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.
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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
