Part 6

Another method is used for half-tone work. A photograph is mounted upon cardboard, and may be worked upon in brushwork with body-colour to any extent, either for lightening the picture or for making it darker. For working upon the ordinary silver-print an admixture of ox-gall must be used or the pigments will not “take” upon the sensitized paper.[1] The illustration, _The Ambulatory, Dore Abbey_, is from a photograph, worked upon in this manner. The photo was so dark and indefinite that something was necessary to be done to show the springing of the arches and the relation of one pier to another. Chinese white was used in the manner described above, and the arches outlined in places by scratching with the sharp point of a penknife.

[1] Refer to _The Real Japan_, by Henry Norman. Fisher Unwin, 1892. The book is freely illustrated with half-tone blocks made from photographs. The photographs were all extensively worked upon with body-colour in this manner. Indeed, the brushwork may clearly be discerned in the reproductions.

Tinted cards may be used in drawing for half-tone, but yellow tints must be avoided, for obvious photographic reasons; and blue tints, photographically, are practically pure white. If tinted cardboard is used at all, it should be in tints of grey or brown.

A very satisfactory way of working for half-tone is to work in oil monochrome. The reproductions from oil sketches come very well indeed by half-tone processes: full and vigorous. The photo-engraver always objects to oil because of its gloss, but this can be obviated by mixing your colour with turpentine or benzine, which give a dull surface. The sketch shown on p. 130 was made in this way. It was a smoothly worked sketch, with no aggressive brush-marks, but it may be noted that brush-marks come beautifully by this process: if anything, rather stronger than in the original, because the shadows cast by them reproduce as well. But if you sketch in oils for reproduction, be chary of vigorous brushwork in white: it comes unpleasantly prominent in the block.

In giving instructions for the reproduction, and reduction, of drawings, the measurement in one direction of the reproduction desired should be plainly indicated thus: ← 4½ inches →. Unless absolutely unavoidable, drawings should not be sent marked “½ size,” “⅓ scale,” and so on, because these terms are apt to mislead. People not accustomed to measurements are very uncertain in their understanding of them, and, absurd as it may seem to those who deal in mensuration, they very frequently take ½ scale and ½ size as synonymous terms; while ½ scale is really ¼ size, and so on, in proportion.

The proportions a drawing will assume when reduced may be ascertained in this way. You have, say, a narrow upright drawing, as shown in the above diagram, and you want the width reduced to a certain measurement, but having marked this off are at a loss to know what height the reproduction will be. Supposing it to be a pen-drawing, vignetted, as most pen-drawings are; in the first place, light pencil lines touching the farthest projections of the drawing should be ruled to each of its four sides, meeting accurately at the angles A, B, C, D. This frame being made, a diagonal line should be lightly ruled from upper to lower corner, either—as shown—from B to C, or from A to D. The measurement of the proposed reduction should then be marked off upon the base line at E, and a perpendicular line ruled from it to meet the diagonal. The point of contact, F, gives the height that was to be found, and a horizontal line from F to G completes the diagram, and gives the correct proportions of the block to be made.

It will readily be seen that large copies of small sketches can be made in exact proportions by a further application of the diagonal, but care should be taken to have all these lines drawn scrupulously accurate, because the slightest deviation throws the proportions all out.

STYLES AND MANNER.

Pen-drawing is ruled by expediency more, perhaps, than any art. I shall not say that one method is more right than another in the management of textures, or in the elaboration or mere suggestion of detail, for line work is, to begin with, a purely arbitrary rendering of tones. There is nothing like line in nature. Take up an isolated brick; it does not suggest line in any way. Build it up with others into a wall, and you can in pen and ink render that wall in many ways that will be equally convincing and right. It may be expressed in terms of splatter-work, which can be made to represent admirably a wall where the bricks have become welded into an homogeneous mass, individually indistinguishable by age, or of vertical or horizontal lines that may or may not take account of each individual brick and the joints of the mortar that binds the courses together. Crosshatching, though a cheap expedient and a decaying convention, may be used. But to lose sight of ordinary atmospheric conditions is no more privileged in pen-work than in paint. This is not by any means unnecessary or untimely advice, though it should be. The fact of using a pen instead of a brush does not empower anybody to play tricks with the solar system, though one sees it constantly done. One continually sees in pen-drawing the laws of light and shade set at naught, and nobody says anything against it—perhaps it looks smart. Certainly the effect is novel, and novelty is a powerful factor in anything. But to draw a wall shining with a strong diffused light which throws a great black shadow, is contrary to art and nature both. “Nature,” according to Mr. Whistler, “may be ‘creeping up,’ but she has not reached that point yet. When one sees suns setting behind the east ends of cathedrals, with other vagaries of that sort, one simply classes such things with that amusing erratum of Mr. Rider Haggard’s, in which he describes a ship ‘steaming out of the mouth of the Thames, shaping her course toward the red ball of the setting sun.’” But though the instance is amusing, the custom is apt to pall.

Some of the American pen-draughtsmen who contribute to the _Century_ are exceedingly clever, and their handling extremely personal; but after a time this excessive personality ceases to charm, and, for one thing, these young bloods are curiously narrow in their choice of the masters from whom they are only too pleased to derive. Mr. Brennan is, perhaps, the most curiously original of these men. He is the man who has shown most convincingly that the inked thumb is the most instant and effective instrument wherewith to render velvet in a pen-drawing. You cannot fail to be struck with his method; his manner is entirely personal, and yet, after a time, it worries one into intolerance.

It is the same with that convention, founded, apparently, by Mr. Herbert Railton, which has had a long run of some nine or ten years. It was a convention in pictorial architecture that had nothing except a remarkably novel technique to recommend it. The illustrator invited us rather to see how “pretty” he could render an old building, than how nearly he could show it us as it stood. He could draw an elevation in a manner curiously feminine, but he could only repeat himself and his trees; his landscapes were insults to the imagination. Nothing inspired him to achievements beyond pictorial confectionery.

This convention has had its day, although in the mean while so strikingly mannered was it that it appealed to almost all the young and undiscriminating men whose work lay in the rendering of pictorial architecture. “Go to,” said the Average Artist in “the picturesque,” “I will sit down and make a drawing in the manner of Mr. Railton.” And he did, generally, it may be observed, from a photograph, and in the undistracting seclusion of his own room. This sort of artistic influenza, which nearly all the younger men caught at one time or another, was very dangerous to true art. But it could not possibly last; it was so resourceless. Always we were invited to glance at the same sky and an unchanging rendering of buildings, whether old or new, in the same condition of supposedly picturesque decrepitude. Everything in this mannerism wore the romantic air of the Moated Grange and radiated Mrs. Radcliffe, dungeons, spectres, and death, whether the subject was a ruinated castle or a new warehouse. All this has grown offensive: we want more sobriety. This apotheosis of raging skies and falling smuts, of impending chimneys, crumbling stones, and tottering walls was only a personal manner. Its imitators have rendered it ridiculous.

The chief merits of such topographical and archæological drawings are that they be truthful and reverent. If art is ever to approach the documentary stage, to be used as the record of facts, it is in this matter. To flood the country with representations of old buildings that are not so much pictures of them as exercises in an exaggerated personal manner, is to deserve ill at the hands of all who would have preserved to them the appearance of places that are passing away. The illustrations to such books, say, as Mr. Loftie’s _Inns of Court_ or his _Westminster Abbey_ are of no historic or artistic value whatever; they are merely essays in a wild and weird manner of which we are tired in the originator of it; which we loathe in those who imitate its worst faults. We require a sober style in this work, after being drunken so long with its so-called picturesqueness, which, rightly considered, is but impressionism, ill seen and uninstructed.

No one has exercised so admirable a method, whether in landscape, in portraiture, or in architecture, as Sir George Reid, but his work is not readily accessible for the study it invites. It is scholarly and expressive, eloquent of the character of his subject, free from redundancies. It is elaborate or suggestive on due occasion, and, although the style is so distinguished, you always feel that every drawing by this stylist is really and truly a representation of the person, place, or thing he has drawn, and not a mere pretext for an individual handling; no braggart assumption of “side.”

The dangers of following in a slavish manner the eccentricities of well-known men are exemplified in the work of those illustrators who ape the whimsies of the impressionist Degas. What Degas may do may nearly always be informed with distinction, but the illustrators who reproduce, not his genius, but an outstanding feature of it, are singularly narrow. If Degas has painted a picture of the play with the orchestra in the foreground and the bass-viol looming immensely up three parts of the composition, the third-rate impressionists also lug in a bass-viol; if he has shown a ballet-girl with apparently only one leg, they always draw one-legged _coryphées_, and remain incapable of conceiving them as bipeds.

Caldecott is a dangerous man to copy. He was, first and last, a draughtsman, and a draughtsman whose every dot and line were eloquent. There is no technique that you can lay hold of in his work, but only characterization, which is more frequently caricature. Caldecott would never have made a serious illustrator; in burlesque he was immense, and no artist could desire a better monument than his _Picture Books_. His reputation has fallen greatly of late, notwithstanding the delightful _John Gilpin_ and the others of that inimitable series; but his repute had stood higher to-day if his private letters to his friends and other unconsidered trifles had never been collected and published, ghoul-like, after his death. Pandering to the market has almost killed Caldecott’s repute, for the undiscriminating public were invited to admire reproductions of hasty sketches never intended for publicity.

There is character in Mr. Phil May’s work, and humour, surprisingly set forth with a marvellous economy of line. His is a gay and festive muse, that is most at home where the tide of life runs strongest and deepest, with wine-bubbles breaking “most notoriously,” as Mr. Kipling might say, upon its surface; with theatres, music-halls, and Gaiety bars ranged along its banks in profusion. There is much human nature in Mr. May. Also in Mr. Greiffenhagen; but a different kind. He has gone chiefly to the boudoir and the drawing-room for his subjects, and has rendered them with a resolute impressionism and a thorough discarding of cross-hatch that make a lasting impression with the beholder. There is a certain Christmas number, 1892, of the _Lady’s Pictorial_ with memorable drawings by him; they are in wash and lithographic crayon, but may only be noted here in passing. He has a gift of novel, unhackneyed composition, and he sees the figure for himself, and draws it in with a daring but right and striking manner.

There has arisen of late years a school of illustration peculiarly English—the so to call it “Decorative School.” It is a new and higher incarnation of the pre-Raphaelite movement. The brotherhood did good work, not at all commensurate with the amount of attention it received, but beyond all praise in the conventions it founded; and, historically considered, Rossetti and his fellows are great, and Blake is greater, because he was an inspired visionary with a kink in his brain, out of which flowed imaginings the most gorgeous and original. But the decorative men of to-day are doing even better work—masculine, convincing, racy of this soil. It is chiefly admirable because it gives us, in these days of “actuality,” of photography, and reproductions direct from photographs, a new outlook upon life. English decorative illustration is, with but few exceptions, possessed of a fine romantic fancy, poetic, and at the same time healthy and virile and eminently sane, and it will live. There is great hope for the future of this school, while the imported styles of Vierge and Rico and other masters used to sunnier skies, admirable beyond expression in their own places, droop and languish in the nor’-easterly winds of England, and their tradition becomes attenuated in passing through so many hands. Their descendants, from Abbey down to Pennell and the whole crowd of those who love not wisely but too well, have brought these fine exotic conventions down to the merest shadows of shades.

Mr. Walter Crane has, any time these last ten years, been the great Apostle of Decoration _plus_ Socialism. It has been given him in this wise to make (in theory) the lion to lie down with the lamb (and yet for the lamb to remain outside the lion with his destiny of mutton still in perspective), and he has proclaimed in parables the possibility of mixing oil and water. He has perpetrated a cartoon for the Socialistic, if not Anarchist, First of May, and therein he has striven to decoratively treat the British Workman. But although Mr. Crane has a pretty trick of decoration, he was worsted in that bout, for the British Plumber or the Irish Hodman is stubborn material for decoration, and their spouses as festal nymphs are not convincing visions. Again, he has achieved a weird series of cartoons upon the walls of the Red Cross Hall in praise of Democratic Valour, in which he has unsuccessfully attempted to conventionalize rescuing firemen and heroic police. Such bravery deserved a better fate. Also Mr. Crane has written much revolutionary verse in praise of brotherhood and equality, and now he has accepted the mastership of a Governmental art school, under the direction of that not very revolutionary body, the Committee of Council for Education (Science and Art Department). Decoration should be made of sterner stuff! His industry has been prodigious. Even now a bibliography of him is in the making; and yet shall it be said that it is difficult in the great mass of his work to find many items altogether satisfactory? It may be feared it is so. For one thing, his anatomy is habitually at fault; and yet has he not informed an interviewer from the _Pall Mall Gazette_ that long years since he had ceased to draw from the model?

That wheel within wheels, the so-called Birmingham School, is attracting attention just now, and men begin to prophesy of deeds from out the midlands. But once upon a time there was a Newlyn School, was there not? Where is that party now? Its foremost members have won to the honours of the Royal Academy, and its mission is done. But it is time to talk of schools when work has been done. Of course it is very logical that good work should come from Birmingham. The sense of beauty is stronger in those who live in midst of dirt and grime. Instance the Glasgow school of impressionists. But the evidence of Birmingham at present is but a touching follow-on to the styles of Mr. Crane and Mr. Sumner, and to the ornament of Mr. Lewis Day. Indeed, the decorative work of the students at the National Art Training Schools may be put in the formula of one-third Crane, and the remaining two-thirds Heywood Sumner and Lewis Day, an amalgam ill-considered and poorly wrought.

But indeed Mr. Heywood Sumner’s work has a note of distinction. He does not confuse Socialist propaganda with ornament, and is not always striving to show with emphasis of line in pen and ink that Capital is the natural enemy of Labour, and that a silk hat on a rich man’s head may justly be defined as so many loaves of bread (or pots of beer) in the wrong place. That is for Mr. Crane and Mr. William Morris to prove; and, really, anything wicked can be proven of such a hideous object. But the onus of bringing the guilt home to it and the wearer of it does not produce good art. Indeed, decorative art is not catholic; it has no sort of commerce with everyday life or with the delineation of any times so recent as the early years of the Victorian era. Its field lies only in poetic imaginings, in fancy, and, most emphatically, not in fact. When Mr. Crane, for instance, takes to idealising the heroic acts of policemen, the impulse does credit to his heart, but the results are not flattering to his head. Fortunately he does not often go these lengths, and no one else of the decorative idea has been equally courageous, save indeed a Mr. Beardsley, who “decoratively” illustrated Orpheus at the Lyceum Theatre; and those illustrations in the _Pall Mall Budget_, March 16, 1893, certainly were very dreadful.

An exception to the general beauty of recent decorative work is the incomprehensible and at the same time unlovely practice of this eccentric. Mr. Charles Ricketts’ work, although its meaning may often be so subtly symbolical that it is not to be understood except by the elect,—never without the aid of a glossary of symbolism,—is always graced with interesting technicalities, and his draughtsmanship is of the daintiest; but what of meaning is conveyed to the mind and what of beauty to the eye in this work of Mr. Beardsley’s, that has been somewhat spoken of lately? It has imagination certainly, but morbid and neurotic, with a savour of Bethlehem Hospital and the charnel-house; it is eccentric apparently with an eccentricity that clothes bad draughtsmanship, and incongruous with an incongruity that suggests the uninstructed enthusiasm of the provincial mind. It exhibits a patchwork-quilt kind of eclecticism, born of a fleeting glance at Durer; of a nodding acquaintance with all prominent modern decoration and an irrelevant _soupçon_ of Renaissance ornament; like the work of a lithographic draughtsman, a designer of bill-heads, roaming fancy free.

The practice of Mr. Selwyn Image has a devotional and meditative cast. He has made some remarkable drawings for the _Hobby Horse_ in the manner of the missal-painters, both in spirit and execution, and he steadfastly keeps the art of the monkish scriptorium in view, and seems to echo the sentiments of the rapturous maidens in _Patience_, “Let us be Early English ere it is too late.” And he _is_ Early English to excellent purpose.

It is a gross error to hold that decorative art is impossible under present social conditions, and unpardonable to attempt to link decoration and design to Socialist propaganda. Art of all possible application never flourished so well as under the feudal system, and never sank so low as it did when Democracy and the Trouser came in together.

The great advantages of Art over Photography are its personal qualities. The camera is impersonal, and will ever be a scientific instrument. You can, like the ingenious Mr. H. P. Robinson, pose figures, and with a combination of negatives concoct a composition which is some sort of cousin-german to a picture; but if you can do all this, you might go a little farther and make a picture without the aid of a camera. It would be personal, and, without a signature, signed all over with the unmistakable mark of style or manner, like Constable’s paintings.

It seems unlikely that any mechanical processes, save the strictly autographic, which reproduce line, will be of permanent artistic value. No photogravure will be sought for and prized in years to come as the old etchings and mezzotints are valued. Those elaborate photogravure plates from popular or artistic pictures (the terms are not synonymous) which crowd the print-sellers’ shops to-day, at five or ten guineas, will not long hence be accounted dear at so many shillings, simply because they lack the personal note. Meanwhile, mezzotints and etchings, other than the “commercial” etching, will become inversely expensive.

In that brackish flood of “bitter cries” to which we have been subjected of late years, the wail of the wood-engraver was easily to be distinguished, and we heard that his occupation was gone. But has it? No, nor will it go. No tint nor half-tone process can ever render sufficiently well the wash drawings that the best engravers render so admirably, with an entire subjection of their own individuality unthought of twenty years ago. The wood-engraver, as one who imposes restrictions upon technique, has had his day; but as a conscientious and skilful workman, who renders faithfully the personality of the artist he engraves, he flourishes, and will continue to flourish. Otherwise, there is no hope for him, let Mr. Linton say what he will. He will remain because he can preserve the personal note.

Half-tone processes are as tricky as Puck and as inconstant. You never know the exact result you will get from any given drawing. Half a dozen blocks from the same drawing will give, each one, a different result, because so much depends upon the fraction of a second, more or less, in making the negative; but all of them agree in presenting an aspect similar to that obtained on looking through the wire blind of some Philistine window upon the street. In all cases the edge, the poignancy of the subject, is taken off, and, in the case of the process-block, several intermediate tones go as well, with, frequently, the result of an unnatural lighting “that never was on land or sea,” and it may be hoped never will be.

No doubt half-tone processes will continue to be more and more widely used, chiefly because they are several times cheaper than a good wood engraving, and because, so far as mere documentary evidence goes, they are good enough for illustrated journalism. But for bookwork, for anything that is not calculated for an ephemeral consideration, half-tone processes are only to be used with the most jealous care.

As regards the half-tone processes employed to reproduce photographs, I take leave to say that no one will, a hundred years hence, prize them for any quality. The necessary reticulation of their surface subtracts from them something of the documentary value of the photograph, and, deriving directly from photographs, they have no personal or artistic interest.