Part 4

It does not seem as though Sir George Reid as an illustrator had any followers. He could hardly have imitators. If a man had delicacy and patience of observation and hand to produce drawings in this 'style,' his style would be his own and not an imitation. The number of artists in black and white who cannot plausibly be imitated is a small number. Sir George Reid is one, Mr. Alfred Parsons is another. Inevitably there are points of similarity in the work of artists, the foundation of whose black and white is colour, and who render the country-side with the understanding of the native, the understanding that is beyond knowledge. The difference between them only proves the essential similarity in the elements of their art; but that, like most paradoxes, is a truism. Mr. Parsons is, of course, thoroughly English in his art. He has the particularity of English nature-poets. Pastoral country is dear to him, and homesteads and flowering orchards, or villages with church tower half hidden by the elms, are part of his home country, the country he draws best. It is interesting to compare his drawings for 'The Warwickshire Avon' with the Scottish artist's drawings of the northern rivers. The drawings of Shakespeare's river show spring trees in a mist of green, leafy summer trees, meadowsweet and hayfields, green earth and blue sky, and a river of pleasure watering a pleasant country. If a man can draw English summer-time in colour with black and white, he must rank high as a landscape pen-draughtsman. Mr. Alfred Parsons has illustrated about a dozen books, and his work is to be found in 'Harper's Magazine,' and 'The English Illustrated' in early days. Two books, the 'Old Songs' and 'The Quiet Life,' published in 1887 and 1890, were illustrated by E. A. Abbey and Alfred Parsons. The drawings of landscape, of fruit and flowers, by Mr. Parsons, the Chippendale people and rooms of Mr. Abbey, fill two charming volumes with pictures whose pleasantness and happy art accord with the dainty verses of eighteenth-century sentiment. 'The Warwickshire Avon,' and another river book, 'The Danube from the Black Forest to the Sea,' illustrated in collaboration with the author, Mr. F. D. Millet, belong to 1892. The slight sketches--passing-by sketches--in these books, are among fortunate examples of a briefness that few men find compatible with grace and significance. Sketches, mostly in wash, of a farther and more decorated country--'Japan, the Far East, the Land of Flowers and of the Rising Sun, the country which for years it had been my dream to see and paint'--illustrate the artist's 'Notes in Japan,' 1895. In the written notes are memoranda of actual colour, of the green harmony of the Japanese summer--harmony culminating in the vivid tint of the rice fields--of sunset and butterflies, of delicate masses of azalea and drifts of cherry-blossom and wisteria, while in the drawings are all the flowers, the green hills and gray hamlets, and the temples, shrines and bridges, that make unspoilt Japan one of the perpetual motives of decorative art. Illustrations to Wordsworth--to a selected Wordsworth--gave the artist fortunate opportunities to render the England of English descriptive verse.

It is convenient to speak first of these painter-illustrators, because, in a sense, they stand alone among illustrative artists. Obviously, that is not to say that their work is worth more than the work of illustrators, who, conforming to the laws of 'process,' make their drawings with brain and hand that know how to win profit by concession. But popularisers of an effective topographical or architectural style are indirectly responsible for a large amount of work besides their own. In one sense a leader does not stand alone, and cannot be considered alone. Before, then, passing on to a draughtsman such as Mr. Joseph Pennell, again, to Mr. Railton, or to Mr. New, whose successful and unforgettable works have inspired many drawings in the books whereby authors pay for their holiday journeys, other artists, whose style is no convenience to the industrious imitator, may be considered. Another painter, known for his work in black and white, is Mr. John Fulleylove, whose 'Pictures of Classic Greek Landscape,' and drawings of 'Oxford,' show him to be one of the few men who see architecture steadily and whole, and who draw beautiful buildings as part of the earth which they help to beautify. Compare the Greek drawings with ordinary archæological renderings of pillared temples, and the difference in beauty and interest is apparent. In Mr. Fulleylove's drawings, the relation between landscape and architecture is never forgotten, and he draws both with the structural knowledge of a landscape painter, who is also by training an architect. In aim, his work is in accord with classical traditions; he discerns the classical spirit that built temples and carved statues in the beautiful places of the open-air, a spirit which has nothing of the museum setting about it. The 'Oxford' drawings show that Mr. Fulleylove can draw Gothic.

Though not a painter, Mr. William Hyde works 'to colour' in his illustrations, and is generally successful in rendering both colour and atmosphere. He has done little with the pen, and it is in wash drawings, reproduced by photogravure, that he is best to be studied. Of his early training as an engraver there is little to be seen in his work, though his appreciation of the range of tone existing between black and white may have developed from working within restrictions of monotone, when the colour sense was growing strong in him. At all events he can gradate from black to white with remarkable minuteness and ease. His earliest work of any importance after giving up engraving, was in illustration of 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso,' 1895, and shows his talent already well controlled. There are thirteen illustrations, and the opportunities for rendering aspects of light, from the moment of the lark's morning flight against the dappled skies of dawn, to the passing of whispering night-winds over the darkened country, given in the verse of a poet sensitive as none before him to the gradations of lightness and dark, are realized. So are the hawthorns in the dale, and the towered cities. But it is as an illustrator of another towered city than that imagined by Milton, that some of Mr. Hyde's most individual work has been produced. In the etchings and pictures in photogravure published with Mrs. Meynell's 'London Impressions,' London beneath the strange great sky that smoke and weather make over the gray roofs, London when the dawn is low in the sky, or when the glow of lamps and lamp-lit windows turns the street darkness to golden haze, is drawn by a man who has seen for himself how beautiful the great city is in 'between lights.' His other work is superficially in contrast with these studies of city light and darkness; but the same love for 'big' skies, for the larger aspects of changing lights and cloud movements, are expressed in the drawings of the wide country that is around and beyond the Cinque Ports, and in the illustrations to Mr. George Meredith's 'Nature Poems.' The reproduction is from a pen drawing in Mr. Hueffer's book, 'The Cinque Ports.' There is no pettiness about it, and the 'phrasing' of castle, trees and sky shows the artist.

Mr. D. Y. Cameron has illustrated a book or two with etchings--notably White's 'Selborne' 1902,--but to consider him as a book-illustrator would be to stretch a point. A few of his etchings are to be seen in books, and one would like to make them the text for the consideration of other etchings by him, but it would be a digression. He is not among painter-illustrators, but among painters who have illustrated, and that would bring more names into this chapter than it could hold except in catalogue arrangement.

Coming to artists who are illustrators, not on occasion but always, there is no question with whom to begin. It is true that Mr. Pennell is American, but he is such an important figure in English illustration that to leave him out would be impossible. He has been illustrating Europe for more than fifteen years, and the forcible fashion of his work, and all that he represents, have influenced black-and-white artists in this country, as his master Rico influenced him. In range and facility, and in getting to the point and keeping there, there is no open-air illustrator to put beside Mr. Pennell. Always interested and always interesting, he is apparently never bewildered, always ready and able to draw. Surely there was never a mind with a greater faculty for quick study; and he can apply this power to the realization of an architectural detail, or of a cathedral, of miles of country with river curves and castles, trees, and hills and fields, and a stretch of sky over all; or of a great city-street crowded with traffic, of new or old buildings, of Tuscany or of the Stock Exchange, with equal ease. To attempt a record of Mr. Pennell's work would leave no room for appreciation of it. As far as the English public is concerned, it began in 1885 with the publication of 'A Canterbury Pilgrimage,' and since then each year has added to Mr. Pennell's notes of the world at the rate of two or three volumes. The highways and byways of England--east, west, south and north--France from Normandy to Provence, the cities and spaces of Italy, the Saone and the Thames, the 'real' Alps and the New Zealand Alps, London and Paris, the Cathedrals of Europe, the gipsy encampment and the Ghetto, Chelsea and the Alhambra--Mr. Pennell has been everywhere and seen most things as he went, and one can see it in his drawings.

He draws architecture without missing anything tangible, and his buildings belong to cities that have life--and an individual life--in their streets. But where he is unapproachable, or at all events unapproached among pen-draughtsmen, is in drawing a great scheme of country from a height. If one could reproduce a drawing such as that of the country of Le Puy in Mr. Wickham Flower's 'Aquitaine,' or, better still, the etching of the same amazing country, one need say no more about Mr. Pennell's art in this kind. Unluckily the page is too small. This strange and lovely landscape, where curving road and river and tree-bordered fields are dominated by two image-crowned rocks, built about with close-set houses, looks like a design from a dream fantasy worked out by a master of definite imagination. One knows it is not. Mr. Pennell is concerned to give facts in picturesque order, and here he has a theme that affects us poetically, however it may have affected Mr. Pennell. His eye measures a landscape that seems outside the measure of observation, and his ability to grasp and render the characteristics of actuality serves him as ever. It is an unforgettable drawing, though the skill displayed in the simplification and relation of facts is no greater than in other drawings by the artist. That power hardly ever fails him. The 'Devils of Notre Dame' again stands out in memory, when one thinks generally of Mr. Pennell's drawings. And again, though it seems as if he were working above his usual pitch of conception, it is only that he is using his keenness of sight, his logical grasp of form and power of expression, on matter that is expressive of mental passion. The man who carved the devils, like those who crowned the rocks of Le Puy with the haloed figures, created facts. The outrageous passion that made these evil things made them in stone. You can measure them. They are matter-of-fact. Mr. Pennell has drawn them as they are, with so much trenchancy, such assertion of their hideous decorativeness, their isolation over modern Paris, that no drawings could be better, and any others would be superfluous. It is impossible to enumerate all that Mr. Pennell has done and can do in black-and-white. He is a master of so many methods. From the sheer black ink and white paper of the 'Devils,' to the light broken line that suggests Moorish fantastic architecture under a hot sun in the 'Alhambra' drawings, there is nothing he cannot do with a pen. Nor is it only with a pen that he can do what he likes and what we must admire. He covers the whole field of black-and-white drawing.

After Mr. Pennell comes Mr. Herbert Railton. No architectural drawings are more popular than his, and no style is better known or more generally 'adopted' by the illustrators of little guide-books or of magazine articles. An architect's training and knowledge of structure underlies the picturesque dilapidation prevalent in his version of Anglo-gothic architecture. His first traceable book-illustrations belong to 1888, though in 'The English Illustrated,' in 'The Portfolio,' and elsewhere, he had begun before then to formulate the style that has served him so admirably in later work with the pen. The illustrations to Mr. Loftie's 'Westminster Abbey' (1890) show his manner much as it is in his latest pen drawings. There is a lack of repose. One would like to undecorate some of the masonry, to reveal the austere lines under the prevalence of pattern. At the same time one realizes that here is the style needed in illustration of picturesquely written books about picturesque places, and that the stone tracery of Westminster, or the old brick and tiles of the Inns of Court, are more interesting to many people in drawings such as these than in actuality. But Rico's 'broken line' is responsible for much, and not every draughtsman who adopts it direct, or through a mixed tradition, has the architectural knowledge of Mr. Railton to support his deviations from stability. Mr. Railton is the artist of the Cathedral Guide; he has drawn Westminster, St. Paul's, Winchester, Gloucester, Peterborough, and many more cathedrals, inside and out, within the last ten years. In illustrations to books where a thread of story runs through historical fact, books such as those written by Miss Manning concerning Mary Powell, and the household of Sir Thomas More, the artist has collaborated with Mr. Jellicoe, who has put figures in the streets and country lanes.

There are so many names in the list of those who, in the beginning, profited by the initiative of Mr. Pennell or of Mr. Railton that generally they may be set aside. Of artists who have made some position for themselves, there are enough to fill this chapter. Mr. Holland Tringham and Mr. Hedley Fitton were at one time unmistakable in their Railtonism. Mr. Fitton has illustrated cathedral books, and in later drawings by Mr. Tringham exaggeration of his copy has given place to a more direct record of beautiful buildings. Miss Nelly Erichsen and Miss Helen James[1] are two artists whose work is much in request for illustrated series, such as Dent's 'Mediæval Towns.' Miss James' drawings to 'Rambles in Dickens' Land' (1899) showed study of Mr. Railton, which is also observable in other books, such as 'The Story of Rouen.' At the same time, she carries out her work from individual observation, and gets an effect that belongs to study of the subject, whether from actuality or from photographs. Miss James and Miss Erichsen have collaborated in certain books on Italian towns, but architectural drawing is only part of Miss Erichsen's illustrative work, though an important part, as the illustrations to the recently-published 'Florentine Villas' of Mrs. Ross show. Illustrating stories, she works with graceful distinctness, and many of the drawings in the 'Story of Rome'--though one remembers that Rome is in Mr. Pennell's province--show what she can do.

Mr. C. G. Harper and Mr. C. R. B. Barrett are the most prominent among those writers of travel-books who are also their own illustrators. They belong, though with all the difference of time and development, to the succession of Mr. Augustus Hare. Mr. Hissey also has made many books out of his driving tours through England, and may be said to have first specialized the subject that Mr. Harper and Mr. Barrett have made their own. It is plain that the kind of book has nothing to do with the kind of art that is used in its making. Mr. Hare's famous 'Walks' may be the prototypes of later books, but each man makes what he can out of an idea that has obvious possibilities in it. Mr. Harper has taken to the ancient high-roads of England, and has studied their historical and legendary, past, present, and imagined aspects. Of these he has written; while his illustrations rank him rather among illustrators who write than among writers who illustrate. Since 1889 he has published a dozen books and more. In 'Royal Winchester'--the first of these--he is illustrator only. 'The Brighton Road' of 1892 is the first of the road-books, and the illustrations of the road as it was and is, of town and of country, have colour and open air in their black-and-white. Since then Mr. Harper has been from Paddington to Penzance, has followed Dick Turpin along the Exeter road, and bygone fashion from London to Bath, while accounts of the Dover road from Southwark Bridge to Dover Castle, by way of Dickens' country and hop-gardens, and of the Great North Road of which Stevenson longed to write, are written and drawn with spirited observation. His drawing is not so picturesque as his writing. It has reticence and justness of expression that would not serve in relating tales of the road, but which, together with a sense of colour and of what is pictorial, combine to form an effective and frequently distinctive style of illustration. The drawing reproduced, chosen by the artist, is from Mr. Harper's recent book on the Holyhead road.

Mr. Barrett has described and illustrated the 'highways and byways and waterways' of various English counties, as well as published a volume on the battlefields of England, and studies of ancient buildings such as the Tower of London. He is always well informed, and illustrates his subject fully from pen-and-ink drawings. Mr. F. G. Kitton also writes and illustrates, though he has written more than he has drawn. St. Albans is his special town, and the old inns and quaint streets of the little red city with its long cathedral, are truthfully and dexterously given in his pen drawings and etchings. Mr. Alexander Ansted, too, as a draughtsman of English cathedrals and of city churches, has made a steady reputation since 1894, when his etchings and drawings of Riviera scenery showed ambition to render tone, and as much as possible of colour and atmosphere, with pen and ink. Since then he has simplified his style for general purposes, though in books such as 'London Riverside Churches' (1897), or 'The Romance of our Ancient Churches' of two years later, many of the drawings are more elaborate than is common in modern illustration. The names of Mr. C. E. Mallows and of Mr. Raffles Davison must be mentioned among architectural draughtsmen, though they are outside the scope of a study of book-illustration. Some of Mr. Raffles Davison's work has been reprinted from the 'British Architect,' but I do not think either of them illustrates books. An extension of architectural art lies in the consideration of the garden in relation to the house it surrounds, and Mr. Reginald Blomfield's 'Formal Garden' treats of the first principles of garden design as distinct from horticulture. The drawings by Mr. Inigo Thomas, whether one considers them as illustrating principles or gardens, are worth looking at, as 'The Yew Walk' sufficiently shows.

The sobriety and decorum of Mr. New's architectural and landscape drawings are the antithesis of the flagrantly picturesque. I do not know whether Mr. Gere or Mr. New invented this order of landscape and house drawing, but Mr. New is the chief exponent of it, and has placed it among popular styles of to-day. It has the effect of sincerity, and of respectful treatment of ancient buildings. Mr. New does not lapse from the perpendicular, his hand does not tremble or break off when house-walls or the ridge of a roof are to be drawn. His is a convention that is frankly conventional, that confines nature within decorous bounds, and makes formality a function of art. But though a great deal of Mr. New's work is mechanical and done to pattern, so that sometimes little perpendicular strokes to represent grass fill half the pictured space, while little horizontal strokes to represent brick-work, together with 'touches' that represent foliage, fill up the rest except for a corner left blank for the sky; yet, at his best, he achieves an effective and dignified way of treating landscape for the decoration of books. Sensational skies that repeat one sensation to monotony, scattered blacks and emphasized trivialities, are set aside by those who follow Mr. New. When they are trivial and undiscriminating, they are unaffectedly tedious, and that is almost pleasant after the hackneyed sparkle of the inferior picturesque.

Mr. New's reputation as a book-illustrator was first made in 1896, when an edition of 'The Compleat Angler' with many drawings by him appeared. The homely architecture of Essex villages and small towns, the low meadows and quiet streams, gave him opportunity for drawings that are pleasant on the page. Two garden books, or strictly speaking, one--for 'In the Garden of Peace' was succeeded by 'Outside the Garden'--contain natural history drawings similar to those of fish in 'The Compleat Angler' and of birds in White's 'Selborne.' The illustrations to 'Oxford and its Colleges,' and 'Cambridge and its Colleges,' are less representative of the best Mr. New can do than books where village architecture, or the irregular house-frontage of country high-streets are his subject. Illustrating Shakespeare's country, 'Sussex,' and 'The Wessex of Thomas Hardy,' brought him into regions of the country-town; but the most important of his recent drawings are those in 'The Natural History of Selborne,' published in 1900. The drawing of 'Selborne Street' is from that volume.

With Mr. New, Mr. R. J. Williams and Mr. H. P. Clifford illustrated Mr. Aymer Vallance's two books on William Morris. Their illustrations are fit records of the homes and working-places of the great man who approved their art. Mr. Frederick Griggs, who since 1900 has illustrated three or four garden books, also follows the principles of Mr. New, but with more variety in detail, less formality in tree-drawing and in the rendering of paths and roads and streams and sunshine, in short, with more of art outside the school, than Mr. New permits himself.