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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

LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER 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 Gesù" 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 is good, but the woodcutter, alas, has made the lover look merely bored. In book-illustration, as in life, who would avoid failure must know his limitations.

Whatever shortcomings these Florentine pictures may have in themselves, or whatever they may lose when examined by eyes only accustomed to modern work, I hope that it will be conceded that as character-illustrations they are far from being despicable. Nevertheless the true home of character-illustration in the fifteenth century was rather in Germany than in Italy. Inferior to the Italian craftsmen in delicacy and in producing a general impression of grace (partly, perhaps, because their work was intended to be printed in conjunction with far heavier type) the German artists and woodcutters often showed extraordinary power in rendering facial expression. My favourite example of this is a little picture from the 'De Claris Mulieribus' of Boccaccio printed at Ulm in 1473, on one side of which the Roman general Scipio is shown with uplifted finger bidding the craven Massinissa put away his Carthaginian wife, while on the other Sophonisba is watched by a horror-stricken messenger as she drains the poison her husband sends her. But there is a naïveté about the figure of Scipio which has frequently provoked laughter from audiences at lantern-lectures, so my readers must look up this illustration for themselves at the British Museum, or elsewhere. I fall back on a picture of a card-party from a 'Guldin Spiel' printed at Augsburg in 1472, in which the hesitation of the woman whose turn it is to play, the rather supercilious interest of her vis-à-vis, and the calm confidence of the third hand, not only ready to play his best, but sure that his best will be good enough, are all shown with absolute simplicity, but in a really masterly manner. Facial expression such as this in modern work seems entirely confined to children's books and caricature, but one would sacrifice a good deal of our modern prettiness for a few more touches of it.

The last point to which I would draw attention is that a good deal more use might be made of quite small illustrations. The full-pagers are, no doubt, impressive and dignified, but I always seem to see written on the back of them the artist's contract to supply so many drawings of such and such size at so many guineas apiece, and to hear him groaning as he runs through his text trying to pick out the full complement of subjects. The little sketch is more popular in France than in England, and there is a suggestion of joyous freedom about it which is very captivating. Such small pictures did not suit the rather heavy touch of the German woodcutters; in Italy they were much more popular. At Venice a whole series of large folio books were illustrated in this way in the last decade of the fifteenth century, two editions of Malermi's translation of the Bible, Lives of the Saints, an Italian Livy, the Decamerone of Boccaccio, the Novels of Masuccio, and other works, all in the vernacular. At Ferrara, under Venetian influence, an edition of the Epistles of S. Jerome was printed in 1497, with upwards of one hundred and eighty such little cuts, many of them illustrating incidents of monastic life. Both at Venice and Ferrara the cuts are mainly in outline, and when they are well cut and two or three come together on a page the effect is delightful. In France the vogue of the small cut took a very special form. By far the most famous series of early French illustrated books is that of the Hours of the Blessed Virgin (with which went other devotions, making fairly complete prayer-books for lay use), which were at their best for some fifteen years reckoning from 1488. These Hour-Books usually contained some fifteen large illustrations, but their most notable features are to be found in the borders which surround every page. On the outer and lower margins these borders are as a rule about an inch broad, sometimes more, so that they can hold four or five little pictures of about an inch by an inch and a half on the outer margin, and one rather larger one at the foot of the page. The variety of the pictures designed to fill these spaces is almost endless. Figures of the Saints and their emblems and illustrations of the games or occupations suited to each month fill the margins of the Calendar. To surround the text of the book there is a long series of pictures of incidents in the life of Christ, with parallel scenes from the Old Testament, scenes from the lives of Joseph and Job, representations of the Virtues, the Deadly Sins being overcome by the contrary graces, the Dance of Death, and for pleasant relief woodland and pastoral scenes and even grotesques. The popularity of these prayer-books was enormous, new editions being printed almost every month, with the result that the illustrations were soon worn out and had frequently to be replaced. I have often wished, if only for the sake of small children in sermon time, that our English prayer-books could be similarly illustrated. An attempt to do this was made in the middle of the last century, but it was pretentious and unsuccessful. The great difficulty in the way of a new essay lies in the popularity of very small prayer-books, with so little margin and printed on such thin paper as hardly to admit of border cuts. The difficulty is real, but should not be insuperable, and I hope that some bold illustrator may soon try his hand afresh.