DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
You should have wept her yesterday
'THE PRINCE'S PROGRESS'
1866
* * * * *
M. J. Lawless (born 1837, died 1864).—This artist, faithful to the best tradition of the pre-Raphaelite illustrators, seems to have left few personal memories. Born in 1837, a son of Barry Lawless, a Dublin solicitor, he was educated at Prior Park School, Bath, and afterwards attended several drawing schools, and was for a time a pupil of Henry O'Neil, R.A. He died August 6, 1864. Mr. Edward Walford, who contributes a short notice of Matthew James Lawless to the Dictionary of National Biography, has only the barest details to record. Nor do others, who knew him intimately, remember anything more than the ordinary routine of a short and uneventful life. But his artistic record is not meagre. In contemporary criticism we find him ranked with Millais and Sandys; not as equal to either, but as a worthy third. A fine picture of his, The Sick Call (from the Leathart Collection), was exhibited again in 1895 at the Guildhall.
But it is by his work as an illustrator he will be remembered, and, despite the few years he practised, for his first published drawing was in Once a Week, December 15, 1859 (vol. i. p. 505), he has left an honourable and not inconsiderable amount of work behind him. No search has lighted upon any work of his outside the pages of the popular magazines, except a few etchings (in the publications of the Junior Etching Club), three designs of no great importance in Lyra Germanica (Longmans, 1861), and a pamphlet, the Life of St. Patrick, with some shocking engravings, said by his biographer to be from Lawless's designs. In the chapters upon Once a Week, London Society, Good Words, etc., every drawing I have been able to identify is duly noted. It is not easy to refrain from eulogy upon the work of a draughtsman with no little individuality and distinction, who has so far been almost completely forgotten by artists of the present day. The selection of his work reproduced here by the courtesy of the owners of the copyright will, perhaps, send many fresh admirers to hunt up the rest of it for themselves.
* * * * *
Arthur Boyd Houghton (1836–1875) was born in 1836, the fourth son of his father, who was a captain in the Royal Navy. He visited India, according to some of his biographers; others say that he was never in the East, but that it was a brother who supplied him with the oriental details that appear in so many of his drawings. Be that as it may, his fellow-workers on the Arabian Nights pretended to be jealous of his Egyptian experience, and declared that it was no good trying to rival from their imaginings the scenes that he knew by heart. At present, when all men unite to praise him, it would almost lend colour to a belief that he was unappreciated by his fellows to read in a contemporary criticism: 'His designs were often striking in their effects of black and white, but were wanting in tone and gradation—a defect partly due to the loss of one eye.' This is only quoted by way of encouragement to living illustrators, who forget that their hero, despite sympathy and commissions, suffered also much the same misunderstanding that is often their lot. Against this may be set a criticism of yesterday, which runs:—
'As regards "the school of the sixties," now that it has moved away, we can rightly range the heads of that movement, and allowing for side impulses from the technique of Menzel, and still more from the magnetism of Rossetti's personality, we see, broadly speaking, that with Millais it arrived, with Houghton it ceased. Under these two leaders it gathered others, but within ten years its essential work was done. It has all gone now nobly into the past from the hands of men, some still living, some dead but yesterday.
'In Houghton's work, two things strike us especially, when we see it adequately to-day: its mastery of technique and style, and its temperament: the mastery so swift and spontaneous, so lavish of its audacities, so noble in its economies; the temperament so dramatic, so passionate, so satiric, and so witty. In many of his qualities, in vitality and movement, Houghton tops Millais. What is missing from his temperament, if it be a lack and not a quality, is the power to look at things coolly; he has not, as Millais, the deep mood of stoical statement, of tragedy grown calm. His tragic note is vindictive, a little shrill: when he sets himself to depict contemporary life, as in the Graphic America series, he is sardonic, impatient, at times morose: his humour carries an edge of bitterness. But in whatever mood he looks at things, the mastery of his aim is certain.'[11]