The work of most of Mr. Crane's followers belongs to 'the nineties,' when the 'Arts and Crafts' movement, the 'Century Guild,' the Birmingham and other schools had attracted or produced artists working according to the canons of Kelmscott. Mr. Heywood Sumner was earlier in the field. The drawings to 'Sintram' (1883) and to 'Undine' (1888) show his art as an illustrator. Undine—spirit of wind and water, flower-like in gladness—seeking to win an immortal soul by submission to the forms of life, is realized in the gracefully designed figures of frontispiece and title-page. Where Mr. Sumner illustrates incident he is 'factual' without being matter-of-fact. The small drawing reproduced is hardly representative of his art, but most of his work is adapted to a squarer page than this, and has had to be rejected on that account. Some of the most apt decorations in 'The English Illustrated' were by Mr. Sumner, and during the time when art was represented in the magazine Mr. Ryland and Mr. Louis Davis were also frequent contributors. The graceful figures of Mr. Ryland, uninterested in activity, a garden-world set with statues around them, and the carol-like grace of Mr. Davis's designs in that magazine, represent them better than the one or two books they have illustrated.
FROM MR. HEYWOOD SUMNER'S 'UNDINE. BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. CHAPMAN AND HALL.
Among those associated with the 'Arts and Crafts' who have given more of their art to book-decoration, Mr. Anning Bell is first. He has gained the approval even of the most exigent of critics as an artist who understands drawing for process. Since 1895, when the 'Midsummer Night's Dream' appeared, his winning art has been praised with discrimination and without discrimination, but always praised. Trained in an architect's office, widely known as the recreator of coloured relief for architectural decoration, Mr. Anning Bell's illustrations show constructive power no less than that fairy gift of seeming to improvise without labour and without hesitancy, which is one of its especial charms. In feeling, and in many of his decorative forms, his drawings recall the art of Florentine bas-relief, when Agostino di Duccio, or Rossellino or Mino da Fiesole, created shapes of delicate sweetness, pure, graceful—so graceful that their power is hardly realized. The fairy by-play of the 'Midsummer Night's Dream' is exactly to Mr. Anning Bell's fancy. He knows better than to go about to expound this dream, and it is not likely that a more delightful edition will ever be put into the hands of children, or of anyone, than this in the white and gold cover devised by the artist.
Of his illustrations to the 'Poems by John Keats' (1897), and to the 'English Lyrics from Spenser to Milton' of the following year—as illustrations—not quite so much can be said, distinguished and felicitous as many of them are. The simple profile, the demure type of beauty that he affects, hardly suit with Isabella when she hears that Lorenzo has gone from her, with Lamia by the clear pool
"Wherein she passionëd
To see herself escaped from so sore ills,"
or with Madeline, 'St. Agnes' charmëd maid.' Mr. Anning Bell's drawings to 'The Pilgrim's Progress' (1898) reveal him in a different mood, as do those in 'The Christian Year' of three years earlier. His vision is hardly energetic enough, his energy of belief sufficient, to make him a strong illustrator of Bunyan, with his many moods, his great mood. A little these designs suggest Howard Pyle, and Anning Bell is better in a way of beauty not Gothic.
