A Practical Hand-book of Drawing for Modern Methods of Reproduction

by Charles G. Harper

The dangers of following in a slavish manner the eccentricities of well-known men are exemplified in the work of those illustrators who ape the whimsies of the impressionist Degas. What Degas may do may nearly always be informed with distinction, but the illustrators who reproduce, not his genius, but an outstanding feature of it, are singularly narrow. If Degas has painted a picture of the play with the orchestra in the foreground and the bass-viol looming immensely up three parts of the composition, the third-rate impressionists also lug in a bass-viol; if he has shown a ballet-girl with apparently only one leg, they always draw one-legged coryphées, and remain incapable of conceiving them as bipeds.

Caldecott is a dangerous man to copy. He was, first and last, a draughtsman, and a draughtsman whose every dot and line were eloquent. There is no technique that you can lay hold of in his work, but only characterization, which is more frequently caricature. Caldecott would never have made a serious illustrator; in burlesque he was immense, and no artist could desire a better monument than his Picture Books. His reputation has fallen greatly of late, notwithstanding the delightful John Gilpin and the others of that inimitable series; but his repute had stood higher to-day if his private letters to his friends and other unconsidered trifles had never been collected and published, ghoul-like, after his death. Pandering to the market has almost killed Caldecott’s repute, for the undiscriminating public were invited to admire reproductions of hasty sketches never intended for publicity.

There is character in Mr. Phil May’s work, and humour, surprisingly set forth with a marvellous economy of line. His is a gay and festive muse, that is most at home where the tide of life runs strongest and deepest, with wine-bubbles breaking “most notoriously,” as Mr. Kipling might say, upon its surface; with theatres, music-halls, and Gaiety bars ranged along its banks in profusion. There is much human nature in Mr. May. Also in Mr. Greiffenhagen; but a different kind. He has gone chiefly to the boudoir and the drawing-room for his subjects, and has rendered them with a resolute impressionism and a thorough discarding of cross-hatch that make a lasting impression with the beholder. There is a certain Christmas number, 1892, of the Lady’s Pictorial with memorable drawings by him; they are in wash and lithographic crayon, but may only be noted here in passing. He has a gift of novel, unhackneyed composition, and he sees the figure for himself, and draws it in with a daring but right and striking manner.

There has arisen of late years a school of illustration peculiarly English—the so to call it “Decorative School.” It is a new and higher incarnation of the pre-Raphaelite movement. The brotherhood did good work, not at all commensurate with the amount of attention it received, but beyond all praise in the conventions it founded; and, historically considered, Rossetti and his fellows are great, and Blake is greater, because he was an inspired visionary with a kink in his brain, out of which flowed imaginings the most gorgeous and original. But the decorative men of to-day are doing even better work—masculine, convincing, racy of this soil. It is chiefly admirable because it gives us, in these days of “actuality,” of photography, and reproductions direct from photographs, a new outlook upon life. English decorative illustration is, with but few exceptions, possessed of a fine romantic fancy, poetic, and at the same time healthy and virile and eminently sane, and it will live. There is great hope for the future of this school, while the imported styles of Vierge and Rico and other masters used to sunnier skies, admirable beyond expression in their own places, droop and languish in the nor’-easterly winds of England, and their tradition becomes attenuated in passing through so many hands. Their descendants, from Abbey down to Pennell and the whole crowd of those who love not wisely but too well, have brought these fine exotic conventions down to the merest shadows of shades.

Mr. Walter Crane has, any time these last ten years, been the great Apostle of Decoration plus Socialism. It has been given him in this wise to make (in theory) the lion to lie down with the lamb (and yet for the lamb to remain outside the lion with his destiny of mutton still in perspective), and he has proclaimed in parables the possibility of mixing oil and water. He has perpetrated a cartoon for the Socialistic, if not Anarchist, First of May, and therein he has striven to decoratively treat the British Workman. But although Mr. Crane has a pretty trick of decoration, he was worsted in that bout, for the British Plumber or the Irish Hodman is stubborn material for decoration, and their spouses as festal nymphs are not convincing visions. Again, he has achieved a weird series of cartoons upon the walls of the Red Cross Hall in praise of Democratic Valour, in which he has unsuccessfully attempted to conventionalize rescuing firemen and heroic police. Such bravery deserved a better fate. Also Mr. Crane has written much revolutionary verse in praise of brotherhood and equality, and now he has accepted the mastership of a Governmental art school, under the direction of that not very revolutionary body, the Committee of Council for Education (Science and Art Department). Decoration should be made of sterner stuff! His industry has been prodigious. Even now a bibliography of him is in the making; and yet shall it be said that it is difficult in the great mass of his work to find many items altogether satisfactory? It may be feared it is so. For one thing, his anatomy is habitually at fault; and yet has he not informed an interviewer from the Pall Mall Gazette that long years since he had ceased to draw from the model?

That wheel within wheels, the so-called Birmingham School, is attracting attention just now, and men begin to prophesy of deeds from out the midlands. But once upon a time there was a Newlyn School, was there not? Where is that party now? Its foremost members have won to the honours of the Royal Academy, and its mission is done. But it is time to talk of schools when work has been done. Of course it is very logical that good work should come from Birmingham. The sense of beauty is stronger in those who live in midst of dirt and grime. Instance the Glasgow school of impressionists. But the evidence of Birmingham at present is but a touching follow-on to the styles of Mr. Crane and Mr. Sumner, and to the ornament of Mr. Lewis Day. Indeed, the decorative work of the students at the National Art Training Schools may be put in the formula of one-third Crane, and the remaining two-thirds Heywood Sumner and Lewis Day, an amalgam ill-considered and poorly wrought.

But indeed Mr. Heywood Sumner’s work has a note of distinction. He does not confuse Socialist propaganda with ornament, and is not always striving to show with emphasis of line in pen and ink that Capital is the natural enemy of Labour, and that a silk hat on a rich man’s head may justly be defined as so many loaves of bread (or pots of beer) in the wrong place. That is for Mr. Crane and Mr. William Morris to prove; and, really, anything wicked can be proven of such a hideous object. But the onus of bringing the guilt home to it and the wearer of it does not produce good art. Indeed, decorative art is not catholic; it has no sort of commerce with everyday life or with the delineation of any times so recent as the early years of the Victorian era. Its field lies only in poetic imaginings, in fancy, and, most emphatically, not in fact. When Mr. Crane, for instance, takes to idealising the heroic acts of policemen, the impulse does credit to his heart, but the results are not flattering to his head. Fortunately he does not often go these lengths, and no one else of the decorative idea has been equally courageous, save indeed a Mr. Beardsley, who “decoratively” illustrated Orpheus at the Lyceum Theatre; and those illustrations in the Pall Mall Budget, March 16, 1893, certainly were very dreadful.

An exception to the general beauty of recent decorative work is the incomprehensible and at the same time unlovely practice of this eccentric. Mr. Charles Ricketts’ work, although its meaning may often be so subtly symbolical that it is not to be understood except by the elect,—never without the aid of a glossary of symbolism,—is always graced with interesting technicalities, and his draughtsmanship is of the daintiest; but what of meaning is conveyed to the mind and what of beauty to the eye in this work of Mr. Beardsley’s, that has been somewhat spoken of lately? It has imagination certainly, but morbid and neurotic, with a savour of Bethlehem Hospital and the charnel-house; it is eccentric apparently with an eccentricity that clothes bad draughtsmanship, and incongruous with an incongruity that suggests the uninstructed enthusiasm of the provincial mind. It exhibits a patchwork-quilt kind of eclecticism, born of a fleeting glance at Durer; of a nodding acquaintance with all prominent modern decoration and an irrelevant soupçon of Renaissance ornament; like the work of a lithographic draughtsman, a designer of bill-heads, roaming fancy free.

The practice of Mr. Selwyn Image has a devotional and meditative cast. He has made some remarkable drawings for the Hobby Horse in the manner of the missal-painters, both in spirit and execution, and he steadfastly keeps the art of the monkish scriptorium in view, and seems to echo the sentiments of the rapturous maidens in Patience, “Let us be Early English ere it is too late.” And he is Early English to excellent purpose.

It is a gross error to hold that decorative art is impossible under present social conditions, and unpardonable to attempt to link decoration and design to Socialist propaganda. Art of all possible application never flourished so well as under the feudal system, and never sank so low as it did when Democracy and the Trouser came in together.