But book-illustration about the end of the eighteenth century and the earlier years of the nineteenth had at its service reproductive methods other than wood-engraving and the graven line. Innumerable books were published with pictorial plates in coloured aquatint and etched outlines, for the most part of merely topographical interest, and therefore scarcely illustrations in the strictly artistic acceptance of the term; yet it was through this medium that the illustrative genius of Rowlandson was reproduced. Notably in his famous “Tours of Dr. Syntax,” he represented a phase of book-illustration the influence of which in more recent times we may trace in the delightful work of Randolph Caldecott.
One does not think of Turner strictly as an illustrator, although countless books were “embellished” with his exquisite landscape drawings and vignettes, translated to a nicety of reproductive art by a remarkable school of line-engravers on copper and steel, trained by the great artist himself to mix the etched with the graven line in a manner never previously imagined. Glorious as he was in interpreting his own visions, when Turner set himself to illustrate another man’s poems, such as Campbell’s “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” or “The Soldier’s Dream,” or “The Last Man,” one can hardly regard his vignettes as impressive illustration. But the Turner-illustrated book loomed large in its day, and that was not yet the day of any distinguished ideal of interpretative and decorative illustration, Blake’s remaining still unique.
However, amid an active period of book-illustration in which the dominant idea was vivacious, scenic, and characteristic representation, with the decorative instinct largely to seek, if not practically absent, began suddenly the great period which we know as “the sixties.” Its opening was marked by Moxon’s publication in 1857 of an edition of Tennyson’s Poems. There was no attempt to make a beautiful book of it; the format, the type, the paper, the binding, were all quite ordinary; but among the illustrations happened to be masterpieces. For among the noted artists engaged upon the work—including Mulready and Clarkson Stanfield—were three young men who proved to be great illustrators, and these, by their wonderful designs for this volume, drawn direct upon the wood-blocks for facsimile engraving, initiated a movement that is remarkable in the history of British Art. Millais, Rossetti, and Holman Hunt brought to their task all the romantic and decorative pictorial ideals of their Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and no more inspiring matter than Tennyson’s early poems could have been illustrated by such artists with such ideals. No sooner was it seen that, in the hands of such contemporary reproductive engravers as the Dalziels, Swain, Hooper, and Linton, the wood-block could offer opportunities to the graphic artist such as it had not offered since the age of Dürer, than most of the leading painters of the more imaginative order turned to it as a medium for expression. Book after book and magazine after magazine issued from the press with illustrations which were remarkable for fine expressive significance, true interpretative vision, and decorative beauty—designs, in fact, which created a new tradition in English book-illustration. To attempt any enumeration of these books and magazines of that amazing period, in which one may find masterpieces that would adorn the reputations of the greatest masters of design, were beyond the scope of this article. There was no attempt to make the books beautiful in themselves, with artistic relation between type and illustration, and harmonious decoration of the page; the designs held in themselves all that the books offered in the way of adornment. It must therefore suffice here to call to memory just the most individual and important of the artists whose work in line upon the wood-block made the years, roughly speaking, between 1860 and 1870 so gloriously memorable. Who shall say that John Everett Millais showed himself a greater artist in his paintings than he did in his black-and-white designs for “The Parables of Our Lord”—superb things—or his illustrations to Tennyson’s poems and Anthony Trollope’s novels? With his unfailing gift of vital interpretation, whether romantic or simply dramatic, allied to masterly command of design, he was the ideal illustrator. How splendidly effective, too, was the pictorial imagination of Dante Gabriel Rossetti when expressed within the limitations of the decorative line, enriched with poetic symbol artistically conceived! Then there was Frederick Sandys, one of the greatest masters of black-and-white of any time, and a living influence to-day, whose noble designs, with their beauty and dignity of sweeping line and perfect balance of composition, are instinct with fine dramatic vitality and emotional expression. If the period had been artistically remarkable for nothing else, it would have been memorable for the gift of Sandys’s designs, which have surely influenced many later illustrators. Much these may owe, too, to Arthur Boyd Houghton, a truly original illustrator, of the richest imagination when happily inspired by his subject, as he certainly was in the most extraordinary degree by the stories of the “Arabian Nights”; an artist of extremely live and sensitive temperament, a master of design in which vivacious line and white significant space were balanced with almost magic felicity. Two other names that shone with particular lustre in the book-illustration of the “sixties” were Frederick Walker and George John Pinwell. There was an idyllic fragrance about Walker’s work; the charm of Pinwell’s was its vivid pictorial truth to life, its dramatic feeling. One must not forget the graces of Arthur Hughes’s designs, the tender naturalness of Birket Foster’s and J. W. North’s. Who would think now of Whistler as an illustrator of other men’s ideas? Yet even his original genius lent itself to the prevailing fascination of interpretative vision upon the wood-block. But if we take up any of the illustrated books or periodicals of that period, especially any issued under the auspices of the Dalziels, who did so much to encourage and stimulate the art of illustration, we shall find famous names attached to designs worth pondering over: Leighton, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, Charles Keene, Tenniel, Du Maurier, Frederick Shields, Simeon Solomon, John Gilbert—all these, besides those already named, were expressing their pictorial inventions in line, and most of them drawing direct upon the wood.
A very charming phase of book-illustration followed close upon this great black-and-white period, and it was a phase of colour. The flat wood-block process was developed by the late Edmund Evans, the colour-printer, and, encouraged by him, three gifted artists of severally distinctive styles exploited its possibilities with distinguished and popular success. Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway, and Walter Crane—their very names call to mind a captivating series of picture-books in which their fancies made dainty frolic and revel for the delight equally of children and grown-ups. With all three the fairy tale and the nursery rhyme found fresh graces of pictorial expression and vivacities of invention, and the children’s picture-book entered upon a new era of artistic refinement and charm. Of the veteran Walter Crane, and his influence on the decorative side of book-illustration, one must speak presently, for happily he is represented in this volume. Of Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, what is there fresh to say in appreciation? Who has not laughed and rejoiced over Caldecott’s “John Gilpin” and his inimitable Goldsmith and Washington Irving illustrations, with their breezy humour, their happy, lively art? Is it only the middle-aged children who recall affectionately the dainty pictorial graces of Kate Greenaway’s world of little people? Anyhow, her very name has become almost established as an adjective. The sweet, tender simplicity of the colour-schemes of those books of Caldecott’s and Kate Greenaway’s had an unforgettable fragrance, and one may feel that without the influence of these artists many of the children’s books of to-day might perhaps lack something of their charm.
The photographic reproductive processes began now to change the spirit of the illustrator’s dream. Both in black-and-white and colour the artist had to readjust his methods and adapt them to the new mechanical conditions—to the domination of the camera, in fact. Already the photographer had become an intermediary between the artist and the wood-engraver, though the designer’s lines were still at the mercy of the craftsman’s knife. Now the artist made his designs with the camera in view, knowing that his line would reproduce exactly as he drew it. Naturally this change had a considerable influence on the character of the designs made for book-illustration. But, meanwhile, there were artists, individual and in groups, who, setting themselves against the innovating photographic reproduction in book-illustration, sought by the older methods to make books beautiful with pictorial adornment. Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, two artists inspired always by high ideals, to whose originality and initiative modern book-decoration owes a great deal, issued The Dial in 1889, and this was the beginning of an important movement in the making of beautiful books. Among the pages Mr. Shannon set those exquisite lithographs of his in which his pictorial poetry is most eloquent; while from this publication we may perhaps date the modern revival of original wood-engraving—Messrs. Ricketts, Shannon, Sturge Moore, Reginald Savage, and Lucien Pissarro cutting their lovely designs upon the wood. From the enthusiasm that produced The Dial grew the Vale Press, which, with its remarkable series of beautiful books, has given so much joy to bibliophiles, a joy that Mr. Pissarro continues to give with the delicately lovely books he issues from his Eragny Press—the Vale’s successor—books in which the ideal of harmonious decorative relation between the lettering of the page and its pictorial adornment is logically realized with exquisite results. How splendidly this ideal was realized by William Morris in his books from the Kelmscott Press has already been shown in “The Art of the Book” (the Special Spring Number of The Studio, 1914); to speak further of it here were beyond my province. I wish only to suggest its great influence for beauty on the book-decoration of to-day and yesterday, an influence one would wish to see still more widely extended.
A more definite alliance between book-illustration and decoration developed during the nineties of the last century, and the artistic activities in this direction were of a distinguished and interesting character. Several notable artists were at work, and among them one must not forget Mr. William Strang with his illustrative etchings, for it would be difficult to find a more intuitive pictorial interpreter of Burns or of Stevenson. One remembers also the expressively decorative designs of Mr. Laurence Housman and the graces of the so-called Birmingham School; above all, one recalls the appearance of two great original draughtsmen of widely different temperaments, both masters of line, both vitally artistic, both of enduring influence—Phil May and Aubrey Beardsley. And both of these were content to let their lines speak through the photographic medium. The Yellow Book and The Savoy came and passed away, but they left us Beardsley, and with him no fresh pictorial understanding of life and character such as we got from the humanly humorous genius of Phil May, but a new decorative value of line and the balance of black and white masses. This is Beardsley’s influence, quite distinct possibly from his fantastic manner of conception, but it is the secret of the permanent artistic worth of his graphic interpretations of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” and Pope’s “Rape of the Lock.”
At the present moment book-illustration is in an interesting phase, with its spreading tendencies towards page-decoration, and suggestive rather than realistic pictorial treatment of the text. In the following pages a fairly representative selection of drawings will show what many of our leading illustrators have been doing of late. It will be noticed that, with the clearness and precision possible to the modern photographic process-block, pure line is favoured for black-and-white; while recent developments of the three-colour process place within the possibilities of the artist a very wide range of tones and harmonies. Indeed, it would seem that, however the book-illustrator may wish to vary his manner in sympathy with the character of the text he is illustrating, the present mediums of reproduction will prove responsive to his need.
I have already mentioned Mr. Walter Crane and the fanciful and decorative charm of his colour-books. It was on the wood-block in the “sixties” and “seventies” that he began his long and distinguished career as a book-illustrator, and, with his delicate feeling for expressive line and the harmoniously decorated page, he has produced book after book, in which Shakespeare or Spenser, William Morris, the beloved Grimm, or the anonymous authors of immortal fairy tale and nursery rhyme, have inspired his graphic fancy to sweet and dainty picturings, whether in colour or in black-and-white. Genuine picture-books his, with the pictorial adornment extending from end-paper to end-paper, and the pages bearing their pictures happily balanced with their letterings amid decorative borders. To name even the best of his books would involve quite a long catalogue.
Turning from the veteran’s sweet and gracious simplicity of fancy to the wizardry of Mr. Arthur Rackham’s alertly imaginative art, with its wide-ranged flights of grotesque or romantic fantasy, is like going from a field of daisies, daffodils, and bluebells into a garden of wonderful exotics. Mr. Rackham stands apart from all the other illustrators of the day; his genius is so thoroughly original. Scores of others have depicted fairyland and wonderland, but who else has given us so absolutely individual and persuasively suggestive a vision of their marvels and allurements? Whose elves are so elfish, whose witches and gnomes are so convincingly of their kind, as Mr. Rackham’s? His line, with its distinctive accent, is his very own; so are his colour-tones; and no little of the secret of his success lies in a subtly harmonious intimacy between design and colour-scheme adapted with peculiarly sympathetic understanding to the capacity and limitations of the photographic mediums of reproduction. In the printed drawings of Mr. Rackham we find the three-colour process never forced, but always at its best, and his happily balanced tones seem to suggest the very atmosphere of mystery and enchantment proper to those worlds of romance and faëry which this fascinating artist delights to picture. But whether he expresses his visions in colour or black-and-white, he gives always new meanings to old tales. Looking at his drawings, one feels more at home even in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” one wonders with Alice afresh and more zestfully, frolics again with childish seriousness among the fairy tales, and gives oneself up as readily to the romantic spell of the “Nibelungen Ring” as to the whimsical supernaturalness of the beasts and birds of Æsop and the nursery rhyme. With all this, Mr. Rackham’s pictorial invention is essentially decorative.
A gentle graciousness of line and decorative design, with simplicity of expression, constitutes the peculiar charm of Mr. Robert Anning Bell’s illustrated books. That he finds happy suggestion among the poets will be seen in the drawings representing him here; but his “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a book to enjoy in its entirety, so harmonious is its scheme, while the Masque of Courteous Monsters in “The Tempest” is a remarkable composition. The distinguished graphic fancy of Mr. W. Heath Robinson has also been inspired to beautiful pictorial interpretation by Shakespeare’s immortal fairy play, and it is interesting to compare his more suggestive treatment with Mr. Anning Bell’s, the more definitely decorative significance of his design. As a quaintly humorous draughtsman Mr. Heath Robinson is also represented in these pages.