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CHAPTER IX
DESIGN AND ENGRAVING
It was inevitable that the new movement in Art, with its deeper research of truth in the rendering of human form and the facts of outward nature, should have led to a renewed study of certain forgotten qualities of design. And it is, indeed, impossible to understand the aim and impulse of the leaders of this new movement without reference to the engraved work of the time. It was a necessity of the straitened means which affected nearly all of them that they should at first employ themselves in the work of illustration, and there is no higher tribute to the genius which this new spirit had evoked than is to be found in the engraved work that was produced in England during the ten or fifteen years dating from the middle fifties.
When he was little more than a boy, and before he had gained any accomplishment as a painter, Rossetti had already produced some beautiful work in black and white, and we know from their published illustrations that Millais and Holman Hunt were already striving in the same direction.
The first important display of this renewed energy in design is to be found in the illustrated edition of Tennyson’s Poems published in 1857, for there, side by side with much that belongs to an earlier manner, the drawings of Hunt and Millais and Rossetti stand out with vivid distinctness as a separate achievement. Not that even at that time these three artists ought to be considered as actuated by a single motive; the individuality of each had been already asserted, and it was hardly necessary for Mr. Hunt in his recently published Reminiscence to labour the point that the aims of Rossetti were not in their essence the aims of Millais and himself. Nor, on the other hand, can the supremacy of Rossetti in regard to imaginative impulse and power be rightly challenged by any one who has had the opportunity of studying the work of the time.
It is not easy to perceive the motive of those who seek so hotly to contest Rossetti’s influence upon his fellows. The very fact that Millais’s art, and even, though in a lesser degree, the art of Mr. Holman Hunt, took afterwards a different direction, is rather to be taken as evidence that in some of the essays of these earlier years they were, for a time at least, under the sway of an individuality in its essence widely different from their own. The champions of the genius of Millais need be under no anxiety to claim for him entire independence of spirit. In his later achievements this independence is announced without reserve. They make it clear that the finer poetic feeling, which is evident in some of his earlier paintings, and more especially in some of his earlier drawings, was not destined to be the dominating factor in his artistic life. But it is no less true, as it seems to me, that there was a time of
THE LEAVEN
From The Parables of our Lord.
By Sir J. E. MILLAIS, Bart., P.R.A.
Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel.