English Book-Illustration of To-day / Appreciations of the Work of Living English Illustrators, with Lists of Their Books

by R. E. D. Sketchley

FROM MR. LEWIS BAUMER'S 'HERMY.'
BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. CHAMBERS.

The acceptance of a formula, rather than the expression of a hitherto unexpressed order of form, is the basis of page-decoration by members of the Birmingham School, whose work in its wider aspect has already been considered. Originality finds exercise in modifying details, but, pre-eminent over differences in style, is the similarity of style that suggests 'Birmingham' before the variations in detail suggest the work of an individual artist. The influence of Kate Greenaway is strongly marked in the work of many of these designers for children's books. Indeed, Miss Winifred Green's drawings to Charles and Mary Lamb's 'Poetry for Children,' and to 'Mrs. Leicester's School,' contain figures that, if one allows for some assertion necessary to justify their reappearance, might have come direct from 'Under the Window.'

The typical illustrative art of Birmingham is, however, of another kind. The quaint propriety of 'old-fashioned' childhood, which Kate Greenaway's delicate pencil first represented at its artistic value, is akin to the conception of the child that prevails on the pages decorated by Mrs. Arthur Gaskin, but the work of Mrs. Gaskin shows nothing of the Stothard-like ideal that seems to have been the suggesting cause of 'Greenaway' play-pictures. In the arabesques of flowers and leaves which decorate many pages designed by Mrs. Gaskin one sees a freedom and fluency of line that are checked to quaintness and naïve angularity when the child is the subject. Her conception of a pictorial child is very definite, and in her later work, one must confess, it is a conception hardly corroborated by observation of fact. 'Horn Book Jingles' and 'The Travellers' of 1897 and 1898 show the culmination of a style that had more sympathetic charm in the tinted pages of the 'A. B. C.' (1895), or the 'Divine and Moral Songs' of the following year. Book-illustration is with Mrs. Gaskin, as with many members of the school, only a part of craftsmanship.

Miss Calvert's winsome drawings in 'Baby Lays' and 'More Baby Lays' are obviously related to the drawings of Mrs. Gaskin, though observation of real babies seems to have come between a rigid adherence to the model. The decorative illustrations by the Miss Holdens to 'Jack and the Beanstalk' (1895), and to 'The Real Princess,' show evidence of fancy that finds expression while nothing of Mr. Gaskin's teaching is forgotten.

As different in spirit from the drawings of the Birmingham designers as is the Lambs' 'Poetry for Children' from 'A Child's Garden of Verses,' the captivating illustrations of Mr. Charles Robinson seem a direct pictorial evocation of the mood of Stevenson's child's rhymes, or of Eugene Field's lullabies. Familiar now, and exaggerated in imitations and in some of the artist's later work, the children and child-fantasies of Mr. Robinson, as they were realized in the first unspoilt freshness of improvisation, are among the delightful surprises of modern book-illustration. In the pages of 'A Child's Garden of Verses' (1896), of 'The Child World,' and of Field's 'Lullaby Land,' the frolic babes of his fancy play hide and seek wherever the text leaves space for them, rioting, or attitudinizing with spritely ceremony, from cover to cover. The mood of imaginative play, of daylight make-believe with its realistic and romantic excesses, and of the make-believe enforced by flickering fire-light, and by the shadows in the darkened house, is expressed in Mr. Robinson's drawings. Not children, but child's-play, and the unexplored shadows and mysteries that lie 'up the mountain side of dreams' are the motives of the fantasies he sets on the page beside Stevenson's rhymes of old delights, and the rhymes of the land of counterpane, where Wynken Blynken and Nod, the Rockaby lady from Hushaby Street, and all kind drowsy fancies close round and shut away the crooked shadows into the night outside the nursery.

The three books mentioned represent, as I think, the artist's work at its truest value. There is variety of touch and of method, and the heavier fact-enforcing line of 'Child Voices,' of 'Lilliput Lyrics,' or of the coloured pictures to 'Jack of all Trades' is used, as well as the fanciful line of the by-the-way drawings, and the arabesques and delicate detail of the fantasy and dream pictures. A scheme of solid black and white, connected and rendered fully valuable by interweaving with line, white lines telling against black masses, and black lines relieved against white, with pattern as a resource to fill spaces when plain black or plain white seem uninteresting, is, of course, the scheme of the majority of decorative illustrators. But of this scheme Mr. Charles Robinson has made individual use. Whether his lines trace a fairy's transparent wing on a background of night-sky, of drifting cloud or of dream mountain-side, or make the child visible among dream-buildings, or seated on the world of fancy in the immensity of night, or passing in a sleep-ship through faëry seas, they have the quality of imagination, imagination in their disposition to form a decorative effect, and in the forms they express. The full-page drawings to 'King Longbeard' have this quality, and hardly a drawing to any theme of fancy, whether in old or in new fairy tales, or in verses, but is the result of a vision of charm and distinction.

It would seem that the imagination of Mr. Charles Robinson realizes a subject with more delight when the text is suggestive, rather than impressive with definite conceptions. The mighty forms of 'The Odyssey,' the chivalric symbolism of 'Sintram and Aslaugas Knight,' even the magical particularity of Hans Andersen, are not, apparently, supreme in his imagination, as is his vision of fairy-seeing childhood. One is unenlightened by the graceful drawings to 'The Adventures of Odyseus,' or the romances of De la Motte Fouqué.

That Miss Alice Woodward has, on occasion, made one of the many illustrators who have profited by the example of Mr. Charles Robinson, various drawings seem to show, but few of these illustrators have the originality and purpose that allow Miss Woodward to enlarge her range of expression without nullifying the spontaneity of her work. She has illustrated over a dozen books, beginning with 'Banbury Cross' in 1895, and mostly she treats her subject with humour and variety and with a consistent idea of the pictorial aspect of things. She has quick appreciation of unconscious humour in attitude and in expression, though she seems at times to rely too much on memory, thereby diminishing vividness. When most successful she can draw a pleasing child with lines almost as few as those used by any modern artist. Miss Gertrude Bradley is another pleasant illustrator. Her later drawings of children are modified from the print-pinafore freshness of those in 'Songs for Somebody' (1893), to a type that has evident affinities with the Charles Robinson child, though in 'Just Forty Winks' (1897) Miss Bradley proves her individual sense of humour. The taking simplicity of Miss Marion Wallace-Dunlop's illustrations of elf-babies in 'Fairies, Elves and Flower Babies,' and of the human twins who adventure in 'The Magic Fruit Garden' also suggests the influence of the fortunate inventor of an admirable child.