SALTWOOD CASTLE. BY WILLIAM HYDE.
FROM F. M. HUEFFER'S 'THE CINQUE PORTS.'
BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. BLACKWOOD.
Mr. D. Y. Cameron has illustrated a book or two with etchings—notably White's 'Selborne' 1902,—but to consider him as a book-illustrator would be to stretch a point. A few of his etchings are to be seen in books, and one would like to make them the text for the consideration of other etchings by him, but it would be a digression. He is not among painter-illustrators, but among painters who have illustrated, and that would bring more names into this chapter than it could hold except in catalogue arrangement.
Coming to artists who are illustrators, not on occasion but always, there is no question with whom to begin. It is true that Mr. Pennell is American, but he is such an important figure in English illustration that to leave him out would be impossible. He has been illustrating Europe for more than fifteen years, and the forcible fashion of his work, and all that he represents, have influenced black-and-white artists in this country, as his master Rico influenced him. In range and facility, and in getting to the point and keeping there, there is no open-air illustrator to put beside Mr. Pennell. Always interested and always interesting, he is apparently never bewildered, always ready and able to draw. Surely there was never a mind with a greater faculty for quick study; and he can apply this power to the realization of an architectural detail, or of a cathedral, of miles of country with river curves and castles, trees, and hills and fields, and a stretch of sky over all; or of a great city-street crowded with traffic, of new or old buildings, of Tuscany or of the Stock Exchange, with equal ease. To attempt a record of Mr. Pennell's work would leave no room for appreciation of it. As far as the English public is concerned, it began in 1885 with the publication of 'A Canterbury Pilgrimage,' and since then each year has added to Mr. Pennell's notes of the world at the rate of two or three volumes. The highways and byways of England—east, west, south and north—France from Normandy to Provence, the cities and spaces of Italy, the Saone and the Thames, the 'real' Alps and the New Zealand Alps, London and Paris, the Cathedrals of Europe, the gipsy encampment and the Ghetto, Chelsea and the Alhambra—Mr. Pennell has been everywhere and seen most things as he went, and one can see it in his drawings.
He draws architecture without missing anything tangible, and his buildings belong to cities that have life—and an individual life—in their streets. But where he is unapproachable, or at all events unapproached among pen-draughtsmen, is in drawing a great scheme of country from a height. If one could reproduce a drawing such as that of the country of Le Puy in Mr. Wickham Flower's 'Aquitaine,' or, better still, the etching of the same amazing country, one need say no more about Mr. Pennell's art in this kind. Unluckily the page is too small. This strange and lovely landscape, where curving road and river and tree-bordered fields are dominated by two image-crowned rocks, built about with close-set houses, looks like a design from a dream fantasy worked out by a master of definite imagination. One knows it is not. Mr. Pennell is concerned to give facts in picturesque order, and here he has a theme that affects us poetically, however it may have affected Mr. Pennell. His eye measures a landscape that seems outside the measure of observation, and his ability to grasp and render the characteristics of actuality serves him as ever. It is an unforgettable drawing, though the skill displayed in the simplification and relation of facts is no greater than in other drawings by the artist. That power hardly ever fails him. The 'Devils of Notre Dame' again stands out in memory, when one thinks generally of Mr. Pennell's drawings. And again, though it seems as if he were working above his usual pitch of conception, it is only that he is using his keenness of sight, his logical grasp of form and power of expression, on matter that is expressive of mental passion. The man who carved the devils, like those who crowned the rocks of Le Puy with the haloed figures, created facts. The outrageous passion that made these evil things made them in stone. You can measure them. They are matter-of-fact. Mr. Pennell has drawn them as they are, with so much trenchancy, such assertion of their hideous decorativeness, their isolation over modern Paris, that no drawings could be better, and any others would be superfluous. It is impossible to enumerate all that Mr. Pennell has done and can do in black-and-white. He is a master of so many methods. From the sheer black ink and white paper of the 'Devils,' to the light broken line that suggests Moorish fantastic architecture under a hot sun in the 'Alhambra' drawings, there is nothing he cannot do with a pen. Nor is it only with a pen that he can do what he likes and what we must admire. He covers the whole field of black-and-white drawing.
THE HARBOUR, SORRENTO. BY JOSEPH PENNELL. FROM HOWELL'S "ITALIAN JOURNEYS."
BY LEAVE OF MR. HEINEMANN.