Part 2

The photographic reproductive processes began now to change the spirit of the illustrator’s dream. Both in black-and-white and colour the artist had to readjust his methods and adapt them to the new mechanical conditions--to the domination of the camera, in fact. Already the photographer had become an intermediary between the artist and the wood-engraver, though the designer’s lines were still at the mercy of the craftsman’s knife. Now the artist made his designs with the camera in view, knowing that his line would reproduce exactly as he drew it. Naturally this change had a considerable influence on the character of the designs made for book-illustration. But, meanwhile, there were artists, individual and in groups, who, setting themselves against the innovating photographic reproduction in book-illustration, sought by the older methods to make books beautiful with pictorial adornment. Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, two artists inspired always by high ideals, to whose originality and initiative modern book-decoration owes a great deal, issued _The Dial_ in 1889, and this was the beginning of an important movement in the making of beautiful books. Among the pages Mr. Shannon set those exquisite lithographs of his in which his pictorial poetry is most eloquent; while from this publication we may perhaps date the modern revival of original wood-engraving--Messrs. Ricketts, Shannon, Sturge Moore, Reginald Savage, and Lucien Pissarro cutting their lovely designs upon the wood. From the enthusiasm that produced _The Dial_ grew the Vale Press, which, with its remarkable series of beautiful books, has given so much joy to bibliophiles, a joy that Mr. Pissarro continues to give with the delicately lovely books he issues from his Eragny Press--the Vale’s successor--books in which the ideal of harmonious decorative relation between the lettering of the page and its pictorial adornment is logically realized with exquisite results. How splendidly this ideal was realized by William Morris in his books from the Kelmscott Press has already been shown in “The Art of the Book” (the Special Spring Number of THE STUDIO, 1914); to speak further of it here were beyond my province. I wish only to suggest its great influence for beauty on the book-decoration of to-day and yesterday, an influence one would wish to see still more widely extended.

A more definite alliance between book-illustration and decoration developed during the nineties of the last century, and the artistic activities in this direction were of a distinguished and interesting character. Several notable artists were at work, and among them one must not forget Mr. William Strang with his illustrative etchings, for it would be difficult to find a more intuitive pictorial interpreter of Burns or of Stevenson. One remembers also the expressively decorative designs of Mr. Laurence Housman and the graces of the so-called Birmingham School; above all, one recalls the appearance of two great original draughtsmen of widely different temperaments, both masters of line, both vitally artistic, both of enduring influence--Phil May and Aubrey Beardsley. And both of these were content to let their lines speak through the photographic medium. _The Yellow Book_ and _The Savoy_ came and passed away, but they left us Beardsley, and with him no fresh pictorial understanding of life and character such as we got from the humanly humorous genius of Phil May, but a new decorative value of line and the balance of black and white masses. This is Beardsley’s influence, quite distinct possibly from his fantastic manner of conception, but it is the secret of the permanent artistic worth of his graphic interpretations of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” and Pope’s “Rape of the Lock.”

At the present moment book-illustration is in an interesting phase, with its spreading tendencies towards page-decoration, and suggestive rather than realistic pictorial treatment of the text. In the following pages a fairly representative selection of drawings will show what many of our leading illustrators have been doing of late. It will be noticed that, with the clearness and precision possible to the modern photographic process-block, pure line is favoured for black-and-white; while recent developments of the three-colour process place within the possibilities of the artist a very wide range of tones and harmonies. Indeed, it would seem that, however the book-illustrator may wish to vary his manner in sympathy with the character of the text he is illustrating, the present mediums of reproduction will prove responsive to his need.

I have already mentioned Mr. Walter Crane and the fanciful and decorative charm of his colour-books. It was on the wood-block in the “sixties” and “seventies” that he began his long and distinguished career as a book-illustrator, and, with his delicate feeling for expressive line and the harmoniously decorated page, he has produced book after book, in which Shakespeare or Spenser, William Morris, the beloved Grimm, or the anonymous authors of immortal fairy tale and nursery rhyme, have inspired his graphic fancy to sweet and dainty picturings, whether in colour or in black-and-white. Genuine picture-books his, with the pictorial adornment extending from end-paper to end-paper, and the pages bearing their pictures happily balanced with their letterings amid decorative borders. To name even the best of his books would involve quite a long catalogue.

Turning from the veteran’s sweet and gracious simplicity of fancy to the wizardry of Mr. Arthur Rackham’s alertly imaginative art, with its wide-ranged flights of grotesque or romantic fantasy, is like going from a field of daisies, daffodils, and bluebells into a garden of wonderful exotics. Mr. Rackham stands apart from all the other illustrators of the day; his genius is so thoroughly original. Scores of others have depicted fairyland and wonderland, but who else has given us so absolutely individual and persuasively suggestive a vision of their marvels and allurements? Whose elves are so elfish, whose witches and gnomes are so convincingly of their kind, as Mr. Rackham’s? His line, with its distinctive accent, is his very own; so are his colour-tones; and no little of the secret of his success lies in a subtly harmonious intimacy between design and colour-scheme adapted with peculiarly sympathetic understanding to the capacity and limitations of the photographic mediums of reproduction. In the printed drawings of Mr. Rackham we find the three-colour process never forced, but always at its best, and his happily balanced tones seem to suggest the very atmosphere of mystery and enchantment proper to those worlds of romance and faëry which this fascinating artist delights to picture. But whether he expresses his visions in colour or black-and-white, he gives always new meanings to old tales. Looking at his drawings, one feels more at home even in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” one wonders with Alice afresh and more zestfully, frolics again with childish seriousness among the fairy tales, and gives oneself up as readily to the romantic spell of the “Nibelungen Ring” as to the whimsical supernaturalness of the beasts and birds of Æsop and the nursery rhyme. With all this, Mr. Rackham’s pictorial invention is essentially decorative.

A gentle graciousness of line and decorative design, with simplicity of expression, constitutes the peculiar charm of Mr. Robert Anning Bell’s illustrated books. That he finds happy suggestion among the poets will be seen in the drawings representing him here; but his “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a book to enjoy in its entirety, so harmonious is its scheme, while the _Masque of Courteous Monsters_ in “The Tempest” is a remarkable composition. The distinguished graphic fancy of Mr. W. Heath Robinson has also been inspired to beautiful pictorial interpretation by Shakespeare’s immortal fairy play, and it is interesting to compare his more suggestive treatment with Mr. Anning Bell’s, the more definitely decorative significance of his design. As a quaintly humorous draughtsman Mr. Heath Robinson is also represented in these pages.

There is no artist now devoting himself to book-decoration who has been truer to the ideals of his art than Mr. Charles Robinson. From the time when he proved himself the ideal illustrator of Stevenson’s “Child’s Garden of Verses” to the present he has aimed always at treating the book as an harmonious whole from cover to cover, providing decoration or illustration just where the scheme seemed to call for it. This unity of treatment may be noted particularly in his more recent books, “The Sensitive Plant,” “The Four Gardens,” “The Happy Prince,” and “The Big Book of Nursery Rhymes.” But Mr. Robinson is a man of original if delicate imagination, as well as an exquisite interpretative artist, and the double-page drawing given here, _The Dream_, will show him graphically illustrating his own fanciful vision--carrying out his pictorial ideas in a book of his own creation. “A Dream of St. Nicholas in Heaven” is a sort of allegory on the modern aspect of maternity.

A wonderful contrast is the robust interpretative imagination of Mr. Edmund J. Sullivan, one of the greatest book-illustrators we have ever had, as he is one of the finest living draughtsmen on the page. His virility of mind and manner have found Carlyle wonderfully inspiring, and in the “Sartor Resartus” drawings shown here, as in the still greater “French Revolution” series, his certainty of expressive effect is extraordinary. Mr. Sullivan’s pictorial sense of character and incident is explicit also in the Goldsmith illustrations.

Mr. W. Russell Flint, a very talented designer of rich pictorial imagination and fine colour-sense, has, within the last few years, come into the front rank of book-illustrators, and he has done this through the medium of a number of beautiful books issued from the Riccardi Press. Things of real beauty are many of the illustrations to the “Song of Solomon,” “Marcus Aurelius,” “Le Morte D’Arthur,” Kingsley’s “Heroes” (one of which is reproduced here), and the “Canterbury Tales.” Mr. Flint adapts his expressive style artistically to the varying styles of the books, and in his colour-schemes he gauges the powers of the reproductive process to a nicety.

Poetry, fantasy, and romance are seen pictorially interpreted here by a group of artists who, though severally distinctive in conception and manner, are linked by the common aim of imaginative expression in orderly design for the purpose of page-decoration. Perhaps nothing more characteristic of Mr. Edmund Dulac’s graces of invention in design and colour could be shown than the charming frontispiece to his “Princess Badoura,” with its engaging orientalism. His versatility is well seen in the Poe drawings. If Beardsley ever lent Miss Jessie King the decorative influence of his line she has made it all her own, as evidenced in these three exquisite and original designs suggested by old romances. Tennyson and Browning have furnished happy inspirations for the delicate art of Miss Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale; while Mr. Dion Clayton Calthrop shows with graphic charm how thoroughly he is at home in Fairyland--being himself the most reliable of guides. Mr. Maxwell Armfield has given all lovers of Hans Andersen a new joy in his charming coloured illustrations to the immortal stories, while in his “Flower Book” and “Sylvia’s Travels” he shows a fascinating fancy; but here we see him only in two distinguished little woodcuts. Mr. W. Graham Robertson is as delicious as ever in his Blake-like simplicity of expression and design, whether illustrating his own books or those of that kindred spirit of fantasy, Mr. Algernon Blackwood. Mr. Byam Shaw’s fecundity of illustrative invention is well represented, if not the wide range of his fertility, which is from Shakespeare and Boccaccio to Flora Annie Steele in Akbar’s India. Mr. Vernon Hill is a designer of remarkable imagination, and he makes an ideal illustrator of “Ballads Weird and Wonderful.” Imaginatively expressive and decorative, also, with the best influences, perhaps, of the “sixties,” are Mr. Gerald Metcalfe’s illustrations to Coleridge. So, too, but in a manner of their own, are Mr. Harry Clarke’s to the “Ancient Mariner” and Mr. John P. Campbell’s designs for the “Celtic Romances.” In this same category we may include the illustrative drawings of Miss Dorothy Payne, Mr. Harold Nelson, Mr. Lee Hankey, Mr. A. Garth Jones, Mr. Monro S. Orr, Miss Beatrice Elvery, and Mr. J. D. Batten. Mr. R. T. Rose, however, must stand by himself. The three drawings here show his strong individuality, but I wish it had been possible to represent his high-water mark in the beautiful designs for the Book of Job.

There are no more facile and prolific illustrators than Mr. Hugh Thomson and Messrs. C. E. and H. M. Brock, and all of them are most at home in the humours of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. So we have Mr. Thomson sympathetically illustrating Jane Austen and Mrs. Gaskell, as well as picturesque highways and byways; while Mr. C. E. Brock shows us what pictorial suggestion he has found in the “Essays of Elia,” a subject, by the way, that might supply an essay in itself; and Mr. H. M. Brock’s multifarious illustration is represented also by clever designs for essays, Leigh Hunt’s and Douglas Jerrold’s. Humorous character, besides, we get from Mr. Frank Reynolds in his vivacious “Pictures of Paris,” and his delightful “Pickwick” illustration in colour. The animal whimsicalities of Mr. Stewart Orr, and Mr. Carton Moore Park’s decorative suggestions of beast and bird life, are also illustrative examples we would not be without.

The Irish character-studies of Mr. Jack B. Yeats have an interest all their own; they have life and atmosphere. Light and atmosphere distinguish Mr. D. Y. Cameron’s two great little landscape drawings for “The Tomb of Burns.” One does not otherwise think of the great etcher as an illustrator. Mr. Frank Brangwyn is entirely himself in the two virile pen-and-ink drawings for “The Book of Bridges,” and the colour illustration to Kinglake’s “Eöthen.” Very charming, and worthy of their theme, are Mr. F. L. Griggs’s illustrations to “The Sensitive Plant”; nor is this accomplished artist less delightful in his designs for “The Chronicles of a Cornish Garden.” But, then, how could he be with such a title to inspire him? Mr. Edmund H. New is another artist of distinctive style who never fails us, and in the “Compleat Angler” and White’s “Selborne” he had, of course, subjects after his heart. The fanciful landscape is Mr. W. T. Horton’s design; peaceful Bruges is Mr. Charles Wade’s theme. FitzGerald’s “Omar” has suggested some quaintly fantastic designs by Miss Helen Sinclair; Mr. René Bull’s facile pen has busied itself with the “Arabian Nights”; while here also are characteristic drawings by Mr. F. H. Ball, Mr. Keith Henderson, Mr. Sydney R. Jones, Mr. Donald Maxwell, Mr. Harry Rountree, and Mr. Joseph Southall.