No. XXXIII.
“PROUD MAIRIE.” (LANCELOT SPEED.)
(From “The Blue Poetry Book.” London: Longmans.)
Pen-and-ink drawing by line process.
Another influence on modern illustration—for good or bad—is the electric light. It enables the photographic operator to be independent of dark and foggy days, and to put a search-light upon objects which otherwise could not be utilised. So far good. To the illustrator this aid is often a doubtful advantage. The late Charles Keene (with whom I have had many conversations on this subject) predicted a general deterioration in the quality of illustrations from what he called “unnatural and impossible effects,” and he made one or two illustrations in Punch of figures seen under the then—(10 or 15 years ago)—novel conditions of electric street lighting, one of which represented a man who has been “dining” returning home through a street lighted up by electric lamps, tucking up his trowsers to cross a black shadow which he takes for a stream. Charles Keene’s predictions have come true, we see the glare of the magnesium light on many a page, and the unthinking public is dazzled every week in the illustrated sheets with these “unnatural and impossible effects.”
Thus it has come about that what was looked upon by Charles Keene as garish, exaggerated, and untrue in effect, is accepted to-day by the majority of people as a lively and legitimate method of illustration.
DANIEL VIERGE.
One of the influences on the modern illustrator—a decidedly adverse influence on the unlearned—is the prominence which has lately been given to the art of Daniel Vierge.
There is probably no illustrator of to-day who has more originality, style, and versatility—in short more genius—than Vierge, and none whose work, for practical reasons, is more misleading to students.
As to his illustrations, from the purely literary and imaginative side, they are as attractive to the scholar as drawings by Holbein or Menzell are to the artist. Let us turn to the illustration on the next page, from the Pablo de Segovia by Quevedo; an example selected by the editor, or publisher, of the book as a specimen page.