"Ye are ill, Effie," were the first words Jeanie could utter; "ye are very ill."
FROM MR. SHEPPERSON'S 'THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN.'
BY LEAVE OF THE GRESHAM PUBLISHING COMPANY.
In a recent work, illustrations to Leigh Hunt's 'Old Court Suburb,' Mr. Shepperson collaborates with Mr. E. J. Sullivan and Mr. Herbert Railton, to realize the associations, literary, historical and gossiping, that have Kensington Palace and Holland House as their principal centres. On the whole, of the three artists, the subject seems least suggestive to Mr. Shepperson. Mr. Sullivan contributes many portraits, and some subject drawings that show him in his lightest and most dexterous vein. These drawings of beaux and belles are as distinct in their happy flattery of fact from the rigid assertion of the artist's 'Fair Women,' as they are from the undelightful reporting style that in the beginning injured Mr. Sullivan's illustrations. One may describe it as the 'Daily Graphic' style, though that is to recognize only the basis of convenience on which the training of the 'Daily Graphic' school was necessarily founded. Mr. Sullivan's early work, the news-illustration and illustrations to current fiction of Mr. Reginald Cleaver and of his brother Mr. Ralph Cleaver, the black and white of Mr. A. S. Boyd and of Mr. Crowther, show this journalistic training, and show, too, that such a training in reporting facts directly is no hindrance to the later achievement of an individual way of art. Mr. A. S. Hartrick must also be mentioned as an artist whose distinctive black and white developed from the basis of pictorial reporting, and how distinctive and well-observed that art is, readers of the 'Pall Mall Magazine' know. As a book-illustrator, however, his landscape drawings to Borrow's 'Wild Wales' represent another art than that of the character-illustrator. Nor can one pass over the drawings of Mr. Maurice Greiffenhagen, also a contributor to the 'Pall Mall Magazine,' if better known in illustrations to fiction in 'The Ladies' Pictorial,' though in an article on book-illustration he has nothing like his right place. As an admirable and original technician and draughtsman of society, swift in sight, excellent in expression, he ranks high among black-and-white artists, while as a painter, his reputation, if based on different qualities, is not doubtful.
FROM MR. E. J. SULLIVAN'S 'SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL.'
BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. MACMILLAN.
Mr. Sullivan's drawings to 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' (1896) are mechanical and mostly without charm of handling, having an appearance of timidity that is inexplicable when one thinks of the vigorous news-drawings that preceded them. The wiry line of the drawings appears in the 'Compleat Angler,' and in other books, including 'The Rivals' and 'The School for Scandal,' 'Lavengro' and 'Newton Forster,' illustrated by the artist in '96 and '97; but the decorative purpose of Mr. Sullivan's later work is, in all these books, effective in modifying its perversity. Increasing elaboration of manner within the limits of that purpose marks the transition between the starved reality of 'Tom Brown' and the illustrations to 'Sartor Resartus' (1898). These emphatic decorations, and those illustrative of Tennyson's 'Dream of Fair Women and other Poems,' published two years later, are the drawings most representative of Mr. Sullivan's intellectual ideals. They show him, if somewhat indifferent to charm, and capable of out-facing beauty suggested in the words with statements of the extreme definiteness of his own fact-conception, yet strongly appreciative of the substance and purpose of the text. Carlyle gives him brave opportunities, and the dogmatism of the artist's line and form, his speculative humour, working down to a definite certainty in things, make these drawings unusually interesting. Tennyson's 'Dream,' and his poems to women's names, are not so fit for the exercise of Mr. Sullivan's talent. He imposes himself with too much force on the forms that the poet suggests. There is no delicacy about the drawings and no mystery. They do not accord with the inspiration of Tennyson, an inspiration that substitutes the exquisite realities of memory and of dream for the realities of experience. Mr. Sullivan's share of the illustrations to White's 'Selborne' and to the 'Garden Calendar,' are technically more akin to the Carlyle and Tennyson drawings than to other examples by him. In these volumes he makes fortunate use of the basis of exactitude on which his work is founded, exactitude that includes portraiture among the functions of the illustrator. No portrait is extant of Gilbert White, but the presentment of him is undertaken in a constructive spirit, and, as in 'The Compleat Angler' and 'The Old Court Suburb,' portraits of those whose names and personalities are connected with the books are redrawn by Mr. Sullivan.