



Produced by Chris Curnow, Diane Monico, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)











ENGLISH BOOK-ILLUSTRATION OF TO-DAY




English Book-Illustration
of To-day

APPRECIATIONS OF THE WORK OF LIVING
ENGLISH ILLUSTRATORS WITH
LISTS OF THEIR BOOKS

BY R. E. D. SKETCHLEY

WITH AN INTRODUCTION

BY ALFRED W. POLLARD

[Illustration]

LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUeBNER AND CO., LTD.
PATERNOSTER HOUSE, CHARING CROSS ROAD, W.C.
1903


CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.




NOTE.


The four articles and bibliographies contained in this volume
originally appeared in "The Library."

In connection with the bibliographies, I desire to express cordial
thanks to the authorities and attendants of the British Museum, without
whose courtesy and aid, extending over many weeks, it would have been
impossible to bring together the particulars. Most of the artists, too,
have kindly checked and supplemented the entries relating to their
work, but even with the help given me I cannot hope to have produced
exhaustive lists. My thanks are due to the publishers with whom
arrangements have been made for the use of blocks.

R. E. D. SKETCHLEY.




CONTENTS.


                                                      PAGE

NOTE                                                    v

INTRODUCTION                                           xi

I. SOME DECORATIVE ILLUSTRATORS                         1

II. SOME OPEN-AIR ILLUSTRATORS                         30

III. SOME CHARACTER ILLUSTRATORS                       56

IV. SOME CHILDREN'S-BOOKS ILLUSTRATORS                 94


BIBLIOGRAPHIES.

I. SOME DECORATIVE ILLUSTRATORS                       121

II. SOME OPEN-AIR ILLUSTRATORS                        132

III. SOME CHARACTER ILLUSTRATORS                      144

IV. SOME CHILDREN'S BOOKS ILLUSTRATORS                158

INDEX OF ARTISTS                                      174




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


          FROM                                                    PAGE

"Les Quinze Joies de Mariage"                                      xii

The "Dialogus Creaturarum"                                        xiii

A Venetian Chapbook                                               xvii

The "Rappresentazione di un Miracolo del Corpo di Gesu"          xviii

The "Rappresentazione di S. Cristina"                              xix

"La Nencia da Barberino"                                           xxi

The "Storia di Ippolito Buondelmonti e Dianora Bardi"             xxii

Ingold's "Guldin Spiel"                                           xxiv

The Malermi Bible                                                  xxv

A French Book of Hours                                           xxvii

          FROM                                   BY

"A Farm in Fairyland."                   _Laurence Housman_        xxx

Grimm's "Household Stories."             _Walter Crane_              5

"Undine."                                _Heywood Sumner_            7

"Keats' Poems."                          _R. Anning Bell_            9

"Stories and Fairy Tales."               _A. J. Gaskin_             11

"The Field of Clover."                   _Laurence Housman_  20 and 21

"Cupide and Psyches."                    _Charles Ricketts_         22

"Daphnis and Chloe."                     _Charles Ricketts and
                                          C. H. Shannon_            23

"The Centaur."                           _T. Sturge Moore_          25

"Royal Edinburgh."                       _Sir George Reid_   facing 35

"The Warwickshire Avon."                 _Alfred Parsons_           37

"The Cinque Ports."                      _William Hyde_             42

"Italian Journeys."                      _Joseph Pennell_    facing 45

"The Holyhead Road."                     _C. G. Harper_             49

"The Formal Garden."                     _F. Inigo Thomas_          51

"The Natural History of Selborne."       _E. H. New_                53

"British Deer and their Horns."          _J. G. Millais_            55

"Death and the Ploughman's Wife."        _William Strang_           61

"The Bride of Lammermoor."               _Fred Pegram_              71

"Shirley."                               _F. H. Townsend_           73

"The Heart of Midlothian."               _Claude A. Shepperson_     75

"The School for Scandal."                _E. J. Sullivan_           78

"The Ballad of Beau Brocade."            _Hugh Thomson_             82

"The Essays of Elia."                    _C. E. Brock_              85

"The Talk of the Town."                  _Sir Harry Furniss_        89

"Hermy."                                 _Lewis Baumer_            100

"To tell the King the Sky is falling."   _Alice B. Woodward_       105

"Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm."     _Arthur Rackham_          109

"Indian Fairy Tales."                    _J. D. Batten_            111

"The Pink Fairy Book."                   _H. J. Ford_              113

"Fairy Tales by Q."                      _H. R. Millar_            115




INTRODUCTION.

SOME PRESENT-DAY LESSONS FROM OLD WOODCUTS.

BY ALFRED W. POLLARD.


SOME explanation seems needed for the intrusion of a talk about the
woodcuts of the fifteenth century into a book dealing with the work of
the illustrators of our own day, and the explanation, though no doubt
discreditable, is simple enough. It was to a mere bibliographer that
the idea occurred that lists of contemporary illustrated books, with
estimates of the work found in them, might form a useful record of the
state of English book-illustration at the end of a century in which for
the first time (if we stretch the century a little so as to include
Bewick) it had competed on equal terms with the work of foreign
artists. Fortunately the bibliographer's scanty leisure was already
heavily mortgaged, and so the idea was transferred to a special student
of the subject, much better equipped for the task. But partly for the
pleasure of keeping a finger in an interesting pie, partly because
there was a fine hobby-horse waiting to be mounted, the bibliographer
bargained that he should be allowed to write an introduction in which
his hobby should have free play, and the reader, who has got a much
better book than he was intended to have, must acquiesce in this
meddling, or resort to his natural rights and skip.

[Illustration: FROM 'LES QUINZE JOIES DE MARIAGE,'

PARIS, TREPEREL, C. 1500.]

It is well to ride a hobby with at least a semblance of moderation, and
the thesis which this introduction is written to maintain does not
assert that the woodcuts of the fifteenth century are better than the
illustrations of the present day, only that our modern artists, if they
will condescend, may learn some useful lessons from them. At the outset
it may frankly be owned that the range of the earliest illustrators was
limited. They had no landscape art, no such out-of-door illustrations
as those which furnish the subject for one of Miss Sketchley's most
interesting chapters. Again, they had little humour, at least of the
voluntary kind, though this was hardly their own fault, for as the
admission is made the thought at once follows it that of all the many
deficiencies of fifteenth-century literature the lack of humour is one
of the most striking. The rough horseplay of the Life of Aesop prefixed
to editions of the Fables can hardly be counted an exception; the wit
combats of Solomon and Marcolphus produced no more than a title-cut
showing king and clown, and outside the 'Dialogus Creaturarum' I can
think of only a single valid exception, itself rather satirical than
funny, this curious picture of a family on the move from a French
treatise on the Joys of Marriage. On the 'Dialogus' itself it seems
fair to lay some stress, for surely the picture here shown of the Lion
and the Hare who applied for the post of his secretary may well
encourage us to believe that in two other departments of illustration
from which also they were shut out, those of Caricature (for which we
must go back to thirteenth-century prayer-books) and Christmas Books
for Children, the fifteenth-century artist would have made no mean
mark. It is, indeed, our Children's Gift-Books that come nearest both
to his feeling and his style.

[Illustration: FROM THE 'DIALOGUS CREATURARUM.' GOUDA, 1480.]

What remains for us here to consider is the achievement of the early
designers and woodcutters in the field of Decorative and Character
Illustrations with which Miss Sketchley deals in her first and third
chapters. Here the first point to be made is that by an invention of
the last twenty years they are brought nearer to the possible work of
our own day than to that of any previous time. It has been often enough
pointed out that, not from preference, but from inability to devise any
better plan, the art of woodcut illustration began on wholly wrong
lines. Starting, as was inevitable, from the colour-work of
illuminated manuscripts, the illustrators could think of no other
means of simplification than the reduction of pictures to their
outlines. With a piece of plank cut, not across the grain of the wood,
but with it, as his material, and a sharp knife and, perhaps, a gouge
as his only tools, the woodcutter had to reproduce these outlines as
best he could, and it is little to be wondered at if his lines were
often scratchy and angular, and many a good design was deplorably ill
handled. After a time, soft metal, presumably pewter, was used as an
alternative to wood, and perhaps, though probably slower, was a little
easier to work successfully. But save in some Florentine pictures and a
few designs by Geoffroy Tory, the craftsman's work was not to cut the
lines which the artist had drawn, but to cut away everything else. This
inverted method of work continued after the invention of crosshatching
to represent shading, and was undoubtedly the cause of the rapid
supersession of woodcuts by copper engravings during the sixteenth
century, the more natural method of work compensating for the trouble
caused when the illustrations no longer stood in relief like the type,
but had to be printed as incised plates, either on separate leaves, or
by passing the sheet through a different press. The eighteenth-century
invention of wood-engraving as opposed to woodcutting once again caused
pictures and text to be printed together, and the amazing dexterity of
successive schools of wood-engravers enabled them to produce, though at
the cost of immense labour, work which seemed to compete on equal terms
with engravings on copper. At its best the wood-engraving of the
nineteenth century was almost miraculously good; at its worst, in the
wood-engravings of commerce--the wood-engravings of the weekly papers,
for which the artist's drawing might come in on a Tuesday, to be cut up
into little squares and worked on all night as well as all day, in the
engravers' shops--it was unequivocally and deplorably, but hardly
surprisingly, bad.

Upon this strange medley of the miraculously good and the excusably
horrid came the invention of the process line-block, and the problem
which had baffled so many fifteenth-century woodcutters, of how to
preserve the beauty of simple outlines was solved at a single stroke.
Have our modern artists made anything like adequate use of this
excellent invention? My own answer would be that they have used it,
skilfully enough, to save themselves trouble, but that its artistic
possibilities have been allowed to remain almost unexplored. As for the
trouble-saving--and trouble-saving is not only legitimate but
commendable--the photographer's camera is the most obliging of
craftsmen. Only leave your work fairly open and you may draw on as
large a scale and with as coarse lines as you please, and the camera
will photograph it down for you to the exact space the illustration has
to fill and will win you undeserved credit for delicacy and fineness of
touch as well. Thus to save trouble is well, but to produce beautiful
work is better, and what use has been made of the fidelity with which
beautiful and gracious line can now be reproduced? The caricaturists,
it is true, have seen their opportunity. Cleverness could hardly be
carried further than it is by Mr. Phil May, and a caricaturist of
another sort, the late Mr. Aubrey Beardsley, degenerate and despicable
as was almost every figure he drew, yet saw and used the possibilities
which artists of happier temperament have neglected. With all the
disadvantages under which they laboured in the reproduction of fine
line the craftsmen of Venice and Florence essayed and achieved more
than this. Witness the fine rendering into pure line of a picture by
Gentile Bellini of a tall preacher preceded by his little crossbearer
in the 'Doctrina' of Lorenzo Giustiniano printed at Venice in 1494, or
again the impressiveness, surviving even its little touch of the
grotesque, of this armed warrior kneeling at the feet of a pope, which
I have unearthed from a favourite volume of Venetian chapbooks at the
British Museum. A Florentine picture of Jacopone da Todi on his knees
before a vision of the Blessed Virgin (from Bonacorsi's edition of his
'Laude,' 1490) gives another instance of what can be done by simple
line in a different style. We have yet other examples in many of the
illustrations to the famous romance, the 'Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,'
printed at Venice in 1499. Of similar cuts on a much smaller scale, a
specimen will be given later. Here, lest anyone should despise these
fifteenth-century efforts, I would once more recall the fact that at
the time they were made the execution of such woodcuts required the
greatest possible dexterity, in cutting away on each side so as to
leave the line as the artist drew it with any semblance of its original
grace. In many illustrated books which have come down to us what must
have been beautiful designs have been completely spoilt, rendered even
grotesque, by the fine curves of the drawing being translated into
scratchy angularities. But draw he never so finely no artist nowadays
need fear that his work will be made scratchy or angular by
photographic process. It is only when he crowds lines together, from
inability to work simply, that the process block aggravates his
defects.

[Illustration: La Lega Facta Nouamente a Morte e Destructione de li
Franzosi & suoi Seguaci.

VENICE. C. 1500.]

[Illustration: FROM THE RAPPRESENTAZIONE DI UN MIRACOLO DEL CORPO DI
GESU, 1572. JAC. CHITI.]

[Illustration: FROM THE RAPPRESENTAZIONE DI S. CRISTINA, 1555.]

I pass on to another point as to which I think the Florentine
woodcutters have something to teach us. If we put pictures into our
books, why should not the pictures be framed? A hard single line round
the edge of a woodcut is a poor set-off to it, often conflicting with
the lines in the picture itself, and sometimes insufficiently emphatic
as a frame to make us acquiesce in what seems a mere cutting away a
portion from a larger whole. Our Florentine friends knew better. Here
(pp. xiv-xv), for instance, are two scenes, from some unidentified
romance, which in 1572 and 1555 respectively (by which time they must
have been about fifty and sixty years old) appeared in Florentine
religious chapbooks, with which they have nothing to do. The little
borders are simple enough, but they are sufficiently heavy to carry off
the blacks which the artist (according to what is the true method of
woodcutting) has left in his picture, and we are much less inclined to
grumble at the window being cut in two than we should be if the cut
were made by a simple line instead of quite firmly and with
determination by a frame.

[Illustration: FROM LORENZO DE' MEDICI'S LA NENCIA DA BARBERINO, S.A.]

I have given these two Florentine cuts, much the worse for wear though
they be, with peculiar pleasure, because I take them to be the exact
equivalents of the pictures in our illustrated novels of the present
day of which Miss Sketchley gives several examples in her third paper.
They are good examples of what may be called the diffused
characterization in which our modern illustrators excel. Every single
figure is good and has its own individuality, but there is no attempt
to illustrate a central character at a decisive moment. Decisive
moments, it may be objected, do not occur (except for epicures) at
polite dinner parties, or during the'mauvais quart d'heure,' which
might very well be the subject of our first picture. But it seems to me
that modern illustrators often deliberately shun decisive moments,
preferring to illustrate their characters in more ordinary moods, and
perhaps the Florentines did this also. Where the illustrator is not a
great artist the discretion is no doubt a wise one. What for instance
could be more charming, more completely successful than this little
picture of a messenger bringing a lady a flower, no doubt with a
pleasing message with it? In our next cut the artist has been much more
ambitious. Preceded by soldiers with their long spears, followed by the
hideously masked 'Battuti' who ministered to the condemned, Ippolito is
being led to execution. As he passes her door, Dianora flings herself
on him in a last embrace. The lady's attitude