Part 3

One may group the names of Charles Ricketts, C. H. Shannon, T. Sturge Moore, Lucien Pissarro, and Reginald Savage together in memory of 'The Dial,' where the activity of five original artists first became evident, though, save in the case of Mr. Ricketts and Mr. Shannon, no continuance of the classification is possible. The first number of 'The Dial' (1889) had a cover design cut on wood by Mr. C. H. Shannon--afterwards replaced by the design of Mr. Ricketts. Twelve designs by Mr. Ricketts may be said to represent the transitional--or a transitional--phase of his art, from the earlier work in magazines, which he disregards, to the reticent expression of 'Vale Press' illustrations. In 1891 the first book decorated by these artists appeared, 'The House of Pomegranates,' by Oscar Wilde. There was, however, nothing in this book to suggest the form their joint talent was to take. Many delightful designs by Mr. Ricketts, somewhat marred by heaviness of line, and full-page illustrations by Mr. Shannon, printed in an almost invisible, nondescript colour, contained no suggestion of 'Daphnis and Chloe.'

The second 'Dial'(1892) contained Mr. Ricketts' first work as his own wood-engraver, and in the following year the result of eleven months' joint work by Mr. Ricketts and Mr. Shannon was shown in the publication of 'Daphnis and Chloe,' with thirty-seven woodcuts by the artists. Fifteen of the pictures were sketched by Mr. Shannon and revised and drawn on the wood by Mr. Ricketts, who also engraved the initials. It is a complete achievement of individuality subordinated to an ideal. Here and there one can affirm that Mr. Shannon drew this figure, composed this scene, Mr. Ricketts that; but generally the hand is not to be known. The ideal of their inspiration--the immortal 'Hypnerotomachia'--seems equally theirs, equally potent over their individuality. Speaking with diffidence, it would seem as though Mr. Shannon's idea of the idyll were more naïve and humorous. Incidents beside the main theme of the pastoral loves of young Daphnis and Chloe--the household animals, other shepherds--are touched with humorous intent. Mr. Ricketts shows more suavity, and, as in the charming double-page design of the marriage feast, a more lyrical realization of delight and shepherd joys.

The 'Hero and Leander' of 1894 is a less elaborate, and, on the whole, a finer production. I must speak of the illustrations only, lest consideration of Vale Press publications should fill the remaining space at my disposal. Obviously the attenuated type of these figures shows Mr. Ricketts' ideal of the human form as a decoration for a page of type. The severe reticence he imposes on himself is in order to maintain the balance between illustrations and text. One has only to turn to illustrations to Lord de Tabley's 'Poems,' published in 1893, to see with what eager imagination he realizes a subject, how strong a gift he has for dramatic expression. That a more persuasive beauty of form was once his wont, much of his early and transitional work attests. But I do not think his power to achieve beauty need be defended. After the publication of 'Hero and Leander,' Mr. Shannon practically ceased wood-engraving for the illustration of books, though, as the series of roundel designs in the recent exhibition of his work proved, he has not abandoned nor ceased to go forward in the art.

'The Sphinx,' a poem by Oscar Wilde, 'built, decorated and bound' by Mr. Ricketts--but without woodcuts--was published in 1894, just after 'Hero and Leander,' and designs for a magnificent edition of 'The King's Quhair' were begun. Some of these are in 'The Dial,' as are also designs for William Adlington's translation of 'Cupide and Psyches' in 'The Pageant,' 'The Dial,' and 'The Magazine of Art.' The edition of the work published by the new Vale Press in 1897, is not that projected at this time. It contains roundel designs in place of the square designs first intended. These roundels are, I think, the finest achievement of Mr. Ricketts as an original wood-engraver. The engraving reproduced shows of what quality are both line and form, how successful is the placing of the figure within the circle. On the page they are what the artist would have them be. With the beginning of the sequence of later Vale Press books--books printed from founts designed by Mr. Ricketts--a consecutive account is impossible, but the frontispiece to the 'Milton' and the borders and initials designed by Mr. Ricketts, must be mentioned. As a designer of book-covers only one failure is set down to Mr. Ricketts, and that was ten years ago, in the cover to 'The House of Pomegranates.'

Mr. Reginald Savage's illustrations to some tales from Wagner lack the force of designs in 'The Pageant,' and of woodcuts in Essex House publications. Of M. Lucien Pissarro, in an article overcrowded with English illustrators, I cannot speak. His fame is in France as the forerunner of his art, and we in England know his coloured wood-engravings, his designs for 'The Book of Ruth and Esther' and for 'The Queen of the Fishes,' printed at his press at Epping, but included among Vale Press books.

'The Centaur,' 'The Bacchant,' 'The Metamorphoses of Pan,' 'Siegfried'--young Siegfried, wood-nurtured, untamed, setting his lusty strength against the strength of the brutes, hearing the bird-call then, and following the white bird to issues remote from savage life--these are subjects realized by the imagination of Mr. T. Sturge Moore. There are few artists illustrating books to-day whose work is more unified, imaginatively and technically. It is some years since first Mr. Moore's wood-engravings attracted notice in 'The Dial' and 'The Pageant,' and the latest work from his graver--finer, more rhythmic in composition though it be--shows no change in ideals, in the direction of his talent. He has said, I think, that the easiest line for the artist is the true basis of that artist's work, and it would seem as though much deliberation in finding that line for himself had preceded any of the work by which he is known. The wood-engraving of Mr. Sturge Moore is of some importance. Always the true understanding of his material, the unhesitating realization of his subject, combine to produce the effect of inevitable line and form, of an inevitable setting down of forms in expression of the thought within. Only that gives the idea of formality, and Mr. 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 Evergreen,' that 'Northern Seasonal,' represented the pictorial outlook of an interesting group of artists--Robert Burns, Andrew K. Womrath, John Duncan, and James Cadenhead, for example--and the racial element, as well as their own individuality, distinguishes the work of Mr. W. B. Macdougall and Mr. J. J. Guthrie of 'The Elf.' Mr. Macdougall has been known as a book-illustrator since 1896, when 'The Book of Ruth,' with decorated borders showing the fertility of his designing power, and illustrations that were no less representative of a unique use of material, appeared. The conventionalized landscape backgrounds, the long, straightly-draped women, seemed strange enough as a reading of the Hebrew pastoral, with its close kinship to the natural life of the free children of earth. Their unimpassioned faces, unspontaneous gestures, the artificiality of the whole impression, were undoubtedly a new reading of the ancient charm of the story. Two books in 1897, and 'Isabella' and 'The Shadow of Love,' 1898, showed beyond doubt that the manner was not assumed, that it was the expression of Mr. Macdougall's sense of beauty. The decorations to 'Isabella' are more elaborate than to 'Ruth,' and inventive handling of natural forms is as marked. Again, the faces are de-characterized in accordance with the desire to make the whole figure the symbol of passion, and that without emphasis. Mr. J. J. Guthrie is hardly among book-illustrators, since 'Wedding Bells' of 1895 does not represent Mr. Guthrie, nor does the child's book of the following year, while the illustrations to Edgar Allan Poe's 'Poems' are still, I think, being issued from the Pear Tree Press in single numbers. His treatment of landscape is inventive, his rhythmic arrangements, his effects of white line on black, are based on a real sense of the beauty of earth, of tall trees and wooded hills, of mysterious moon-brightness and shade in the leafy depths of the woodlands.

Mr. Granville Fell made his name known in 1896 by his illustrations to 'The Book of Job.' In careful detail, drawn with fidelity, never obtrusive, his art is pre-Raphaelite. He touches Japanese ideals in the rendering of flower-growth and animals, but the whole effect of his decorative illustrations is far enough away from the art of Japan. In the 'Book of Job' he had a subject sufficient to dwarf a very vital imaginative sense by its grandeur. In the opinion of competent critics Mr. Granville Fell proved more than the technical distinction of his work by the manner in which he fulfilled his purpose. The solid black and white, the definite line of these drawings, were laid aside for the sympathetic medium of pencil in 'The Song of Solomon' (1897). Again, his conception is invariably dramatic, and never crudely dramatic, robust, with no trace of morbid or sentimental thought about it. The garden, the wealth of vineyard and of royal pleasure ground, is used as a background to comely and gracious figures. His other work, illustrative of children's books and of legend, the cover and title-page to Mr. W. B. Yeats's 'Poems,' shows the same definite yet restrained imagination.

Mr. Patten Wilson is somewhat akin to Mr. Granville Fell in the energy and soundness of his conceptions. Each of these artists is, as we know, a colourist, delighting in brilliant and iridescent colour-schemes, yet in black and white they do not seek to suggest colour. Mr. Patten Wilson's illustrations to Coleridge's 'Poems' have the careful fulness of drawings well thought out, and worked upon with the whole idea realised in the imagination. He has observed life carefully for the purposes of his art. But it is rather in rendering the circumstance of poems, such as 'The Ancient Mariner,' or, in a Chaucer illustration--Constance on the lonely ship--that he shows his grasp of the subject, than by any expression of the spiritual terror or loneliness of the one living man among the dead, the solitary woman on strange seas.

Few decorative artists habitually use 'wash' rather than line. Among these, however, is Mr. Weguelin, who has illustrated Anacreon in a manner to earn the appreciation of Greek scholars, and his illustrations to Hans Andersen have had a wider and not less appreciative reception. His drawings have movement and atmosphere. Mr. W. E. F. Britten also uses this medium with fluency, as is shown by his successful illustrations to Mr. Swinburne's 'Carols of the Year' in the 'Magazine of Art' in 1892-3. Since that time his version of 'Undine,' and illustrations to Tennyson's 'Early Poems,' have shown the same power of graceful composition and sympathy with his subject.

II. SOME OPEN-AIR ILLUSTRATORS.

OPEN-AIR illustration is less influenced by the tradition of Rossetti and of the romanticists of 'the sixties' than any other branch of illustrative art. The reason is obvious. Of all illustrators, the illustrator of open-air books has least concern with the interpretation of literature, and is most concerned with recording facts from observation. It is true that usually he follows where a writer goes, and studies garden, village or city, according to another man's inclination. But the road they take, the cities and wayside places, are as obvious to the one as to the other. 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 traceable effect on modern open-air illustration. Nor are the landscape drawings in works such as 'Wayside Poesies,' or 'Pictures of English Landscape,' at the beginning of the style or styles--formal or picturesque--most in vogue at present. Birket Foster has no followers; the pensive landscape is not suited to holiday excursion books; and, though Mr. 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.

With few exceptions the open-air illustrators of to-day began their work and took their place in public favour, and in the estimation of critics, after 1890. Mr. Joseph Pennell, it is true, had been making sketches in England, in France, and in Italy for some years; Mr. Railton had made some preliminary illustrations; Mr. Alfred Parsons illustrated 'Old Songs' with Mr. Abbey in 1889; and Mr. Fulleylove contributed to 'The Picturesque Mediterranean,' and published his 'Oxford' drawings, in the same year. Still, with a little elasticity, 'the nineties' covers the past activity of these men. The only important exception is Sir George Reid, President of the Royal Scottish Academy, much of whose illustrative work belongs to the years prior to 1890. The one subject for regret in connection with Sir George Reid's landscape illustrations is that the chapter is closed. He makes no more drawings with pen-and-ink, and the more one is content with those he has made, the less does the quantity seem sufficient. Those who know only the portraits on which Sir George Reid's reputation is firmly based will find in his landscape illustrations a new side to his art. Here, as in portraiture, he sees distinctly and records without prejudice the characteristics of his subject. He renders what he sees, and he knows how to see. His conception being clear to himself, he avoids vagueness and obscurity, finding, with apparent ease, plain modes of expression. A straight observer of men and of the country-side, there is this directness and perspicuity about his work, whether he paints a portrait, or makes pen-drawings of the village worthies of 'Pyketillim' parish, or draws Pyketillim Kirk, small and white and plain, with the sparse trees beside it, or great river or city of his native land.

But in these pen-stroke landscapes, while the same clear-headed survey, the same logical record of facts, is to be observed as in his work as a portrait painter, there is besides a charm of manner that brings the indefinable element into one's appreciation of excellent work. Of course this is not to estimate these drawings above the portraits of Sir George Reid. That would be absurd. But he draws a country known to him all his life, and unconsciously, from intimate memory, he suggests more than actual observation would discover. This identification of past knowledge with the special scrutiny of a subject to be rendered is not usually possible in portraiture. The 'portrait in-time' is a question of occasion as well as of genius.

The first book in which his inimitable pen-drawing of landscape can be properly studied is the illustrated edition of 'Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk, in the Parish of Pyketillim,' published in 1880. Here the illustrations are facsimile reproductions by Amand-Durand's heliogravure process, and their delicacy is perfectly seen. These drawings are of the Aberdeenshire country-folk and country, the native land of the artist; though, as a lad in Aberdeen, practising lithography by day, and seizing opportunities for independent art when work was over, the affairs and doings of Gushetneuk, of Smiddyward, of Pyketillim, or the quiet of Benachie when the snow lies untrodden on its slopes, were things outside the city of work.

It is as difficult to praise these drawings intelligibly to those who have not seen them, as it is unnecessary to enforce their charm on those who have. Unfortunately, a reproduction of one of them is not possible, and admirable as is the drawing from 'Royal Edinburgh,' it is in subject and in treatment distinct from the 'Gushetneuk' and 'North of Scotland' illustrations. The 'Twelve Sketches of Scenery and Antiquities on the Great North of Scotland Railway,' issued in 1883, were made in 1881, and have the same characteristics as the 'Gushetneuk' landscapes. The original drawings for the engraved illustrations in 'The Life of a Scotch Naturalist,' belonging to 1876--drawings made because the artist was 'greatly interested' in the story of Thomas Edward--must have been of the same delicate force, and the splendid volumes of plates illustrating the 'River Clyde,' and the 'River Tweed,' issued by the Royal Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Scotland, contain more of his fine work. It was this society, that, in the difficult days following the artist's abandonment of Aberdeen and lithography for Edinburgh and painting, gave him the opportunity, by the purchase of two of his early landscapes, for study in Holland and in Paris. There is something of Bosboom in a rendering of a church interior such as 'The West Kirk,' but of Israels, who was his master at the Hague, there is nothing to be seen in Sir George Reid's illustrations. 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.

The print-black of naked boughs against pale sky, a snow-covered country where roofs are white, and the shelter of the woods is thin after the passing of the autumn winds--this black and white is the black and white of most of Sir George Reid's studies of northern landscape. To call it black and white is to stretch the octave and omit all the notes of the scale. Pure white of plastered masonry, or of snow-covered roof or field in the bleak winter light, pure black in some deep-set window, in the figure of a passer-by, or in the bare trees, are used with the finesse of a colourist. Look at the 'Pyketillim Kirk' drawing in 'Johnny Gibb.' Between the white of the long church wall, and the black of the little groups of village folk in the churchyard, how quiet and easy is the transition, and how true to colour is the result. Of the Edinburgh drawings the same may be said; but, except in facsimile reproduction, one has to know the scale of tone used by Sir George Reid in order to see the original effect where the printed page shows unmodified black and white. In 'Holyrood Castle' the values are fairly well kept, and the rendering of the ancient building in the deep snow, without false emphasis, yet losing nothing of emphatic effect, shows the dominant intellectual quality of the artist's work.