'ONCE A WEEK'
VOL. II. N. S. p. 127
ARIADNE
'Of Pinwell no need to say so much. He has lived, not long enough indeed to fulfil the great promise of his youth, but to ensure his head a lasting laurel. There have been stronger intellects, purer colourists, surer draughtsmen among his contemporaries, but where shall we seek a spirit of poetry more pathetic, more subtle, more absolutely modern than his? The critics are for ever urging poets and painters to cultivate the materials that lie about them in the common household-life of to-day. It is not so easy to do so; it is not to be done by writing "idylls of the gutter and the gibbet"; it is not to be done by painting the working-man asleep by his baby's cradle. Perhaps no one has done it with so deep and thorough a sympathy as Pinwell; and it is sympathy that is needed, not curiosity or pity.' But it would be hardly fair to quote further from Mr. Gosse's appreciation twenty years ago of artists still living. The volume contains eight designs by Sandys, namely, Labours of Thor (Harold Harfagr), King Warwolf, The Apparitor of the Secret Tribunal (Jacques de Caumont), Tintoretto (Yet once more on the organ play), The Avatar of Zeus (The King at the Gate), The search of Ceres for Proserpine (Helen and Cassandra), The Boy Martyr, The Three Statues of Egina, and The Miller's Meadow (The Old Chartist); the alternative title given in brackets is that of the original as it first appeared in Once a Week. To show how carelessly the author treated the artists, to whom, in a flowery preface, he says he owes so much, 'for they have given to his airy nothings a local habitation and a name, and have caught and fixed down on paper, like butterflies in an entomologist's cabinet, many a fleeting Cynthia of his brain,' it will suffice to quote his profuse acknowledgments to 'Mr. Poynter, an old schoolfellow of the author's, and now Professor in the London University, [who] has expended all his learning, taste, and thought in the The Three Statues. The drapery might be copied by a sculptor, it is arrayed with such fine artistic feeling, and over the whole the artist has thrown the solemnity of the subject, and has shown, in Pluto's overshadowing arm, the vanity of all things under the sun—even the pure ambition of a great artist.' This charming eulogy, be it noted, is bestowed on a drawing that is by Frederick Sandys!!! not by Poynter, who is unrepresented in the book.
The four Whistlers of Once a Week are all here, absurdly renamed. There are twenty by M. J. Lawless, seven by T. Morten, ten by J. Lawson, one by A. Boyd Houghton, two by Fred Walker, eight by G. J. Pinwell, six by W. Small, three by J. Tenniel, three by F. Eltze, and one each by J. D. Watson, C. Keene, G. Du Maurier, Towneley Green, C. Green, T. R. Macquoid, P. Skelton, A. Fairfield, E. H. Corbould, and A. Rich. The book is well printed, and a treasure-house of good things, which appear to more advantage upon its 'toned paper' than in the pages of the periodical where they first saw daylight.
The preface to Dalziels' Bible Gallery is dated October 1880, so that the volume was probably issued for the season of 1880–81. As we have seen, the work was in active preparation in the early sixties. It contained sixty-nine blocks excellently printed upon an India tint. These include nine by the late Lord Leighton, P.R.A., three by G. F. Watts, R.A., five by F. R. Pickersgill, R.A., twelve by E. J. Poynter, R.A., three by E. Armitage, R.A., two by H. H. Armstead, R.A., one by Sir E. Burne-Jones, one by Holman Hunt, three by Ford Madox Brown, six by Simeon Solomon, two by A. Boyd Houghton, two by W. Small, one by E. F. Brewtnall, fourteen by T. Dalziel, one by E. Dalziel, two by A. Murch, and one by F. S. Walker, and one by Frederick Sandys. The praise lavished on these designs is amply justified if you regard them as a whole; but, turning over the pages critically after a long interval, there is a distinct sense of disillusion. At the time they seemed all masterpieces; sixteen years after they stand confessed as a very mixed group, some conscientious pot-boilers, others absolutely powerful and intensely individual. The book is monumental, both in its ambitious intention and in the fact that it commemorates a dead cause. It is easy to disparage the work of the engravers, but when we see what fine things owe their very existence to Messrs. Dalziels' enterprise, it is but just to pay due tribute to the firm, and to regret that so powerful an agency is no longer actively engaged in similar enterprises.
EDWARD BURNE JONES
DALZIELS' 'BIBLE
GALLERY,' 1880
THE PARABLE OF THE
BOILING POT