PORTRAIT OF MR. BONNAT, BY HIMSELF.
Painters who have known nothing whatever of processes have from time to time been called upon to make pen-drawings from their paintings for reproduction in illustrated exhibition catalogues, and their drawings have frequently been both of the most ludicrously impossible character from the process point of view, and bad from the independent penman’s standpoint. But a percentage of this painters’ pen-work, done as it was with a free hand and an unprejudiced brain, is curiously instructive. A very great number of painters’ pen-drawings have been made up to within the last few years (since which time half-tone process blocks produced from photos of their pictures have superseded them), and painters have in no small measure helped to advance the science of process-work, merely by reason of the difficulty of reproducing their drawings adequately, and the consequent renewed efforts of the process-man toward the adequate translation of their frequently untranslateable qualities. The graver has been pressed into the service of process partly on their account, and the roulette has been used freely to assuage the crudities resulting on the block from drawings utterly unsuitable for straight-away processing.
In this connection half-tone processes have done inestimable harm, for, to-day, the catalogues and the illustrated papers are filled with photographic reproductions of paintings where in other days autographic sketches by the painters themselves were used to give a value that is now lacking to these records of exhibitions.
They have frequently a heavy hand, these painters, and are prodigal of their ink; moreover, they have not the paralyzing dread of an immaculate sheet of white cardboard that seizes upon the black-and-white man (so to call the illustrator), who is brought up with the fear of the process-man before him.
Thus you will find Mr. Wyllie make pen-sketches from his pictures with a masterful hand, and a pen (apparently a quill) that plumbs the deepest depths of the inkpot, and produces a robustious drawing that wrings conviction out of one by the thickness and surety of its lines; or again, [Mr. Blake Wirgman] shows equal vigour and directness with portraits in pen-and-ink, replicas in little of his oil-paintings. One could desire nothing more masculine than the accompanying illustration from his hand.
18 × 10½. TOWING PATH, ABINGDON.
From a drawing by Mr. David Murray.