Illustration

Illustration. In a general sense, illustration (or the art of representing pictorially some idea which has been expressed in words) is as old as Art itself. There has never been a time since civilization began when artists were not prompted to pictorial themes from legendary, historical or literary sources. But the art of illustration, as now understood, is a comparatively modern product. The tendency of modern culture has been to make the interests of the different arts overlap. The theory of Wagner, as applied to opera, for making a combined appeal to the artistic emotions, has been also the underlying principle in the development of that great body of artistic production which in painting gives us the picture containing “literary” elements, and, in actual association with literature in its printed form, becomes what we call “illustration.” The illustrator’s work is the complement of expression in some other medium. A poem can hardly exist which does not awaken in the mind at some moment a suggestion either of picture or music. The sensitive temperament of the artist or the musician is able to realize out of words some parallel idea which can only be conveyed, or can be best conveyed, through his own medium of music or painting. Similarly, music or painting may, and often does, suggest poetry. It is from this inter-relation of the emotions governing the different arts that illustration may be said to spring. The success of illustration lies, then, in the instinctive transference of an idea from one medium to another; the more spontaneous it be and the less laboured in application, the better.

Leaving on one side the illuminated manuscripts of the middle ages (see Illuminated MSS.) we start with the fact that illustration was coincident with the invention of printing. Italian art produced many fine examples, notably the outline illustrations to the Poliphili Hypneratomachia, printed by Aldus at Venice in the last year of the 15th century. Other early works exist, the products of unnamed artists of the French, German, Spanish and Italian schools; while of more singular importance, though not then brought into book form, were the illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy made by Botticelli at about the same period. The sudden development of engraving on metal and wood drew many painters of the Renaissance towards illustration as a further opportunity for the exercise of their powers; and the line-work, either original or engraved by others, of Pollajuolo, Mantegna, Michelangelo and Titian has its place in the gradual enlargement of illustrative art. The German school of the 16th century committed its energies even more vigorously to illustration; and many of its artists are now known chiefly through their engravings on wood or copper, a good proportion of which were done to the accompaniment of printed matter. The names of Dürer, Burgmair, Altdorfer and Holbein represent a school whose engraved illustrations possess qualities which have never been rivalled, and remain an invaluable aid to imitators of the present day.

Illustration has generally flourished in any particular age in proportion to the health and vigour of the artistic productions in other kinds. No evident revival in painting has come about, no great school has existed during the last four centuries, which has not set its mark upon the illustration of the period and quickened it into a medium for true artistic expression. The etchers of the Low Countries during the 17th century, with Rembrandt at their head, were to a great extent illustrators in their choice of subjects. In France the period of Watteau and Fragonard gave rise to a school of delicately engraved illustration, exquisite in detail and invention. In England Hogarth came to be the founder of many new conditions, both in painting and illustration, and was followed by men of genius so distinct as Reynolds on the one side and Bewick on the other. With Reynolds one connects the illustrators and engravers for whom now Bartolozzi supplies a surviving name and an embodiment in his graceful but never quite English art. But it is from Thomas Bewick that the wonderfully consistent development of English illustration begins to date. Bewick marks an important period in the technical history of wood-engraving Progress in England. as the practical inventor of the “tint” and “white line” method of wood-cutting; but he also happened to be an artist. His artistic device was to give local colour and texture without shadow, securing thereby a precision of outline which allowed no form to be lost. And though, in consequence, many of his best designs have somewhat the air of a specimen plate, he succeeded in bringing into black-and-white illustration an element of colour which had been wholly absent from it in the work of the 15th and 16th century German and Italian schools. Bewick’s method started a new school; but the more racy qualities of his woodcuts were entirely dependent on the designer being his own cutter; and the same happy relationship gave distinct characteristics to the nearly contemporary work of William Blake and of Calvert. Blake’s wonderful Illustrations to the Book of Job, while magnificent in their conventional rendering of light and shade, still retain the colourlessness of the old masters, as do also the more broadly handled designs to his own books of prophecy and verse; but in his woodcuts to Philips’s Pastorals the modern tendency towards local colour makes itself strongly felt. So wonderfully, indeed, have colour and tone been expressed in these rough wood-blocks, that more vivid impressions of darkness and twilight falling across quiet landscape have never been produced through the same materials. The pastoral designs made by Edward Calvert on similar lines can hardly be over-praised. Technically these engravings are far more able than those from which they drew their inspiration.

With the exception of the two artists named, and in a minor degree of Thomas Stothard and John Flaxman, who also produced original illustrations, the period from the end of the 18th century till about the middle of the 19th was less notable for the work of the designer than of the engraver. The delicate plates to Rogers’s Italy were done from drawings which Turner had not produced for purposes of illustration; and the admirable lithographs of Samuel Prout and Richard Bonington were merely studies of architecture and landscape made in a material that admitted of indefinite multiplication. It is true that Géricault came over to England about the year 1820 to draw the English race-horse and other studies of country life, which were published in London in 1821, and that other fine work in lithography was done by James Ward, G. Cattermole, and somewhat later by J. F. Lewis. But illustration proper, subject-illustration applied to literature, was mainly in the hands of the wood-engravers; and these, forming a really fine school founded on the lines which Bewick had laid down, had for about thirty years to content themselves with rendering the works of ephemeral artists, among whom Benjamin R. Haydon and John Martin stand out as the chief lights. It must not be forgotten, however, that while the day of a serious English school of illustration had not yet come, Great Britain possessed an indigenous tradition of gross and lively caricature; a tradition of such robust force and vulgarity that, by the side of some choicer specimens of James Gillray and Henry W. Bunbury, the art of Rowlandson appears almost refined. This was the school in which George Cruikshank, John Leech, and the Dickens illustrators had their training, from which they drew more and more away; until, with the help of Punch, just before the middle of the 19th century, English caricaturists had learned the secret of how to be apposite and amusing without scurrility and without libel. (See Caricature.)

Under Newspapers will be found some account of the rise of illustrated journalism. It was in about the year 1832 that the illustrated weekly paper started on its career in England, and almost by accident determined Influence of Wood-engraving. under what form a great national art was to develop itself. While in France the illustrators were making their triumphs by means of lithography, English illustration was becoming more and more identified with wood-engraving. The demand for a method of illustration, easy to produce and easy to print, for books and magazines of large circulation and moderate price, forced the artist before long into drawing upon the wood itself; and so soon as the artist had asserted his preference for facsimile over “tint,” the school which came to be called “of the ’sixties” was in embryo, and waited only for artistic power to give it distinction. The engraver’s translation of the artist’s painting or wash-drawing into “tint” had largely exalted the individuality of the engraver at the expense of the artist. But from the moment when the designer began to put his own lines upon the wood, new conditions shaped themselves; and though the artist at times might make demands which the engraver could not follow, or the engraver inadequately fulfil the expectation of the artist, the general tendency was to bring designer and engraver into almost ideal relations—an ideal which nothing short of the artist being his own engraver could have equalled. Out of an alliance cemented by their common use and understanding of the material on which they worked came the school of facsimile or partial-facsimile engraving which flourished during the ’sixties, and lasted just so long as its conditions were unimpaired—losing its flavour only at the moment when “improved” mechanical appliances enabled the artist once more to dissociate himself from the conditions which bound the engraver in his craft.

Before the fortunate circumstances which governed the work of the ’sixties became decisive, illustrations of a transitional character, but tending to the same end, had been produced by John Tenniel, John Gilbert, Birket Pre-Raphaelite movement. Foster, Harrison Weir, T. Creswick, W. Mulready and others; but their methods were too vague and diffuse to bear as yet the mark of a school; no single influence gave a unity to their efforts. On some of them Adolf von Menzel’s illustrations to Kügler’s Frederick the Great, published in England in 1844, may have left a mark; Gilbert certainly shows traces of the influence of Delacroix and Bonington in the free, loose method of his draughtsmanship, independent of accurate modelling, and with here and there a paint-like dab of black to relieve a generally colourless effect; while Tenniel, with cold, precise lines of wire-drawn hardness, remained the representative of the past academic style, influencing others by the dignity of his fine technique, but with his own feeling quite untouched by the Pre-Raphaelite and romantic movement which was soon to occupy the world of illustration. In greater or less degree it may be said of the work of all these artists that, as it antedates, so to the end does it stand somewhat removed in character from, the school with which for a time it became contemporary. The year which decisively marked the beginning of new things in illustration was 1857, the year of the Moxon Tennyson and of Wilmott’s Poets of the Nineteenth Century, with illustrations by Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt and Ford Madox Brown. In these artists we get the germ of the movement which afterwards came to have so wide a popularity. At the beginning, Pre-Raphaelite in name, poetic and literary in its choice of subjects, the school quickly expanded to an acceptance of those open-air and everyday subjects which one connects with the names of Frederick Walker, Arthur B. Houghton, G. F. Pinwell and M. North. The illustrations of the Pre-Raphaelites were eminently thoughtful, full of symbolism, and with a certain pressure of interest to which the epithet of “intense” came to be applied. As an example of their method of thought-transference from word to form, Madox Brown’s drawing for the Dalziel Bible of “Elijah and the Widow’s Son” may be taken. The restoration of life to a dead body, of a child to its mother, is there conveyed with many illustrative touches and asides, which become clumsy when stated in words. The hen bearing her chicken between her wings is a perfectly direct and appropriate pictorial symbol, but a far more imaginative stroke is the shadow on the wall of a swallow flying back to the clay bottle where it has made its nest. Here is illustration full of literary symbolism, yet wholly pictorial in its means; and in this it is entirely characteristic of Pre-Raphaelite feeling, with its method of suggesting, through externals, consideration as opposed to mere outlook. Of this phase Rossetti must be accounted the leader, but it was Millais who, by the sheer weight of his personality, carried English illustration along with him from Pre-Raphaelitism to the freer romanticism and naturalistic tendencies of the ’sixties. Rossetti, with his poetic enthusiasm, his strong personal magnetism and dramatic power of composition, may be said to have brought about the awakening; it was Millais who, by his rapid development Influence of Millais. of style, his original and daring technique, turned it into a movement. When he started, there were many influences behind him and his fellow-workers—among older foreign contemporaries, those of Menzel and Rethel; and behind these again something of the old masters. But through a transitional period, represented by his twelve drawings of “The Parables,” which appeared first in Good Words, Millais emerged in to the perfect independence of his illustrations to Trollope’s novels, Framley Parsonage, and The Small House at Allington, his own master and the master of a new school. Depicting the ugly fashions of his day with grave dignity and distinction, and with a broad power of rendering type in work which had the aspect of genre, he drew the picture of his age in a summary so embracing that his illustrations attain the rank almost of historical art. For art of this sort the symbolism of the Pre-Raphaelites lost its use: the realization in form of a character conveyed by an author’s words, the happy suggestion of a locality helping to fix the writer’s description, the verisimilitudes of ordinary life, even to trivial detail, carried out with real pictorial conviction, were the things most to be aimed at. Pictorial conviction was the great mark of the illustrative school of the ’sixties. The work of its artists has absorbed so completely the interest and reality of the letterpress that the results are a model of what faithful yet imaginative illustration should be. In the illustrated magazines of this period, Once a Week, Good Words, Cornhill, London Society, The Argosy, The Leisure Hour, Sunday at Home, The Quiver and The Churchman’s Family Magazine, as well as others, is to be found the best work of this new school of illustrators; and with the greater number of them it cannot be mistaken that Millais is the prevailing force.

By their side other men were working, more deeply influenced by the old masters, and by the minuteness and hard, definite treatment of form which the Pre-Raphaelite school had inculcated. Foremost of these was Frederick Sandys. His illustrations, scattered through nearly all the magazines which have been named, show always a decorative power of design and are full of fine drawing and fine invention, but remain resolutely cold in handling and lacking in imaginative ardour. The few illustrations done by Burne-Jones at this period show a whole-hearted following of Rossetti, but a somewhat struggling technique; and the same qualities are to be found in the work of Arthur Hughes, whose illustrations in Good Words for the Young (1869) have a charm of tender poetic invention showing through the faults and persistent uncertainty of his draughtsmanship. The illustrations of Frederick Shields to Defoe’s History of the Plague have a certain affinity to the work of Sandys; but, with less power over form, they show a more dramatic sense of light and shade, and at their best can claim real and original beauty. The formality of feeling and composition, and the strained, stiff quality of line in Lord Leighton’s designs to Romola (1863), do a good deal to mar one’s enjoyment of their admirable draughtsmanship. Many fine drawings done at this period by Leighton, Poynter, Henry Armstead and Burne-Jones did not appear until the year 1880 in the “Dalziel Bible Gallery,” when the methods of which they were the outcome had fallen almost out of use.

Deeply influenced by the broad later phases of Millais’s black-and-white work were those artists whose tendency lay in the direction of idyllic naturalism and popular romance, the men to whom more particularly is given the name “The ’sixties.” of the period and school “the ’sixties,” and whose more immediate leader, as far as popular estimation goes, was Frederick Walker. With his, one may roughly group the names of Pinwell, Houghton, North, Charles Keene, Lawless, Matthew J. Mahoney, Morten and, with a certain reservation, W. Small and G. du Maurier. In no very separate category stand two other artists whose contributions to illustration were but incidental, John Pettie and J. M’Neill Whistler. The broad characteristics of this variously related group were a loose, easy line suggestive of movement, a general fondness for white spaces and open-air effects, and in the best of them a thorough sense of the serious beauty of domestic and rural life. They treated the present with a feeling rather idyllic than realistic; when they touched the past it was with a courteous sort of realism, and a wonderful inventiveness of detail which carried with it a charm of conviction. Walker’s method shows a broad and vivid use of black and white, with a fine sense of balance, but very little preoccupation for decorative effect. Pinwell had a more delicate fancy, but less freedom in his technique—less ease, but more originality of composition. In Houghton’s work one sees a swift, masterful technique, full of audacity, noble in its economy of means, sometimes rough and careless. His temperament was dramatic, passionate, satiric and witty. Some of his best work, his “Scenes from American Life,” appeared in the pages of the Graphic as late as the years 1873-1874. There are indications in the work of Lawless that he might have come close to Millais in his power of infusing distinction into the barest materials of everyday life, but he died too soon for his work to reach its full accomplishment. North was essentially a landscape illustrator. The delicate sense of beauty in du Maurier’s early work became lost in the formal but graceful conventions of his later Punch drawings. It was in the pages of Punch that Keene secured his chief triumphs. The two last-named artists outstayed the day which saw the break-up of the school of which these are the leading names. It ran its course through a period when illustrated magazines formed the staple of popular consumption, before the illustrated newspapers, with their hungry rush for the record of latest events, became a weekly feature. Its waning influence may be plainly traced through the early years of the Graphic, which started in 1869 with some really fine work, done under transitional conditions before the engraver’s rendering of tone-drawings once more ousted facsimile from its high place in illustration.

In connexion with this transitional period, drawings for the Graphic by Houghton, Pinwell, Sir Hubert von Herkomer, E. J. Gregory, H. Woods, Charles Green, H. Paterson (Mrs Allingham) and William Small deserve honourable mention. Yet it was the last-named who was mainly instrumental in bringing about the change from line-work to pigment, which depressed the artistic value of illustration during the ’seventies and the ’eighties to almost absolute mediocrity. Several artists of great ability practised illustration during this period: in addition to those Graphic artists already mentioned there were Luke Fildes, Frank Holl, S. P. Hall, Paul Renouard and a few others of smaller merit. But the interest was for the time shifting from black-and-white work and turning to colour. Kate Greenaway began to produce her charming idyllic renderings of children in mob-caps and long skirts. Walter Crane on somewhat similar lines designed his illustrated nursery rhymes; while Randolph Caldecott took the field with his fresh and breezy scenes of hunting life and carousal in the times most typical of the English squirearchy. Working with a broad outline, suggestive of the brush by its easy freedom, and adding washes of conventional colour for embellishment, he was one of the first in England to show the beginnings of Japanese influence. Even more dependent upon colour were his illustrated books for children; while in black and white, in his illustrations to Bracebridge Hall (1876), for instance, pen and ink began to replace the pencil, and to produce a new and more independent style of draughtsmanship. This style was taken up and followed by many artists of ability, by Harry Furniss, Hugh Thomson and others, till the influence of E. A. Abbey’s more mobile and more elaborate penmanship came to produce a still further development in the direction of fineness and illusion, and that of Phil May, with Linley Sambourne for his teacher, to simplify and make broad for those who aimed rather at a journalistic and shorthand method of illustration. (See also Caricature and Cartoon.)

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.

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