Laurence Housman and Edward Fairbrother Strange

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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 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 ”

“ In America, until a comparatively recent date, illustration bowed the knee to the superior excellence of the engraver over the artist. Not until the brilliant pen-drawing of E. A. Abbey carried the day with the black-and-white artists of England did any work of real moment emanate from the United United States. States, unless that of Elihu Vedder be regarded as an exception. Howard Pyle is a brilliant imitator of Dürer; he has also the ability to adapt himself to draughtsmanship of a more modern tendency. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Germany, Jugend, Simplicissimus, and other publications devoted to humour and caricature, employ colour-printing to a great extent with success. The organ of the artists of the younger German schools, Pan (1895) , makes use of every means of illustration, and has especially cultivated lithography and wood-cuts, using these arts effectively but with some eccentricity. Holland has also employed coloured lithography for a remarkable series of children’s books illustrated by van Hoytema and others. ”

“ It was in about the year 1832 that the illustrated weekly paper started on its career in England, and almost by accident determined under what form a great national art was to develop Influence of Wood-engraving. 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ In the various types of periodicals of which the Revue Illustrée, Figaro Illustré and Gil Blas Illustré may be taken as examples, the most noticeable feature is a use of colour-printing, which is far in advance of anything generally attempted in Great Britain. A favourite and effective process is that employed for the reproduction of chalk drawings (as by Steinlen) , which consists of the application of a surface-tint of colour from a metal plate to a print from an ordinary process block. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”