Modern book illustrators and their work

by Unknown

BRITISH BOOK-ILLUSTRATION. BY MALCOLM C. SALAMAN

HO does not love a picture-book? Yet how few comparatively still love it for anything but the pleasure of recognizing images mentally familiar or readily suggested—personalities, incidents, scenes—irrespective of any sensuous gratification from artistic qualities of presentation, of design, of composition! How few, in short, appreciate the distinction between illustration that is merely reproductive and illustration that is both interpretative and decorative! This appreciation is certainly on the increase, but, much as the artists and the makers of books are doing to stimulate it, much remains to do. The appeal of the picture-book is universal; but the Book Beautiful, in which the printed text and the illustrative scheme are conceived as a decorative whole, is as yet a rare thing. How much our joy in a book may be enhanced by pictorial embellishment must depend, of course, upon our individual conception of illustration in relation to the permanent elements of pictorial art.

That most human of book-lovers, Charles Lamb, admitted that he preferred to read Shakespeare, not in the First Folio, but in the common editions with plates so execrably bad that they served as maps, or modest remembrancers, to the text without pretending any supposable emulation with it. But we must remember that Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery engravings were then the example—the awful example, one might say—of the highest illustration of the poet, Sir John Gilbert’s vigorous dramatic illustrative designs being, of course, of much later date. Perhaps few of us would not have agreed with Lamb in his day. In our own day, however, we have come to look in book-illustration for something more than “maps, or modest remembrancers, to the text.” We are coming, in fact, if we have not already come, to demand of illustration that it shall not merely interpret for us the literary idea, or the mental image suggested by it, but that it shall do this with decorative effect—that it shall take its place upon the page with charm, dignity, and beauty. We are thus aiming at a higher standard of artistic book-illustration, which certain modern tendencies and achievements, as well as certain wider developments in the crafts of reproduction, have enabled us to conceive.

I do not pretend, of course, that in all of the great mass of book-illustration to-day there is any attempt to conform to this artistic standard—though the general average is higher. Let us therefore be clear as to what we mean by artistic illustration. To be regarded as a work of art, I take it, any graphic illustration must be composed of intrinsic decorative elements; its pictorial expression of the visualized idea must be controlled by such qualities, with harmonious balance, of form and tone as could in themselves give satisfaction as design or pattern apart from any question of literary or dramatic significance. When the expressive elements are perfectly fused with the decorative, then we get great illustration which may outlive all changes and fashions of taste. Thus, if we look with a sense of pictorial art at William Blake’s illustrations to the Book of Job or his own poems, at the noble woodcut designs of Millais, Sandys, Boyd Houghton, and the other great illustrators of the “sixties,” or at Aubrey Beardsley’s “Rape of the Lock” designs, we shall see why all these illustrations are likely to live for their own sakes as works of art, and we shall gather confidence in the permanent artistic value of not a little of the book-illustration being done to-day. We shall also understand why so much of the popular illustration of the period immediately preceding the “sixties” has died with the literature that called it forth; why even the immortal “Phiz” lives artistically chiefly because the types and episodes he made visually familiar to us have long been absorbed in our popular memories; why even the great George Cruikshank, with his infinity of illustrative invention and wit, his enormous range and facility of graphic expression, yet with his passion for significant detail uncontrolled by the decorative instinct, seems quite old-fashioned—old-fashioned as no drawing of Charles Keene’s, whatever contemporary phase of life it presented, could ever become.

The art of book-illustration in England has been of slow growth, and till recent times its development has been sporadic. This has depended largely on the mediums of reproduction which happened to be ready to the designer’s hand, although on occasion men of genius, such as Blake and Bewick, have found for themselves the means for their pictorial needs, and have incidentally enriched the method’s possibilities. English book-illustration can scarcely be said to have had any distinctive existence before the eighteenth century, although the earliest printed books had pictorial woodcuts upon their pages. These were of a more or less primitive character, and bore little illustrative relation to the literary text, being frequently of foreign origin and serving again and again for various books. The printers would seem to have used them without any definitely decorative or illustrative intention, and, as a matter of fact, in the England of Caxton’s day, and for some decades later, the graphic arts were not in a condition to offer much to the service of the new art of printing. Native design had little artistic significance, and English wood-engraving was still in the crudest state, even at a time when in Germany Dürer, Burgkmair, Lucas Cranach, and Holbein were using the woodcut for imperishable illustration—imperishable because of its intrinsic artistic qualities.

When, in the middle of the sixteenth century, copper-plate engraving was belatedly introduced into this country it was soon employed to add to the attractiveness of the printed book. Indeed, it is in the books of the period that we must in a great measure trace the progress of the engraver’s art in England, though the illustrator’s was still largely to seek. Few books of any importance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were published without an engraved title-page or frontispiece, or both, ornately designed, often with the author’s portrait set amid allegorical or symbolic suggestions of the book’s contents. Many of these pictorial title-pages and frontispieces have a quaint artistic charm, though their significance is for the most part literary and fantastic. Occasionally, as in the case of Elstrack’s ponderous frontispiece to Sir Walter Raleigh’s “History of the World,” we find the author thinking it necessary to explain “The Minde of the Front,” but, as the engravers’ names only appeared on the plates, we must suppose them to have been also the designers, and so we may associate with the beginnings of book-illustration in this country the names of William Hole, John Payne, William Marshall, Robert Vaughan, and others of the early line-engravers. But illustration in any modern acceptance of the term was not to be found in the books of the seventeenth century, although occasionally among the pages would appear plates of a pictorial character.

The eighteenth century, however, saw a notable activity in the illustrating of books, dating from the publication in 1726 of Hogarth’s plates to Butler’s “Hudibras.” But perhaps the greatest stimulus to the still groping art was the influence of the charming and fertile French illustrator Gravelot, who lived and worked in London for some twenty years in the first half of the century. His influence, sadly needed at this time, was in the direction of grace and delicacy in visualizing the mental image, and of the many English artists of the period who addressed themselves to book-illustration none equalled the prolific Thomas Stothard in the display of these qualities. The designs that Stothard made in the course of his long career are practically countless, and, with much work that was feeble or merely pretty, at his best, as when illustrating the novels of Richardson, Sterne, and Goldsmith, and certain poems of Samuel Rogers, his graphic fancy would translate the author’s conceptions with sympathy into pictorial terms of grace and persuasion. And the daintiness of his design would lend itself as readily to stipple-engraving as to line. Stothard’s is one of the few outstanding names in eighteenth-century book-illustration; another is Flaxman’s, with his outline designs for Homer, Æschylus, and Dante; but in the whole history of the art no name shines more brilliantly than that of their great contemporary, William Blake. With that sublime and original genius, it may be said, English printed book-illustration came into being in its ideal condition as a work of art. Before Blake produced his entrancing “Songs of Innocence” in 1787 nobody had conceived the printed page as an harmonious combination of text, illustration, and decoration, an ideal of beautiful book-making that has proved the inspiration of some of our best modern artists. So we may call Blake the first great English book-illustrator. Never were expression and decoration more perfectly blended than in those pages of Blake’s, all smelling of April, as Swinburne happily phrased it, with their script and their illustrative designs, in decorative setting, printed in tinted inks from plates etched in relief after a method of his own devising, and their exquisite colour-harmonies built up by hand upon the impressions. That Blake’s example was not followed in those days of the popularity of the stippled colour-print is surprising, although it would have argued an artistic sense of book-decoration that was in Blake’s day, and for long afterwards, extremely rare, if not almost non-existent. But absolutely unique and original as was Blake’s genius, and slow as was his influence, we can trace in later book-illustration, especially in some of to-day’s, something of the influence not only of his colour-books but of his nobly beautiful illustrations to the Book of Job and Blair’s “Grave,” and of those wonderful little woodcut designs for Philips’s “Pastorals,” in which he extended the capacity of the wood-engraver’s art for the suggestion of colour, showing how far more pliable it may be in the hands of the artist who cuts his own designs and gives his imagination play upon the block.

It was through the wood-engraver’s art, too, that, contemporary with Blake, yet beginning earlier than he to handle the block, another man of genius stamped himself on the history of English book-illustration, and exerted an extraordinary influence. Indeed, in the hands of Thomas Bewick the craft of wood-engraving awakened from a moribund condition to new life, invigorated by his revival of the “white line,” used in a pictorial way of his own, to serve the illustrator’s art through many a year and one glorious decade, while Bewick’s inimitable vignettes and tail-pieces gave English book-illustration fresh inspiration in the direction of original fancy. And Bewick’s influence was splendidly transmitted through his gifted disciples and followers, Luke Clennell, William Harvey, and W. J. Linton.