An old man sits up in bed, startled by a noise from downstairs.
He reaches for the door, listening. Even in a simple spot
illustration, Frederic R. Gruger (1871-1953) tells a story by
showing only what he needs to show: the rumpled bed, the modest
bedframe, the doorknob, the key, and the lock. He leaves out
unnecessary details, like picture frames, lamps, or windows.
What he does show, he understates. The forms and edges of his
left arm are swallowed up by a simple shadow shape that leads us
to the even darker dark of the open doorway. The virtues of
economy and understatement are one of the benefits of working
solely from the imagination. Gruger rarely used models. A close
look at the head, which is only about an inch high, shows that
Gruger defined the form gradually, tentatively, erasing and
blending until it emerged in his mind, and then adding the more
definite lines of the Wolff pencil last. As Joseph Pennell said
in 1925, “All art is illustration.” And a good illustration is
like a good novel or a good