Dedication
TO CHARLES MORLEY, ESQ.
Dear Mr. Morley,
It is with a peculiar satisfaction that I inscribe this book to yourself, for to you more than to any other occupant of an editorial chair is due the position held by “process” in illustrating the hazards and happenings of each succeeding week.
Time was when the “Pall Mall Budget,” with a daring originality never to be forgotten, illustrated the news with diagrams fashioned heroically from the somewhat limited armoury of the compositor. Nor I nor my contemporaries, I think, have forgotten those weapons of offence—the brass rules, hyphens, asterisks, daggers, braces, and other common objects of the type-case—with which the Northumberland Street printers set forth the details of a procession, or the configuration of a country. There was in those days a world of meaning—apart from libellous innuendo—in a row of asterisks; for did they not signify a chain of mountains? And what Old Man Eloquent was ever so vividly convincing as those serpentine brass rules that served as the accepted hieroglyphics for rivers on type-set maps?
These were the beginnings of illustration in the “Pall Mall Budget” when you first filled the editorial chair. The leaps and bounds by which you came abreast of (and, indeed, overlook) the other purveyors of illustrated news, hot and hot, I need not recount, nor is there occasion here to allude to the events which led to what some alliterative journalist has styled the Battle of the Budgets. Only this: that if others have reaped where you have sown, why! ’twas ever thus.
For the rest, I must needs apologize to you for a breach of an etiquette which demands that permission be first had and obtained before a Dedication may be printed. To print an unauthorized tribute to a private individual is wrong: when (as in the present case) an Editor is concerned I am not sure that the wrong-doing halts anything before lèse majesté.
Yours very truly,
CHARLES G. HARPER.
London,
May, 1894.
Everywhere to-day is the Illustrator (artist he may not always be), for never was illustration so marketable as now; and the correspondence-editors of the Sunday papers have at length found a new outlet for the superfluous energies of their eager querists in advising them to “go in” for black and white: as one might advise an applicant to adventure upon a commercial enterprise of large issues and great risks before the amount of his capital (if any) had been ascertained.
It is so very easy to make black marks upon white cardboard, is it not? and not particularly difficult to seize upon the egregious mannerisms of the accepted purveyors of “the picturesque”—that cliché phrase, battered nowadays out of all real meaning.
But for really serious art—personal, aggressive, definite and instructed—one requires something more than a penchant, or the stimulating impulsion of an empty pocket, or even the illusory magnetism of the vie bohême of the lady-novelist, whose artists still wear velvet coats and aureoles of auburn hair, and marry the inevitable heiress in the third volume. Not that one really wishes to be one of those creatures, for the lady-novelists’ love-lorn embryonic Michael Angelos are generally great cads; but this by the way!
What is wanted in the aspirant is the vocation: the feeling for beauty of line and for decoration, and the powers both of idealizing and of selection. Pen-drawing and allied methods are the chiefest means of illustration at this day, and these qualities are essential to their successful employ. Practitioners in pen-and-ink are already numerous enough to give any new-comer pause before he adds himself to their number, but certainly the greater number of them are merely journalists without sense of style; mannerists only of a peculiarly vicious parasitic type.
“But,” ask those correspondents, “does illustration pay?” “Yes,” says that omniscient person, the Correspondence-Editor. Then those pixie-led wayfarers through life, filled with an inordinate desire to draw, to paint, to translate Nature on to canvas or cardboard (at a profit), set about the staining of fair paper, the wasting of good ink, brushes, pens, and all the materials with which the graphic arts are pursued, and lo! just because the greater number of them set out, not with the love of an art, but with the single idea of a paying investment of time and labour—it does not pay! Remuneration in their case is Latin for three farthings.
Publishers and editors, it is said, can now, with the cheapness of modern methods of reproduction as against the expense of wood-engraving, afford to pay artists better because they pay engravers less. Perhaps they can. But do they?
Pen-drawing in particular has, by reason of these things, almost come to stand for exaggeration and a shameless license—a convention that sees and renders everything in a manner flamboyantly quaint. But this vein is being worked down to the bed-rock: it has plumbed its deepest depth, and everything now points to a period of instructed sobriety where now the untaught abandon of these mannerists has rioted through the pages of illustrated magazines and newspapers to a final disrepute.
Artists are now beginning to ask how they can dissociate themselves from that merely manufacturing army of frantic draughtsmen who never, or rarely, go beyond the exercise of pure line-work; and the widening power of process gives them answer. Results striking and unhackneyed are always to be obtained to-day by those who are not hag-ridden by that purely Philistine ideal of the clear sharp line.
These pages are written as a plea for something else than the eternal round of uninspired work. They contain suggestions and examples of results obtained in striving to be at one with modern methods of reproduction, and perhaps I may be permitted to hope that in this direction they may be of some service.
CHARLES G. HARPER.
Works by the Same Author
| PAGE | |
| Vignette on Title | |
| Kensington Palace. Photogravure | Frontispiece |
| The Hall, Barnard’s Inn | 25 |
| A Window, Chepstow Castle | 29 |
| On Whatman’s “Not” Paper | 31 |
| From a Drawing on Allongé Paper | 31,32 |
| Bolt Head: A Misty Day. Bitumen process | 38 |
| Bolt Head: A Misty Day. Swelled gelatine process | 39 |
| A Note at Gorran. Bitumen process | 43 |
| A Note at Gorran. Swelled gelatine process | 43 |
| Charlwood. Swelled gelatine process | 45 |
| Charlwood. Reproduced by Chefdeville | 45 |
| View from the Tower Bridge Works. Bitumen process | 48 |
| View from the Tower Bridge Works. Bitumen process. | |
| Sky revised by hand-work | 49 |
| Kensington Palace | 51 |
| Snodgrass Farm | 53 |
| Sunset, Black Rock | 55 |
| Drawing in Diluted Inks, reproduced by Gillot | 57 |
| Chepstow Castle | 61 |
| Clifford’s Inn: a Foggy Night | 65 |
| Pencil and Pen and Ink Drawing reproduced by Half-tone Process | 68 |
| The Village Street, Tintern. Night | 70 |
| Leebotwood | 71 |
| Examples of Day’s Shading Mediums | 75, 76 |
| Churchyard Cross, Raglan | 76 |
| Canvas-grain Clay-board | 84 |
| Plain Diagonal Grain | 85 |
| Plain Perpendicular Grain | 85 |
| Drawing in Pencil on White Aquatint Grain Clay-board | 86 |
| Black Aquatint Clay-board and Two Stages of Drawing | 87 |
| Black Diagonal-lined Clay-board and Two Stages of Drawing | 87 |
| Black Perpendicular-lined Clay-board and Two Stages of Drawing | 88 |
| Venetian Fête on the Seine, with the Trocadero illuminated | 89 |
| The Gatehouse, Moynes Court | 110 |
| Portrait Sketches | 118, 119 |
| The Houses of Parliament at Night, from the River | 122 |
| Victoria Embankment near Blackfriars Bridge: a Foggy Night | 123 |
| Corfe Railway Station | 125 |
| The Ambulatory, Dore Abbey | 127 |
| Moonlight: Confluence of the Severn and the Wye | 131 |
| Diagram showing Method of reducing Drawings for Reproduction | 133 |
| Painter’s Pen-drawing—Pasturage, by Mr. Alfred Hartley | 155 |
| “” Portrait, by Mr. Bonnat | 156 |
| Towing Path, Abingdon, by Mr. David Murray | 158 |
| A Portrait from a Drawing by Mr. T. Blake Wirgman | 159 |
| Finis | 161 |
A PRACTICAL HANDBOOK OF DRAWING
FOR REPRODUCTION.