The record of modern French illustration goes back to the day when political caricature and the Napoleonic legend divided between them the triumphs of early lithography. The illustrators of France at that period were also her France. greatest artists. Of the historical and romantic school were D. Raffet, Nicholas J. Charlet, Géricault, Delacroix, J. B. Isabey and Achille Devéria, many of whose works appeared in L’Artiste, a paper founded in 1831 as the official organ of the romanticists; while the realists were led in the direction of caricature by two artists of such enormous force as Gavarni and Honoré Daumier, whose works, appearing in La Lithographie Mensuelle, Le Charivari and La Caricature, ran the gauntlet of political interference and suppression during a troubled period of French politics—which was the very cause of their prosperity. Behind these men lay the influence of the great Spanish realist Goya. Following upon the harsh satire and venomous realism of this famous school of pictorial invective, the influence of the Barbizon school came as a milder force; but the power of its artists did not show in the direction of original lithography, and far more value attaches to the few woodcuts of J. F. Millet’s studies of peasant life. In these we see clearly the tendency of French illustrative art to keep as far as possible the authentic and sketch-like touch of the artist; and it was no doubt from this tendency that so many of the great French illustrators retained lithography rather than commit themselves to the middleman engraver. Nevertheless, from about the year 1830 many French artists produced illustrations which were interpreted upon the wood for the most part by English engravers. Cunier’s editions of Paul et Virginie and La Chaumière Indienne, illustrated by Huet, Jacque, Isabey, Johannot and Meissonier, were followed by Meissonier’s more famous illustrations to Contes rémois. After Meissonier came J. B. E. Detaille and Alphonse M. de Neuville and, with a voluminous style of his own, L. A. G. Doré. By the majority of these artists the drawing for the engraver seems to have been done with the pen; and the tendency to penmanship was still more accentuated when from Spain came the influence of M. J. Fortuny’s brilliant technique; while after him, again, came Daniel Vierge, to make, as it were, the point of the pen still more pointed. During the middle period of the 19th century the best French illustration was serious in character; but among the later men, when we have recognized the grave beauty of Grasset’s Les Quatre Fils d’Aymon (in spite of his vicious treatment of the page by flooding washes of colour through the type itself), and the delicate grace of Boutet de Monvel’s Jeanne d’Arc, also in colours, it is to the illustrators of the comic papers that we have to go for the most typical and most audacious specimens of French art. In the pages of Gil Blas, Le Pierrot, L’Écho de Paris, Le Figaro Illustré, Le Courrier Français, and similar publications, are to be found, reproduced with a dexterity of process unsurpassed in England, the designs of J. L. Forain, C. L. Léandre, L. A, Willette and T. A. Steinlen, the leaders of a school enterprising in technique, and with a mixture of subtlety and grossness in its humour. Caran d’Ache also became celebrated as a draughtsman of comic drama in outline.
Among illustrators of Teutonic race the one artist who seems worthy of comparison with the great Menzel is Hans Tegner, if, indeed, he be not in some respects his technical superior; but apart from these two, the illustrators respectively of Germany. Kügler’s Frederick the Great and Holberg’s Comedies, there is no German, Danish or Dutch illustrator who can lay claim to first rank. Max Klinger, A. Böcklin, W. Trübner, Franz Stück and Hans Thoma are all symbolists who combine in a singular degree force with brutality; the imaginative quality in their work is for the most part ruined by the hard, braggart way in which it is driven home. The achievements and tendency of the later school of illustration in Germany are best seen in the weekly illustrated journal, Jugend, of Munich. Typical of an older German school is the work of Adolf Oberländer, a solid, scientific sort of caricaturist, whose illustrations are at times so monumental that the humour in them seems crushed out of life. Others who command high qualities of technique are W. Dietz, L. von Nagel, Hermann Vogel, H. Lüders and Robert Haug. Behind all these men in greater or less degree lies the influence of Menzel’s coldly balanced and dry-lighted realism; but wherever the influence of Menzel ceases, the merit of German illustration for the most part tends to disappear or become mediocre.
Authorities.—W. J. Linton, The Masters of Wood Engraving (London, 1889); C. G. Harper, English Pen Artists of To-day (London, 1892); Joseph Pennell, Pen Drawing and Pen Draughtsmen (London, 1894), Modern Illustration (London, 1895); Walter Crane, The Decorative Illustration of Books (London, 1896); Gleeson White, English Illustration: “The ’Sixties”: 1855-1870 (Westminster, 1897); W. A. Chatto, A Treatise on Wood Engraving (London, n.d.); Bar-le-Duc, Les Illustrations du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1882); T. Kutschmann, Geschichte der deutschen Illustration vom ersten Auftreten des Formschnittes bis auf die Gegenwart (Berlin, 1899).
(L. Ho.)
Technical Developments.
The history of illustration, apart from the merits of individual artists, during the period since the year 1875, is mainly that of the development of what is called Process (q.v.), the term applied to methods of reproducing a drawing or photograph which depend on the use of some mechanical agency in the making of the block, as distinguished from such products of manual skill as steel or wood-engraving, lithography and the like. There is good reason to believe that the art of stereotyping—the multiplication of an already existing block by means of moulds and casts—is as old as the 15th century; and the early processes were, in a measure, a refinement upon this: with the difference that they aimed at the making of a metal block by means of a cast of the lines of the drawing itself, the background of which had been cut away so as to leave the design in a definite relief. Experiments of this nature may be said to have assumed practical shape from the time of the invention of Palmer’s process called at first Glyphography, about the year 1844; this was afterwards perfected and used to a considerable extent under the name of Dawson’s Typographic Etching, and its results were in many cases quite admirable, and often appear in books and periodicals of the first part of the period with which we are now concerned. The Graphic, for instance, published its first process block in 1876, and the Illustrated London News also made similar experiments at about the same time.
From this time begins the gradual application of photography to the uses of illustration, the first successful line blocks made by its help being probably those of Gillot, at Paris, in the early ’eighties. The next stage was to be the invention of some means of reproducing wash drawings. To do this it was necessary for the surface of the block to be so broken up that every tone of the drawing should be represented thereon by a grain holding ink enough to reproduce it. This was finally accomplished by the insertion of a screen, in the camera, between the lens and the plate—the effect of which was to break up the whole surface of the negative into dots, and so secure, when printed on a zinc plate and etched, an approximation to the desired result. Half-tone blocks (as they were called) of this nature (see [Process]) were used in the Graphic from 1884 and the Illustrated London News from 1885 onwards, the methods at first in favour being those of Meisenbach and Boussod Valadon and Co.’s phototype. Lemercier and Petit of Paris, Angerer and Göschl of Vienna, and F. Ives of Philadelphia also perfected processes giving a similar result, a block by the latter appearing in the Century magazine as early as 1882. Processes of this description had, however, been used for some years before by Henry Blackburn in his Academy Notes.
During the decade 1875-1885, however, the main body of illustration was accomplished by wood-engraving, which a few years earlier had achieved such splendid results. Its artistic qualities were now at a rather low ebb, although good facsimile engravings of pen-drawings were not infrequent. The two great illustrated periodicals already referred to during that period relied more upon pictorial than journalistic work. An increasing tendency towards the illustration of the events of the day was certainly shown, but the whole purpose of the journal was not, as at present, subordinated thereto. The chief illustrated magazines of the time, Harper’s, the Century, the English Illustrated, were also content with the older methods, and are filled with wood-engravings, in which, if the value of the simple line forming the chief quality of the earlier work has disappeared, a most astonishing delicacy and success were obtained in the reproduction of tone.
Perhaps the most notable and most characteristic production of the time in England was colour-printing. The Graphic and the Illustrated London News published full-page supplements of high technical merit printed from wood-blocks in conjunction with metal plates, the latter sometimes having a relief aquatint surface which produced an effect of stipple upon the shading; metal was also used in preference to wood for the printing of certain colours. The children’s books illustrated by Randolph Caldecott, Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway at this time are among the finest specimens of colour-printing yet seen outside of Japan; in them the use of flat masses of pleasant colour in connexion with a bold and simple outline was carried to a very high pitch of excellence. These plates were generally printed by Edmund Evans. In 1887 the use of process was becoming still more general; but its future was by no means adequately foreseen, and the blocks of this and the next few years are anything but satisfactory. This, it soon appeared, was due to inefficient printing on the one hand, and, on the other, to a want of recognition by artists of the special qualities of drawing most suitable for photographic reproduction. The publication of Quevedo’s Pablo de Segovia with illustrations by Daniel Vierge in 1882, although hardly noticed at the time, was to be a revelation of the possibilities of the new development; and a serious study of pen-drawing from this point of view was soon inaugurated by the issue of Joseph Pennell’s Pen Drawing and Pen Draughtsmen in 1889, followed in by C. G. Harper’s English Pen Artists of To-day and in 1896 by Walter Crane’s Decorative Illustration of Books. At this time also the influence of Aubrey Beardsley made itself strongly felt, not merely as a matter of style, but, by the use of simple line or mass of solid black, as an almost perfect type of the work most suitable to the needs of process. Wider experience of printing requirements, and finer workmanship in the actual making of the blocks, in Paris, Vienna, New York and London, soon brought the half-tone process into great vogue. The spread of education has enormously increased the demand for ephemeral literature, more especially that which lends itself to pictorial illustration; and the photograph or drawing in wash reproduced in half-tone has of late to a great extent ousted line work from the better class of both books and periodicals.
Improvements in machinery have made it possible to print illustrations at a very high speed; and the facility with which photographs can now be taken of scenes such as the public delight to see reproduced in pictures has brought about an almost complete change in pictorial journalism. In addition, reference must be made to an extraordinary increase in the numbers and circulation of cheap periodical publications depending to a very large extent for popularity on their illustrations. Several of these, printed on the coarsest paper, from rotary machines, sell to the extent of hundreds of thousands of copies per week. It was inevitable that this cheapening process should not be permitted to develop without opposition, and the Dial (1889-1897) must be looked on as a protest by the band of artists who promoted it against the unintelligent book-making now becoming prevalent. Much more effective and far-reaching in the same direction was the influence of William Morris, as shown in the publications of the Kelmscott Press (dating from 1891). In these volumes the aim was to produce illustrations and ornaments which were of their own nature akin to, and thus able to harmonize with the type, and to do this by pure handicraft work. As a result, a distinct improvement is to be found in the mere book-making of Great Britain; and although the main force of the movement soon spent itself in somewhat uninspired imitations, there can be no doubt of the survival of a taste for well-produced volumes, in which the relationship of type, paper, illustration and binding has been a matter of careful and artistic consideration. Under this influence, a notable feature has been the re-issue, in an excellent form, of illustrated editions of the works of most of the famous writers.