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.