“ W. Graham Robertson is as delicious as ever in his Blake-like simplicity of expression and design, whether illustrating his own books or those of that kindred spirit of fantasy, Mr. Algernon Blackwood. Mr. Byam Shaw’s fecundity of illustrative invention is well represented, if not the wide range of his fertility, which is from Shakespeare and Boccaccio to Flora Annie Steele in Akbar’s India. Mr. Vernon Hill is a designer of remarkable imagination, and he makes an ideal illustrator of “Ballads Weird and Wonderful.” ”

“ There is no artist now devoting himself to book-decoration who has been truer to the ideals of his art than Mr. Charles Robinson. From the time when he proved himself the ideal illustrator of Stevenson’s “Child’s Garden of Verses” to the present he has aimed always at treating the book as an harmonious whole from cover to cover, providing decoration or illustration just where the scheme seemed to call for it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Robinson is a man of original if delicate imagination, as well as an exquisite interpretative artist, and the double-page drawing given here, The Dream, will show him graphically illustrating his own fanciful vision—carrying out his pictorial ideas in a book of his own creation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Light and atmosphere distinguish Mr. D. Y. Cameron’s two great little landscape drawings for “The Tomb of Burns.” One does not otherwise think of the great etcher as an illustrator. Mr. Frank Brangwyn is entirely himself in the two virile pen-and-ink drawings for “The Book of Bridges,” and the colour illustration to Kinglake’s “Eöthen.” Very charming, and worthy of their theme, are Mr. F. L. Griggs’s illustrations to “The Sensitive Plant”; nor is this accomplished artist less delightful in his designs for “The Chronicles of a Cornish Garden.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Native design had little artistic significance, and English wood-engraving was still in the crudest state,{3} 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sullivan’s pictorial sense of character and incident is explicit also in the Goldsmith illustrations.
Mr. W. Russell Flint, a very talented designer of rich pictorial imagination and fine colour-sense, has, within the last few years, come into the front rank of book-illustrators, and he has done this through the medium of a number of beautiful books issued from the Riccardi Press. Things of real beauty are many of the illustrations to the “Song of Solomon,” “Marcus Aurelius,” “Le Morte D’Arthur,” Kingsley’s “Heroes” (one of which is reproduced here) , and the “Canterbury Tales.” Mr. ”

“ Mr. Edmund H. New is another artist of distinctive style who never fails us, and in the “Compleat Angler” and White’s “Selborne” he had, of course, subjects after his heart. The fanciful landscape is Mr. W. T. Horton’s design; peaceful Bruges is Mr. Charles Wade’s theme. FitzGerald’s “Omar” has suggested some quaintly fantastic designs by Miss Helen Sinclair; Mr. René Bull’s facile pen has busied itself with the “Arabian Nights”; while here also are characteristic drawings by Mr. ”

“ If Beardsley ever lent Miss Jessie King the decorative influence of his line she has made it all her own, as evidenced in these three exquisite and original designs suggested by old romances. Tennyson and Browning have furnished happy inspirations for the delicate art of Miss Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale; while Mr. Dion Clayton Calthrop shows with graphic charm how thoroughly he is at home in Fairyland—being himself the most reliable of guides. Mr. ”

“ The three drawings here show his strong individuality, but I wish it had been possible to represent his high-water mark in the beautiful designs for the Book of Job.
There are no more facile and prolific illustrators than Mr. ”