Equally good are those magazines that publish illustrations which are independent works of art, of equal importance with the text.
Equally pleasant, too, is working for the weekly illustrated press—how long this form of publication will last is doubtful—making drawings which will be printed of a large size and show really the ability of the artist. It is pleasant, too, when the editor is an artist or man of sympathetic intelligence.
Another very important matter is the recognising of the fact that illustration at its best is equal in artistic rank with any other form of artistic expression; and that in every country save England illustrators rank with any other artists. Here one is forced to take to paint to gain admittance to the Royal Academy, though most of the distinguished members of that body won their reputations, and live on them, not by colour, but by the despised trade of illustrating. Critics—even the best of them—will tell you that an illustrator is just a little lower than a painter. It is false if the art of the one is as good in quality as that of the other; else Rembrandt’s etchings are inferior to his paintings, which is absurd.
But to-day many illustrators, in fact the mass, do not take themselves seriously. They squabble and haggle, they hurry and push, they are as much shopkeepers as your out-of-work painter. Others must have their stuff in every paper. Others’ portraits and eventless bourgeois lives appear in every magazine, especially if the portrait is done for nothing and a few drawings are thrown in. Others crib the superficial qualities of the popular one of the moment, whether his game is eccentricity, mysticism, or primitiveness, three excellent dodges for hiding incapacity or want of training.
Not that there are no good men who do find their means of expression among the primitives or who are really mystic, or truly grotesque, but for every one of these there is an army of frauds.
But all the while good work is being done. You may not see the real artist’s name in letters a foot long on every hoarding, or his productions in every book that comes out. But once in a while he does an article, or even a drawing and then the mystics, the hacks, the primitives, and even some few of the public, buy it and treasure it up.
Therefore be serious, be earnest; and if you cannot be—if you think illustration but a stepping-stone to something better—leave it alone and tackle the something better. You may never succeed in that; you will certainly fail in illustration.
There is still another point, the financial one. Here illustration approaches architecture. Ruskin said somewhere, probably by accident, for it is so true, “Never give your drawings away; tear them up or keep them till some one wants to buy them.” At the present time the profession is so crowded at the bottom that some shopkeeping editors have profited by this to reduce their prices almost to nothing—literally, by threatening and sweating, obtaining the work of mere students and people who are without money or brains, though they may be possessed of artistic ability, for next to nothing. In the case of painters they have said, “Send us a photo or sketch of your picture, and we will put it in; and think of the advertisement.”
What you who want to be illustrators must think of is that the painters who give their work to these people are fools. Would a writer give his story for nothing, or a poet his sonnet? And when these editors say they can get such an one’s drawing for so much less, tell them to get it, they will come after you on their knees later if you have anything in you, or their papers do not come to grief in the meantime.
Of course there can be no hard-and-fast rule about remuneration, but the labourer is worthy of what he can get. And it has only been within the last few years that the clever dodge of swindling the public by bad photos and worse art, of sweating artists by employing hacks and students has been practised, for the benefit of two people, grasping proprietors and still more grasping editors.