R. E. D. Sketchley

“ In no other part of the subject of book-illustration are the books of yesterday fraught with charm so inimical to delight in the books of to-day. The modern child's book—except, let us hope, to the child-owner—is merely a book as other books are. Its qualities are as patent as its size, or number of illustrations. The pictures are to the credit or discredit of a known and realized artist ”

“ The completeness of a work of art is to some a refuge from the incompleteness of actuality; to others this completeness is more incomplete than any incident of their own experience. The first bent of mind—supposing an artist who illustrates to 'express himself'—makes an illustrator of a draughtsman, the second makes literature seem no more than la reste to the artist as an opportunity for pictorial characterization. ”

“ It is interesting to compare his drawings for 'The Warwickshire Avon' with the Scottish artist's drawings of the northern rivers. The drawings of Shakespeare's river show spring trees in a mist of green, leafy summer trees, meadowsweet and hayfields, green earth and blue sky, and a river of pleasure watering a pleasant country. If a man can draw English summer-time in colour with black and white, he must rank high as a landscape pen-draughtsman. ”

“ Abbey's technique, curious as he is in the uses of antiquity as part of the pleasure of a fresh realization, clothing his characters in textiles of the great weaving times, or of a dainty simplicity, a student of architecture and of landscape, of household fittings, of armoury, of every beautiful accessory to the business of living, his clever pen rarely fails to render within the convention of black and white the added point of interest and of charm that these things bring into actuality. ”

“ Children, goblins, animals and queer monsters are drawn with unhesitating spirit and humour, and with decorative invention that would be even more successful if it were less fertile in devising detail. More fortunate in rendering action than facial expression, without the mystery that is the atmosphere of the magical fairy-land, the fact and fancy of Mr. Macgregor are so admirably illustrative of Judge Parry's text that one is almost inclined to attribute the absence of glamour to the artist's strong conception of the function of an illustrator. ”

“ They are never merely picturesque, and when too many men are 'freakish' in their rendering of architecture, the drawings of North of Scotland castles—well founded to endure weather and rough times of war—seem as real and true to Scottish romance as the "pleasant seat," the martlet-haunted masonry of Macbeth's castle set among the brooding wildness of Inverness by the fine words of Duncan and Banquo. ”

“ There are thirteen illustrations, and the opportunities for rendering aspects of light, from the moment of the lark's morning flight against the dappled skies of dawn, to the passing of whispering night-winds over the darkened country, given in the verse of a poet sensitive as none before him to the gradations of lightness and dark, are realized. So are the hawthorns in the dale, and the towered cities. But it is as an illustrator of another towered city than that imagined by Milton, that some of Mr. Hyde's most individual work has been produced. ”

“ Batten knows the rules of chivalry, of sentiment, humour, and horridness, as they exist in the magical convention of the real fairy-tales, and whether their purpose be merry or sad, heroic or grotesque, he illustrates the old tales of Celt and Saxon, of India, Arabia and Greece with appreciation of the largeness and splendour of their conception. One might wish for more vitality in his women, and think that a representation of the mournful beauty of Deirdre, the passion of Circe or of Medea, should differ from the untroubled sweetness of the King's daughter of faery. ”

“ So it happens that open-air drawings are usually illustrations of text, text of a practical guide-book character, or of archæological interest, or of the gossiping, intimate kind that tells of possessions, of journeys and pleasurings, or, again, illustrations of the open-air classics in prose and verse.
But in turning to the work of those draughtsmen whose subject is the presentment of character, of every man in his own humour, the illustration of literature is a part only of what is noteworthy. These artists have a subject that makes the opportunities of the book-illustrator seem formal ”

“ It adds nothing to the intrinsic value of an artist's work, nor does it represent the true relationship between him and those whom he has influenced. For if they are mere imitators they have no relation with any form of art, while to insist upon derived qualities in work that has the superscription of individuality is no true way of apprehension. What a man owes to himself is the substantial fact, the fact that relates him to other men. ”

“ The effect of the earlier 'Punch' artist on the work of the younger man is hardly more than suggested in certain felicities of pose and expression added to those that a delightful kind of child discovers to an observer unusually sensitive to the vivid and engaging qualities of his subject. These children are swift of movement and of spirit, and the verve of the artist's style is rarely forced, and still more rarely inadequate to the occasion. ”

“ His eye measures a landscape that seems outside the measure of observation, and his ability to grasp and render the characteristics of actuality serves him as ever. It is an unforgettable drawing, though the skill displayed in the simplification and relation of facts is no greater than in other drawings by the artist. That power hardly ever fails him. ”

“ It gives us illustrations which are really needed for the understanding of the text when they could hardly be produced in any other way, and while it does this it must be tolerated. But by necessitating the use of heavily-loaded paper—unpleasant to the touch, heavy in the hand, doomed, unless all the chemists are wrong, speedily to rot—it is the greatest danger to the excellence of our English book-work which has at present to be faced, while by wearying readers with endless mechanically produced pictures it is injurious also to the best interests of artistic illustration. ”

“ Kipling's works, as in the ballad etchings, the imagination of the artist is unfettered by tradition. The stories he pictures deal, for all their cleverness and definition, with themes that, translated out of Mr. Kipling's words into the large imagination of Mr. Strang, have powerful purpose. As usual, the artist makes his picture not of matter-of-fact—and the etching called 'A Matter of Fact' is specially remote from any such matter—but of more purposeful, more overpowering realities than any particular instance of life would show. ”

“ Cooke's wash-drawings to Jane Austen's novels, to 'Evelina' and 'The Man of Feeling,' as well as the pen-drawings to 'British Ballads,' have more force, and represent with some distinction the stir of ballad romance, the finely arranged situations of Miss Austen, and the sentiments of life, as Evelina and Harley understood it.
In a study of English black-and-white art, not limited to book-illustration, 'Punch' is an almost inevitable and invaluable centre for facts. ”

“ He has gained the approval even of the most exigent of critics as an artist who understands drawing for process. Since 1895, when the 'Midsummer Night's Dream' appeared, his winning [Pg 8] art has been praised with discrimination and without discrimination, but always praised. Trained in an architect's office, widely known as the recreator of coloured relief for architectural decoration, Mr. Anning Bell's illustrations show constructive power no less than that fairy gift of seeming to improvise without labour and without hesitancy, which is one of its especial charms. ”

“ It is clear that such an ideal of illustration is for the attainment of a few only. The ordinary illustrator, making drawings for cheap reproduction in the ordinary book, can no more work in this mood than the journalist can model his style on the prose of Milton. But journalism is not literature, and [Pg 3] pictured matter-of-fact is not illustration, though it is convenient and customary to call it so. However, here one need not consider this, for the decorative illustrator has usually literature to illustrate, and a commission to be beautiful and imaginative in his work. ”

“ J. W. North is among artists of to-day, as a book-illustrator he has unfortunately added little to his fine record of landscape drawings made between 1864 and 1867. One cannot include his work in a study of contemporary illustration, though it is a pleasure passed over to leave unconsidered drawings that in 'colour,' in effects of winter-weather, of leaf-thrown light and shade amid summer woods and over the green lanes of English country, are delightfully remote from obvious and paragraphic habits of rendering facts. ”

“ Abbey's work, and in the Shakespearean drawings he shows with greater force than ever his 'stage-managing' power, and the correctness and beauty of his 'mounting.' The drawings are dramatic: the women have beauty and individuality, while the men match them, or contrast with them as in the plays; the rogues are vagabonds in spirit, and the wise men have weight; the world of Shakespeare has been entered by the artist. ”

“ But though their decorative intention and technique represent the forms of the artist's work, the spirit of fantasy that informs her illustrations to 'Undine' finds only modified expression. The symbolism of 'Undine' is wrought into decorations of inventive elaborateness. The technical ideal of Miss Pitman suggests study of Dürer's pen-drawing, and though at times there is too much sweetness and luxury in her representation of beauty, at her best she expresses free fancy with distinction not common in modern book-illustration. ”

“ Byam Shaw began his work as an illustrator in 1897 with a volume of 'Browning's Poems,' edited by Dr. Garnett. He proved himself in these drawings, as in his pictures and later illustrations, an artist with a definite memory for the forms, and a genuine sympathy with the aims of pre-Raphaelite art. Evidently, too, he admires the black-and-white of Mr. Abbey. He has the gift of dramatic conception, sees a situation at high pitch, and has a pleasant way of giving side-lights, pictorial asides, by means of decorative head and tailpieces. ”

“ Moore's art handles the strong impulse of the wild creatures of earth, of the solitary creatures, mighty and terrible, haunting the desert places and fearing the order men make for safety. Designs to Wordsworth's 'Poems,' not yet published, represent with innate perception the earth-spirit as Wordsworth knew it, when the great mood of 'impassioned contemplation' came upon his careful spirit, when his heart leapt up, or when, wandering beneath the wind-driven clouds of March, at sight of daffodils, he lost his loneliness. ”

“ The artist has not to realize the personal significance of beauty conceived by another mind; he has to set down in black and white the aspect of indisputable cities and palaces and churches, of the actual highways and gardens of earth. No fugitive light, but the light of common day shows him his subject. So, although Stevenson's words, that reaching romantic art one becomes conscious of the background, are completely true in application to the drawings of Rossetti, of Millais, Sandys and Houghton, these 'backgrounds' have had no [Pg 31] traceable effect on modern open-air illustration. ”

“ If he isolates a figure, one feels that figure has stepped forward into a clear place of his imagination as he followed its way through the crowd. If he sets a pageant on the page, or some piece of turbulent action, or moment of decision, the actors have their individual value. He thinks his way through processes of gradual realization to the final picture of the characters in the play or poem. One writes now with special reference to the illustrations of the comedies of Shakespeare—so far, the illustrative work most exigent to the intellectual powers of the artist. ”