Mr. Patten Wilson is somewhat akin to Mr. Granville Fell in the energy and soundness of his conceptions. Each of these artists is, as we know, a colourist, delighting in brilliant and iridescent colour-schemes, yet in black and white they do not seek to suggest colour. Mr. Patten Wilson's illustrations to Coleridge's 'Poems' have the careful fulness of drawings well thought out, and worked upon with the whole idea realised in the imagination. He has observed life carefully for the purposes of his art. But it is rather in rendering the circumstance of poems, such as 'The Ancient Mariner,' or, in a Chaucer illustration—Constance on the lonely ship—that he shows his grasp of the subject, than by any expression of the spiritual terror or loneliness of the one living man among the dead, the solitary woman on strange seas.
Few decorative artists habitually use 'wash' rather than line. Among these, however, is Mr. Weguelin, who has illustrated Anacreon in a manner to earn the appreciation of Greek scholars, and his illustrations to Hans Andersen have had a wider and not less appreciative reception. His drawings have movement and atmosphere. Mr. W. E. F. Britten also uses this medium with fluency, as is shown by his successful illustrations to Mr. Swinburne's 'Carols of the Year' in the 'Magazine of Art' in 1892-3. Since that time his version of 'Undine,' and illustrations to Tennyson's 'Early Poems,' have shown the same power of graceful composition and sympathy with his subject.
II. SOME OPEN-AIR ILLUSTRATORS.
OPEN-AIR illustration is less influenced by the tradition of Rossetti and of the romanticists of 'the sixties' than any other branch of illustrative art. The reason is obvious. Of all illustrators, the illustrator of open-air books has least concern with the interpretation of literature, and is most concerned with recording facts from observation. It is true that usually he follows where a writer goes, and studies garden, village or city, according to another man's inclination. But the road they take, the cities and wayside places, are as obvious to the one as to the other. The artist has not to realize the personal significance of beauty conceived by another mind; he has to set down in black and white the aspect of indisputable cities and palaces and churches, of the actual highways and gardens of earth. No fugitive light, but the light of common day shows him his subject. So, although Stevenson's words, that reaching romantic art one becomes conscious of the background, are completely true in application to the drawings of Rossetti, of Millais, Sandys and Houghton, these 'backgrounds' have had no traceable effect on modern open-air illustration. Nor are the landscape drawings in works such as 'Wayside Poesies,' or 'Pictures of English Landscape,' at the beginning of the style or styles—formal or picturesque—most in vogue at present. Birket Foster has no followers; the pensive landscape is not suited to holiday excursion books; and, though Mr. J. W. North is among artists of to-day, as a book-illustrator he has unfortunately added little to his fine record of landscape drawings made between 1864 and 1867. One cannot include his work in a study of contemporary illustration, though it is a pleasure passed over to leave unconsidered drawings that in 'colour,' in effects of winter-weather, of leaf-thrown light and shade amid summer woods and over the green lanes of English country, are delightfully remote from obvious and paragraphic habits of rendering facts.
With few exceptions the open-air illustrators of to-day began their work and took their place in public favour, and in the estimation of critics, after 1890. Mr. Joseph Pennell, it is true, had been making sketches in England, in France, and in Italy for some years; Mr. Railton had made some preliminary illustrations; Mr. Alfred Parsons illustrated 'Old Songs' with Mr. Abbey in 1889; and Mr. Fulleylove contributed to 'The Picturesque Mediterranean,' and published his 'Oxford' drawings, in the same year. Still, with a little elasticity, 'the nineties' covers the past activity of these men. The only important exception is Sir George Reid, President of the Royal Scottish Academy, much of whose illustrative work belongs to the years prior to 1890. The one subject for regret in connection with Sir George Reid's landscape illustrations is that the chapter is closed. He makes no more drawings with pen-and-ink, and the more one is content with those he has made, the less does the quantity seem sufficient. Those who know only the portraits on which Sir George Reid's reputation is firmly based will find in his landscape illustrations a new side to his art. Here, as in portraiture, he sees distinctly and records without prejudice the characteristics of his subject. He renders what he sees, and he knows how to see. His conception being clear to himself, he avoids vagueness and obscurity, finding, with apparent ease, plain modes of expression. A straight observer of men and of the country-side, there is this directness and perspicuity about his work, whether he paints a portrait, or makes pen-drawings of the village worthies of 'Pyketillim' parish, or draws Pyketillim Kirk, small and white and plain, with the sparse trees beside it, or great river or city of his native land.
But in these pen-stroke landscapes, while the same clear-headed survey, the same logical record of facts, is to be observed as in his work as a portrait painter, there is besides a charm of manner that brings the indefinable element into one's appreciation of excellent work. Of course this is not to estimate these drawings above the portraits of Sir George Reid. That would be absurd. But he draws a country known to him all his life, and unconsciously, from intimate memory, he suggests more than actual observation would discover. This identification of past knowledge with the special scrutiny of a subject to be rendered is not usually possible in portraiture. The 'portrait in-time' is a question of occasion as well as of genius.
The first book in which his inimitable pen-drawing of landscape can be properly studied is the illustrated edition of 'Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk, in the Parish of Pyketillim,' published in 1880. Here the illustrations are facsimile reproductions by Amand-Durand's heliogravure process, and their delicacy is perfectly seen. These drawings are of the Aberdeenshire country-folk and country, the native land of the artist; though, as a lad in Aberdeen, practising lithography by day, and seizing opportunities for independent art when work was over, the affairs and doings of Gushetneuk, of Smiddyward, of Pyketillim, or the quiet of Benachie when the snow lies untrodden on its slopes, were things outside the city of work.
It is as difficult to praise these drawings intelligibly to those who have not seen them, as it is unnecessary to enforce their charm on those who have. Unfortunately, a reproduction of one of them is not possible, and admirable as is the drawing from 'Royal Edinburgh,' it is in subject and in treatment distinct from the 'Gushetneuk' and 'North of Scotland' illustrations. The 'Twelve Sketches of Scenery and Antiquities on the Great North of Scotland Railway,' issued in 1883, were made in 1881, and have the same characteristics as the 'Gushetneuk' landscapes. The original drawings for the engraved illustrations in 'The Life of a Scotch Naturalist,' belonging to 1876—drawings made because the artist was 'greatly interested' in the story of Thomas Edward—must have been of the same delicate force, and the splendid volumes of plates illustrating the 'River Clyde,' and the 'River Tweed,' issued by the Royal Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Scotland, contain more of his fine work. It was this society, that, in the difficult days following the artist's abandonment of Aberdeen and lithography for Edinburgh and painting, gave him the opportunity, by the purchase of two of his early landscapes, for study in Holland and in Paris. There is something of Bosboom in a rendering of a church interior such as 'The West Kirk,' but of Israels, who was his master at the Hague, there is nothing to be seen in Sir George Reid's illustrations. They are never merely picturesque, and when too many men are 'freakish' in their rendering of architecture, the drawings of North of Scotland castles—well founded to endure weather and rough times of war—seem as real and true to Scottish romance as the "pleasant seat," the martlet-haunted masonry of Macbeth's castle set among the brooding wildness of Inverness by the fine words of Duncan and Banquo.