrated with thirty-three plates, in the mixture of etching and engraving characteristic of the French school of the day, by Laurent Cars, after pencil drawings by François Boucher, and by nearly two hundred vignettes and tailpieces (not all different) after Boucher and others by Cars and François Joullain. Another edition of this in four volumes with Boucher’s designs reproduced on a smaller scale was published in 1741 and reprinted three times within the decade.
After the Molière, books and editions which collectors take count of come much more quickly. There was an edition of Montesquieu’s Le Temple de Gnide in 1742 (imprint: Londres), a Virgil in 1743 with plates by Cochin, engraved by Cochin père, the Contes of La Fontaine (Amsterdam, 1743-5) also illustrated by Cochin, Guer’s Moeurs et usages des Turcs, with plates after Boucher (1746), an edition of the works of Boileau in five volumes, with vignettes by Eisen and tailpieces by Cochin (1743-5), and in 1753 a Manon Lescaut (imprint: Amsterdam) with some plates by J. J. Pasquier, which are stiff, and others by H. Gravelot, which are feeble.
In the four-volume edition of the Fables of La Fontaine (1755-9) with illustrations after J. B. Oudry, we come to a very ambitious piece of work, handsomely carried out, which a book-lover may yet find it hard to admire. Oudry’s designs are always adequate, and have more virility in them than is often found in the work of this school, and they are competently interpreted by a number of etchers and engravers, some of whom, it may be noted, worked together in pairs on the same plate, so that we find such signatures as “C. Cochin aqua forti, R. Gaillard cælo sculpsit,” and “Gravé à l’eau forte par C. Cochin, terminé au burin par P. Chenu”—a very explicit statement of the method of work. But adequate as the plates may seem, if they are judged not as book-illustrations but as engravings, no one could rate them high, and as a book what is to be said of an edition of La Fontaine’s Fables, which fills four volumes, each measuring nearly nineteen inches by thirteen? The bookman can only regard such a work as a portfolio of plates with accompanying text, and if the plates as plates are only second rate, enthusiasm has nothing to build on.
We return to book-form in 1757, when Boccaccio’s Decamerone was published in Italian (imprint: Londra) in five octavo volumes, with charming vignettes and illustrations mostly by Gravelot, although a few are by Boucher and Eisen. Gravelot, who was more industrious than successful as an illustrator, is seen here to advantage, and deserves some credit for having made his designs not less but more reticent than the stories he had to illustrate. This praise can certainly not be given to the famous 1762 edition of the Contes of La Fontaine, the cost of which was borne by the Fermiers-Généraux (imprint: Amsterdam). The fleurons by Choffard are throughout delightful and the plates are brilliantly engraved, but the lubricity of Eisen’s designs is wearisome in the first volume and disgusting in the second, and possessors of the book are not to be envied. It is to be regretted that the next book we have to notice, the Contes Moraux of Marmontel (3 vols., 1765), has very little charm to support its morality, the plates after Gravelot being poor, while the head- and tailpieces, or rather the substitutes for them, are wretched. A much better book than either of these last is the edition in French and Latin of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in four quarto volumes (1767-71); with plates after Boucher, Eisen, Gravelot, and Moreau, and headpieces by Choffard at the beginning of each book. The imprint, “A Paris, chez Leclerc, Quai des Augustins, avec approbation et privilège du Roi,” prepares us to find that the designers have kept their licence within bounds, and many of the plates have a combined humour and charm which are very attractive. If I had to choose a single plate to show Gravelot at his best, I doubt if prolonged search would find any success more complete than that of the illustration to Book I, xi., Deucalion et Pyrrha repeuplant la Terre, suivant l’Oracle de Themis (see the frontispiece to this volume, Plate I), and though Eisen was a much better artist than Gravelot, his Apollon gardant les troupeaux d’Admet, dans les campagnes de Messene (II, x.) is certainly one of his prettiest pieces.
| XXXIX. PARIS, LAMBERT, 1770. DORAT. LES BAISERS. PAGE WITH ENGRAVED HEADPIECE AFTER EISEN |
During the next few years illustrated books became the fashion, so that in 1772 Cazotte wrote Le diable amoureux, nouvelle d’Espagne, with the false imprint Naples (Paris, Lejay) and six unsigned plates, said to be by Moreau after Marillier, on purpose to ridicule the craze for putting illustrations into every book. In 1768 the indefatigable Gravelot had illustrated an edition of the works of Voltaire, published at Geneva, with forty-four designs. In 1769 Les Saisons, a poem by Saint Lambert, was published at Amsterdam, with designs by Gravelot and Le Prince and fleurons by Choffard. In the same year there was published at Paris Meunier de Queslon’s Les Graces, with an engraved title by Moreau, a frontispiece after Boucher, and five plates after Moreau. In 1770 came Voltaire’s Henriade with ten plates and ten vignettes after Eisen, and more highly esteemed even than this, Dorat’s Les Baisers (La Haye et Paris), with a frontispiece and plate and forty-four head- and tailpieces, all (save two) after Eisen, not easily surpassed in their own luxurious style (see Plate XXXIX). In 1771 Gravelot, more indefatigable than ever, supplied designs for twenty plates and numerous head- and tailpieces for an edition of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, and was honoured, as Eisen had been in the Fermiers-Généraux edition of La Fontaine’s Contes, by his portrait being prefixed to the second volume. In 1772 a new edition of Montesquieu’s Le Temple de Gnide, in which the text was engraved throughout, was illustrated with designs by Eisen, brilliantly interpreted by Le Mire, and Imbert’s Le Jugement de Paris was illustrated by Moreau, With, fleurons by Choffard. In 1773 Le Temple de Gnide was versified by Colardeau, and illustrated by Monnet, and selections from Anacreon, Sappho, Bion, and Moschus by Eisen, while Moreau and others illustrated the Chansons of Laborde in four volumes and the works of Molière in six. After this the pace slackened, and we need no longer cling to the methods of the annalist. Moreau illustrated Saint Lambert’s Les Saisons and Fromageot’s Annales du règne de Marie Therèse (both in 1775), Marmontel’s Les Incas (1777), the seventy-volume Voltaire (1784-9), Paul et Virginie (1789), and many other works, living on to illustrate Goethe’s Werther in 1809; other books were adorned by Marillier, Cochin, Duplessis, Bertaux, Desrais, Saint Quentin, Fragonard, Gérard, and Le Barbier, and the fashion survived the Revolution and lingered on till about 1820.
We must go back now to England, where at the end of the seventeenth century the requirements of book-illustration were neglected, partly because of the growing taste for a neat simplicity in books, partly because the chief English engravers all devoted themselves to mezzotint. A few foreigners came over to supply their place, and Michael Burghers, of Amsterdam, illustrated the fourth edition of Paradise Lost, a stately folio, in 1688, with plates which enjoyed a long life and were also imitated for smaller editions. Burghers also illustrated the Oxford almanacs, and supplied frontispieces to the Bibles and other large books issued by the University Press up to about 1720. Another Dutchman who came to England not much later (in about 1690) was Michael Van der Gucht, who worked for the booksellers, as his children did after him. How low book-illustration had fallen in England at the beginning of the eighteenth century may be seen by a glance at the wretched plates which disfigure Rowe’s Shakespeare in 1709, the first edition on which an editor and an illustrator were allowed to work their wills. The year after this Louis Du Guernier came to England, and was soon engaged in the not too patriotic task of helping Claude Du Bosc to illustrate the victories of Marlborough. In 1714 he and Du Bosc were less painfully, though not very successfully, employed in making plates for Pope’s Rape of the Lock. Du Bosc subsequently worked on the Religious Ceremonies of all Nations (1733), an English edition of a book of Bernard Picart’s, and on plates for Rapin’s History of England (1743), but he was far from being a great engraver. It is a satisfaction that the plates to the first edition of Robinson Crusoe (1719) were engraved by two Englishmen, and not very badly. Their names are given as “Clark and Pine,” the Clark being presumably John Clark (1688-1736), who engraved some writing-books, and the Pine, John Pine (1690-1756), who imitated some designs by Bernard Picart to the book of Jonah in 1720, and may have been a pupil of his at Amsterdam.
It should, perhaps, have been mentioned that two years before Crusoe an English engraver, John Sturt (1658-1730), produced a Book of Common Prayer, of which the text as well as the pictures was engraved. This is rather a curiosity than a work of art, the frontispiece being a portrait of George I made up of the Creed, Lord’s Prayer, Ten Commandments, Prayer for the Royal Family, and Psalm XXI. written in minute characters, instead of lines. Sturt produced another engraved book, The Orthodox Communicant, in 1721.
In 1723 William Hogarth began what might have proved a notable career as a book-illustrator had not he soon found more profitable work. He illustrated the Travels of Aubry de la Mottraye in 1723, Briscoe’s Apuleius (1724), Cotterel’s translation of Cassandra (1725), Blackwell’s Compendium of Military Discipline (1726), and (also in 1726) Butler’s Hudibras, his plates to which, though grotesque enough, show plenty of character. For some years after this he worked on frontispieces, e.g. to Leveridge’s Songs (1727), Cooke’s Hesiod (1728), J. Miller’s comedy, The Humours of Oxford (1729), Theobald’s Perseus and Andromeda (1730), and in 1731 to a Molière, Fielding’s Tragedy of Tragedies, and Mitchell’s Highland Fair. But the success of his set of prints on “The Harlot’s Progress” diverted him from bookwork, although many years after he contributed frontispieces to Vols. II and IV of Tristram Shandy, and in 1761 a head-and tailpiece (engraved by Grignion) to a Catalogue of the Society of Arts.