BY W. PAGET. FROM “CASSELL’S MAGAZINE.”
Though wood-engraving is purely an English art, and though some of the greatest wood-engravers even in modern times have been Englishmen, the art no longer flourishes here as it should. The strongest of modern engravers, Cole and Linton, are both Englishmen, but their reputations are due chiefly to America. W. Biscombe Gardner is almost the only man who has continued to produce good interpretative work, engraving his own designs, while W. H. Hooper easily leads in facsimile work. This decline of wood-engraving has been especially felt by such important firms as Dalziel and Swain. An International Society of Wood-engravers has lately been started, and one hopes its members will succeed in the task they have set themselves: that of encouraging original wood-engraving. In colour-printing England has always held a leading place, the work of Edmund Evans and the Leighton Brothers being universally appreciated. A very strong endeavour is being made by Messrs. Way to revive original lithography. As this art is now beginning to be again practised by eminent artists, there is every probability that their efforts will be successful. "Vanity Fair" has always been illustrated by chromo-lithography, and in it appeared the work of the late Carlo Perugini, while "Spy" and others still carry out his methods. The architectural papers also use, mainly, photo-lithography for reproducing the drawings which they print. In England the fashion of making pictorial perspective drawings for architects has been very extensively practised; it is only an outgrowth of the work of Prout and Harding, but it has been enormously developed since their day; at present, several architectural papers are published which solely contain drawings of this sort, drawings mainly the outcome of the T-square, and the inner consciousness of the architectural perspective man, who has never seen the house, nor the landscape, nor street elevation in which his subject may be ultimately built; nevertheless some of these drawings are most interesting. The work of the late W. Burgess, A.R.A., of A. B. Pite, in mediæval design; of G. C. Horsley, A. B. Mitchell, T. Raffles Davison, Rowland Paul, and, above all, of C. E. Mallows. Mr. Mallows is an artist; to him a drawing is as important as the building it represents; he does everything he can from nature, and his drawings of old work, notably difficult studies in perspective, like the cloisters of Gloucester, have never been equalled by any of the Prout-Harding-Cotman set. He feels that architecture and the delineation of it are a part of the fine arts—and he makes others feel it too. And to do this is simply to be an artist. This fashion of architectural drawing has spread to America and Germany, but it has no support in France. Much has also been accomplished in etching, and England possesses to-day in William Hole, Robert Macbeth, William Strang, Frank Short, D. Y. Cameron, C. J. Watson, C. O. Murray, a number of etchers whose fame is justly great.
BY L. RAVEN-HILL. FROM “THE BUTTERFLY.”
BY L. RAVEN-HILL. FROM “THE BUTTERFLY.”
BY EDGAR WILSON. PROCESS BLOCK FROM THE ORIGINAL DRAWING FOR “THE UNICORN.”
BY C. E. MALLOWS. FROM THE ORIGINAL DRAWING, PUBLISHED IN “THE BUILDER.”