OF THE APPARITION OF THE THREE NYMPHS TO DAPHNIS IN A DREAM.
FROM MESSRS. RICKETTS AND SHANNON'S 'DAPHNIS AND CHLOE.' (MATHEWS AND LANE.)
REPRODUCED BY THEIR LEAVE AND THE PUBLISHERS'.
'The Sphinx,' a poem by Oscar Wilde, 'built, decorated and bound' by Mr. Ricketts—but without woodcuts—was published in 1894, just after 'Hero and Leander,' and designs for a magnificent edition of 'The King's Quhair' were begun. Some of these are in 'The Dial,' as are also designs for William Adlington's translation of 'Cupide and Psyches' in 'The Pageant,' 'The Dial,' and 'The Magazine of Art.' The edition of the work published by the new Vale Press in 1897, is not that projected at this time. It contains roundel designs in place of the square designs first intended. These roundels are, I think, the finest achievement of Mr. Ricketts as an original wood-engraver. The engraving reproduced shows of what quality are both line and form, how successful is the placing of the figure within the circle. On the page they are what the artist would have them be. With the beginning of the sequence of later Vale Press books—books printed from founts designed by Mr. Ricketts—a consecutive account is impossible, but the frontispiece to the 'Milton' and the borders and initials designed by Mr. Ricketts, must be mentioned. As a designer of book-covers only one failure is set down to Mr. Ricketts, and that was ten years ago, in the cover to 'The House of Pomegranates.'
Mr. Reginald Savage's illustrations to some tales from Wagner lack the force of designs in 'The Pageant,' and of woodcuts in Essex House publications. Of M. Lucien Pissarro, in an article overcrowded with English illustrators, I cannot speak. His fame is in France as the forerunner of his art, and we in England know his coloured wood-engravings, his designs for 'The Book of Ruth and Esther' and for 'The Queen of the Fishes,' printed at his press at Epping, but included among Vale Press books.
FROM MR. STURGE MOORE'S 'THE CENTAUR.'
REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF MR. RICKETTS.
'The Centaur,' 'The Bacchant,' 'The Metamorphoses of Pan,' 'Siegfried'—young Siegfried, wood-nurtured, untamed, setting his lusty strength against the strength of the brutes, hearing the bird-call then, and following the white bird to issues remote from savage life—these are subjects realized by the imagination of Mr. T. Sturge Moore. There are few artists illustrating books to-day whose work is more unified, imaginatively and technically. It is some years since first Mr. Moore's wood-engravings attracted notice in 'The Dial' and 'The Pageant,' and the latest work from his graver—finer, more rhythmic in composition though it be—shows no change in ideals, in the direction of his talent. He has said, I think, that the easiest line for the artist is the true basis of that artist's work, and it would seem as though much deliberation in finding that line for himself had preceded any of the work by which he is known. The wood-engraving of Mr. Sturge Moore is of some importance. Always the true understanding of his material, the unhesitating realization of his subject, combine to produce the effect of inevitable line and form, of an inevitable setting down of forms in expression of the thought within. Only that gives the idea of formality, and Mr. Moore's art handles the strong impulse of the wild creatures of earth, of the solitary creatures, mighty and terrible, haunting the desert places and fearing the order men make for safety. Designs to Wordsworth's 'Poems,' not yet published, represent with innate perception the earth-spirit as Wordsworth knew it, when the great mood of 'impassioned contemplation' came upon his careful spirit, when his heart leapt up, or when, wandering beneath the wind-driven clouds of March, at sight of daffodils, he lost his loneliness.
'The Evergreen,' that 'Northern Seasonal,' represented the pictorial outlook of an interesting group of artists—Robert Burns, Andrew K. Womrath, John Duncan, and James Cadenhead, for example—and the racial element, as well as their own individuality, distinguishes the work of Mr. W. B. Macdougall and Mr. J. J. Guthrie of 'The Elf.' Mr. Macdougall has been known as a book-illustrator since 1896, when 'The Book of Ruth,' with decorated borders showing the fertility of his designing power, and illustrations that were no less representative of a unique use of material, appeared. The conventionalized landscape backgrounds, the long, straightly-draped women, seemed strange enough as a reading of the Hebrew pastoral, with its close kinship to the natural life of the free children of earth. Their unimpassioned faces, unspontaneous gestures, the artificiality of the whole impression, were undoubtedly a new reading of the ancient charm of the story. Two books in 1897, and 'Isabella' and 'The Shadow of Love,' 1898, showed beyond doubt that the manner was not assumed, that it was the expression of Mr. Macdougall's sense of beauty. The decorations to 'Isabella' are more elaborate than to 'Ruth,' and inventive handling of natural forms is as marked. Again, the faces are de-characterized in accordance with the desire to make the whole figure the symbol of passion, and that without emphasis. Mr. J. J. Guthrie is hardly among book-illustrators, since 'Wedding Bells' of 1895 does not represent Mr. Guthrie, nor does the child's book of the following year, while the illustrations to Edgar Allan Poe's 'Poems' are still, I think, being issued from the Pear Tree Press in single numbers. His treatment of landscape is inventive, his rhythmic arrangements, his effects of white line on black, are based on a real sense of the beauty of earth, of tall trees and wooded hills, of mysterious moon-brightness and shade in the leafy depths of the woodlands.
Mr. Granville Fell made his name known in 1896 by his illustrations to 'The Book of Job.' In careful detail, drawn with fidelity, never obtrusive, his art is pre-Raphaelite. He touches Japanese ideals in the rendering of flower-growth and animals, but the whole effect of his decorative illustrations is far enough away from the art of Japan. In the 'Book of Job' he had a subject sufficient to dwarf a very vital imaginative sense by its grandeur. In the opinion of competent critics Mr. Granville Fell proved more than the technical distinction of his work by the manner in which he fulfilled his purpose. The solid black and white, the definite line of these drawings, were laid aside for the sympathetic medium of pencil in 'The Song of Solomon' (1897). Again, his conception is invariably dramatic, and never crudely dramatic, robust, with no trace of morbid or sentimental thought about it. The garden, the wealth of vineyard and of royal pleasure ground, is used as a background to comely and gracious figures. His other work, illustrative of children's books and of legend, the cover and title-page to Mr. W. B. Yeats's 'Poems,' shows the same definite yet restrained imagination.