The Art of Illustration / 2nd ed.

by Henry Blackburn

When the question arises as to what examples a beginner should copy who wishes to practise the art of pen-and-ink drawing, the difficulty will be to select from the great and varied stores of material that are everywhere to his hand. All steel and copper-plate engravings that have been executed in line, and all wood engravings, are within the possible range of pen-and-ink drawing. I hold, however, that much time should not be occupied in the imitatative copying of prints: only, indeed, so much as enables the student to learn with what arrangement of lines the different textures and qualities of objects may be best rendered.

There are, roughly, two methods of obtaining effect with a pen—one by few lines, laid slowly, and the other by many lines, drawn with rapidity. If the intention is to see what effect may be obtained with comparatively few lines deliberately drawn, we may refer to the woodcuts after Albert Dürer and Holbein, and the line engraving of Marc Antonio. The engraved plates by Dürer furnish excellent examples of work, with more and finer lines than his woodcuts [but many of the latter were not done by his hand]. “Some of the etchings of Rembrandt are examples of what may be fairly reproduced in pen and ink, but in them we find the effect to depend upon innumerable lines in all directions. In the matter of landscape the etched plates by Claude and Ruysdael are good examples for study, and in animal life the work of Paul Potter and Dujardin.”

Thus, for style, for mastery of effect and management of line, we must go back to the old masters; to work produced generally in a reposeful life, to which the younger generation are strangers. But the mere copying of other men’s lines is of little avail without mastering the principles of the art of line drawing. The skilful copies, the fac-similes of engravings and etchings drawn in pen and ink, which are the admiration of the young artist’s friends, are of little or no value in deciding the aptitude of the student. The following words are worth placing on the walls of every art school:—

“Proficiency in copying engravings in fac-simile, far from suggesting promise of distinction in the profession of art, plainly marks a tendency to mechanical pursuits, and is not likely to be acquired by anyone with much instinctive feeling for the arts of design.” There is much truth and insight in this remark.

“THE FINDING OF THE INFANT ST. GEORGE.” (CHARLES M. GERE.
(From his painting in the New Gallery, 1893.)

In line work, as now understood, we are going back, in a measure, to the point of view of the missal writer and the illuminator, who, with no thought of the possibilities of reproduction, produced many of his decorative pages by management of line alone (I refer to the parts of his work in which the effect was produced by black and white). No amount of patience, thought, and labour was spared for this one copy. What would he have said if told that in centuries to come this line work would be revived in its integrity, with the possibility of the artist’s own lines being reproduced 100,000 times, at the rate of several thousand an hour. And what would he have thought if told that, out of thousands of students in centuries to come, a few, a very few only, could produce a decorative page; and that few could be brought to realise that a work which was to be repeated, say a thousand times, was worthy of as much attention as his ancestors gave to a single copy!

On the principle that “everything worth doing is worth doing well,” and on the assumption that the processes in common use—[I purposely omit mention here of the older systems of drawing on transfer paper, and drawing on waxed plates, without the aid of photography, which have been dealt with in previous books]—are worth all the care and artistic knowledge which can be bestowed upon them, we would press, upon young artists especially, the importance of study and experiment in this direction. As there is no question that “the handwork of the artist” can be seen more clearly through mechanical engraving than through wood engraving, it behoves him to do his best. And as we are substituting process blocks for wood engraving in every direction, so we should take over some of the patience and care which were formerly given to book illustrations.