I Some Decorative Illustrators
Of the famous ‘Poems by Alfred Tennyson,’ published in 1857 by Edward Moxon, Mr. Gleeson White wrote in 1897: ‘The whole modern school of decorative illustrators regard it, rightly enough, as the genesis of the modern movement.’ The statement may need some modification to touch exact truth, for the ‘modern movement’ is no single-file, straightforward movement. ‘Kelmscott,’ ‘Japan,’ the ‘Yellow Book,’ black-and-white art in Germany, in France, in Spain, in America, the influence of Blake, the style of artists such as Walter Crane, have affected the present form of decorative book-illustration. Such perfect unanimity of opinion as is here ascribed to a large and rather indefinitely related body of men hardly exists among even the smallest and most derided body of artists. Still, allowing for the impossibility of telling the whole truth about any modern and eclectic form of art in one sentence, there is here a statement of fact. What Rossetti and Millais and Holman Hunt achieved in the drawings to the ‘Tennyson’ of 1857, was a vital change in the intention of English illustrative art, and whatever form decorative illustration may assume, their ideal is effective while a personal interpretation of the spirit of the text is the creative impulse. The influence of technical mastery is strong and enduring enough. It is constantly in sight and constantly in mind. But it is in discovering and making evident a principle in art that the influence of spirit on spirit becomes one of the illimitable powers.
To Rossetti the illustration of literature meant giving beautiful form to the expression of delight, of penetration, that had kindled his imagination as he read. He illustrated the ‘Palace of Art’ in the spirit that stirred him to rhythmic translation into words of the still music in Giorgione’s ‘Pastoral,’ or of the unpassing movement of Mantegna’s ‘Parnassus.’ Not the words of the text, nor those things precisely affirmed by the writer, but the spell of significance and of beauty that held his mind to the exclusion of other images, gave him inspiration for his drawings. As Mr. William Michael Rossetti says: ‘He drew just what he chose, taking from his author’s text nothing more than a hint and an opportunity.’ It is said, indeed, that Tennyson could never see what the St. Cecily drawing had to do with his poem. And that is strange enough to be true.
It is clear that such an ideal of illustration is for the attainment of a few only. The ordinary illustrator, making drawings for cheap reproduction in the ordinary book, can no more work in this mood than the journalist can model his style on the prose of Milton. But journalism is not literature, and pictured matter-of-fact is not illustration, though it is convenient and customary to call it so. However, here one need not consider this, for the decorative illustrator has usually literature to illustrate, and a commission to be beautiful and imaginative in his work. He has the opportunity of Rossetti, the opportunity for significant art.
The ‘Classics’ and children’s books give greatest opportunity to decorative illustrators. Those who have illustrated children’s books chiefly, or whose best work has been for the playful classics of literature, it is convenient to consider in a separate chapter, though there are instances where the division is not maintainable: Walter Crane, for example, whose influence on a school of decorative design makes his position at the head of his following imperative.
Representing the ‘architectural’ sense in the decoration of books, many years before the supreme achievements of William Morris added that ideal to generally recognized motives of book-decoration, Walter Crane is the precursor of a large and prolific school of decorative illustrators. Many factors, as he himself tells, have gone to the shaping of his art. Born in 1846 at Liverpool, he came to London in 1857, and there after two years was ‘apprenticed’ to Mr. W. J. Linton, the well-known wood-engraver. His work began with ‘the sixties,’ in contact with the enthusiasm and inspiration those years brought into English art. The illustrated ‘Tennyson,’ and Ruskin’s ‘Elements of Drawing,’ were in his thoughts before he entered Mr. Linton’s workshop, and the ‘Once a Week’ school had a strong influence on his early contributions to ‘Good Words,’ ‘Once a Week,’ and other famous magazines. In 1865 Messrs. Warne published the first toy-book, and by 1869-70 the ‘Walter Crane Toy-book’ was a fact in art. The sight of some Japanese colour-prints during these years suggested a finer decorative quality to be obtained with tint and outline, and in the use of black, as well as in a more delicate simplicity of colour, the later toy-books show the first effect of Japanese art on the decorative art of England. Italian art in England and Italy, the prints of Dürer, the Parthenon sculptures, these were influences that affected him strongly. ‘The Baby’s Opera’ (1877) and ‘The Baby’s Bouquet’ (1879) are classics almost impossible to criticise, classics familiar from cover to cover before one was aware of any art but the art on their pages. So that if these delightful designs seem less expressive of the Greece, Germany, and Italy of the supreme artists than of the ‘Crane’ countries by whose coasts ships ‘from over the sea’ go sailing by with strange cargoes and strange crews, it is not in their dispraise. As a decorative draughtsman Mr. Crane is at his best when the use of colour gives clearness to the composition, but some of his most ‘serious’ work is in the black-and-white pages of ‘The Sirens Three,’ of ‘The Shepheardes Calendar,’ and especially of ‘The Faerie Queene.’ The number of books he has illustrated—upwards of seventy—makes a detailed account impossible. Nursery rhyme and fairy books, children’s stories, Spenser, Shakespeare, the myths of Greece, ‘pageant books’ such as ‘Flora’s Feast’ or ‘Queen Summer,’ or the just published ‘Masque of Days,’ his own writings, serious or gay, have given him subjects, as the great art of all times has touched the ideals of his art.
But whatever the subject, how strong soever his artistic admirations, he is always Walter Crane, unmistakable at a glance. Knights and ladies, fairies and fairy people, allegorical figures, nursery and school-room children, fulfil his decorative purpose without swerving, though not always without injury to their comfort and freedom and the life in their limbs. An individual apprehension that sees every situation as a conventional ‘arrangement’ is occasionally beside the mark in rendering real life. But when his theme touches imagination, and is not a supreme expression of it—for then, as in the illustrations to ‘The Faerie Queene,’ an unusual sense of subservience appears to dull his spirit—his humorous fancy knows no weariness nor sameness of device.
The work of most of Mr. Crane’s followers belongs to ‘the nineties,’ when the ‘Arts and Crafts’ movement, the ‘Century Guild,’ the Birmingham and other schools had attracted or produced artists working according to the canons of Kelmscott. Mr. Heywood Sumner was earlier in the field. The drawings to ‘Sintram’ (1883) and to ‘Undine’ (1888) show his art as an illustrator. Undine—spirit of wind and water, flower-like in gladness—seeking to win an immortal soul by submission to the forms of life, is realized in the gracefully designed figures of frontispiece and title-page. Where Mr. Sumner illustrates incident he is ‘factual’ without being matter-of-fact. The small drawing reproduced is hardly representative of his art, but most of his work is adapted to a squarer page than this, and has had to be rejected on that account. Some of the most apt decorations in ‘The English Illustrated’ were by Mr. Sumner, and during the time when art was represented in the magazine Mr. Ryland and Mr. Louis Davis were also frequent contributors. The graceful figures of Mr. Ryland, uninterested in activity, a garden-world set with statues around them, and the carol-like grace of Mr. Davis’s designs in that magazine, represent them better than the one or two books they have illustrated.
Among those associated with the ‘Arts and Crafts’ who have given more of their art to book-decoration, Mr. Anning Bell is first. He has gained the approval even of the most exigent of critics as an artist who understands drawing for process. Since 1895, when the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ appeared, his winning art has been praised with discrimination and without discrimination, but always praised. Trained in an architect’s office, widely known as the recreator of coloured relief for architectural decoration, Mr. Anning Bell’s illustrations show constructive power no less than that fairy gift of seeming to improvise without labour and without hesitancy, which is one of its especial charms. In feeling, and in many of his decorative forms, his drawings recall the art of Florentine bas-relief, when Agostino di Duccio, or Rossellino or Mino da Fiesole, created shapes of delicate sweetness, pure, graceful—so graceful that their power is hardly realized. The fairy by-play of the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is exactly to Mr. Anning Bell’s fancy. He knows better than to go about to expound this dream, and it is not likely that a more delightful edition will ever be put into the hands of children, or of anyone, than this in the white and gold cover devised by the artist.
Of his illustrations to the ‘Poems by John Keats’ (1897), and to the ‘English Lyrics from Spenser to Milton’ of the following year—as illustrations—not quite so much can be said, distinguished and felicitous as many of them are. The simple profile, the demure type of beauty that he affects, hardly suit with Isabella when she hears that Lorenzo has gone from her, with Lamia by the clear pool
“Wherein she passionëd
To see herself escaped from so sore ills,”
or with Madeline, ‘St. Agnes’ charmëd maid.’ Mr. Anning Bell’s drawings to ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ (1898) reveal him in a different mood, as do those in ‘The Christian Year’ of three years earlier. His vision is hardly energetic enough, his energy of belief sufficient, to make him a strong illustrator of Bunyan, with his many moods, his great mood. A little these designs suggest Howard Pyle, and Anning Bell is better in a way of beauty not Gothic.
So if Mr. Anning Bell represents the ‘Arts and Crafts’ movement in the variety of decorative arts he has practised, and in the architectural sense underlying all his art, his work does not agree with the form in which the influence of William Morris on decorative illustration has chiefly shown itself. That form, of course, is Gothic, as the ideal of Kelmscott was Gothic. The work of the ‘Century Guild’ artists as decorative illustrators is chiefly in the pages of ‘The Hobby Horse.’ Mr. Selwyn Image and Mr. Herbert Horne can hardly be included among book illustrators, so in this connection one may not stop to consider the decorative strength of their ideal in art. The Birmingham school represents Gothic ideals with determination and rigidity. Morris addressed the students of the school and prefaced the edition of ‘Good King Wenceslas,’ decorated and engraved and printed by Mr. A. J. Gaskin ‘at the press of the Guild of Handicraft in the City of Birmingham,’ with cordial words of appreciation for the pictures. These illustrations are among the best Mr. Gaskin has done. The commission for twelve full-page drawings to ‘The Shepheardes Calendar’ (Kelmscott Press, 1896) marks Morris’s pleasure in Mr. Gaskin’s work—especially in the illustrations to Andersen’s ‘Stories and Fairy Tales.’ If not quite in tune with Spenser’s Elizabethan idyllism, these drawings are distinctive of the definite convictions of the artist.
These convictions represent a splendid tradition. They are expressive, in their regard for the unity of the page, for harmony between type and decoration, of the universal truth in all fine bookmaking. Only at times, Birmingham work seems rather heavy in spirit, rather too rigid for development. Still, judging by results, a code that would appear to be against individual expression is inspiring individual artists. Some of these—as Mr. E. H. New—have turned their attention to architectural and ‘open-air’ illustration, in which connection their work will be considered, and many have illustrated children’s books. Their quaint and naïve fancy has there, at times, produced a portentous embodiment of the ‘old-fashioned’ child of fiction. Mr. Gere, though he has done little book-illustration, is one of the strongest artists of the school. His original wood engravings show unmistakably his decorative power and his craftsmanship. With Mr. K. Fairfax Muckley he was responsible for ‘The Quest’ (1894-96). Mr. Fairfax Muckley has illustrated and decorated a three-volume edition of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (1897), wherein the forest branches and winding ways of woodland and of plain are more happily conventionalized than are Spenser’s figures. Some of the headpieces are especially successful. The artist uses the ‘mixed convention’ of solid black and line with less confusion than many modern draughtsmen. Once its dangers must have been evident, but now the puzzle pattern, with solid blacks in the foreground, background, and mid-distance—only there is no distance in these drawings—is a common form of black and white.
Miss Celia Levetus, Mr. Henry Payne, Mr. F. Mason, and Mr. Bernard Sleigh, are also to the credit of the school. Miss Levetus, in her later work, shows that an inclination towards a more flexible style is not incompatible with the training in Gothic convention. Mr. Mason’s illustrations to ancient romances of chivalry give evidence of conscientious craftsmanship, and of a spirit sympathetic to themes such as ‘Renaud of Montauban.’ Mr. Bernard Sleigh’s original wood-engravings are well known and justly appreciated. Strong in tradition and logic as is the work of these designers, it is, for many, too consistent with convention to be delightful. Perhaps the best result of the Birmingham school will hardly be achieved until the formal effect of its training is less patent.
The ‘sixties’ might have been void of art, so far as these designers are concerned, save that in those days Morris and Burne-Jones and Walter Crane, as well as Millais and Houghton and Sandys, were about their work. Far other is the case with artists such as Mr. Byam Shaw, or with the many draughtsmen, including Messrs. P. V. Woodroffe, Henry Ospovat, Philip Connard, and Herbert Cole, whose art derives its form and intention from the sixties. Differing in technical power and fineness of invention, in all that distinguishes good from less good, they have this in common—that the form of their art would have been quite other if the illustrated books of that period were among things unseen. Mr. Byam Shaw began his work as an illustrator in 1897 with a volume of ‘Browning’s Poems,’ edited by Dr. Garnett. He proved himself in these drawings, as in his pictures and later illustrations, an artist with a definite memory for the forms, and a genuine sympathy with the aims of pre-Raphaelite art. Evidently, too, he admires the black-and-white of Mr. Abbey. He has the gift of dramatic conception, sees a situation at high pitch, and has a pleasant way of giving side-lights, pictorial asides, by means of decorative head and tailpieces. His illustrations to the little green and gold volumes of the ‘Chiswick Shakespeare’ are more emphatic than his earlier work, and in the decorations his power of summarizing the chief motive is put to good use. There is no need of his signature to distinguish the work of Byam Shaw, though he shows himself under the influence of various masters. Probably he is only an illustrator of books by the way, but in the meantime, as the ‘Boccaccio,’ ‘Browning,’ and ‘Shakespeare’ drawings show, he works in black and white with vigorous intention.
Mr. Ospovat’s illustrations to ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ and to ‘Matthew Arnold’s Poems’ are interesting, if not very markedly his own. He illustrates the Sonnets as a celebration of a poet’s passion for his mistress. As in these, so in the Matthew Arnold drawings, he shows some genuine creative power and an aptitude for illustrative decoration. Mr. Philip Connard has made spirited and well-realized illustrations in somewhat the same kind; Miss Amelia Bauerle, and Mr. Bulcock, who began by illustrating ‘The Blessed Damozel’ in memory of Rossetti, have made appearance in the ‘Flowers of Parnassus’ series, and Mr. Herbert Cole, with three of these little green volumes, prepared one for more important work in ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ (1900).
The work of Mr. Woodroffe was, I think, first seen in the ‘Quarto’—the organ of the Slade School—where also Mr. A. Garth Jones, Mr. Cyril Goldie, and Mr. Robert Spence, gave unmistakable evidence of individuality. Mr. Woodroffe’s wood-engravings in the ‘Quarto’ showed strength, which is apparent, too, in the delicately characterized figures to ‘Songs from Shakespeare’s Plays’ (1898), with their borders of lightly-strung field flowers. His drawings to ‘The Confessions of S. Augustine,’ engraved by Miss Clemence Housman, are in keeping with the text, not impertinent. Mr. A. Garth Jones in the ‘Quarto’ seemed much influenced by Japanese grotesques; but in illustrations to Milton’s ‘Minor Poems’ (1898) he has shown development towards the expression of beauty more austere, classical, controlled to the presentment of Milton’s high thought. His recent ‘Essays of Elia’ remind one of the forcible work of Mr. E. J. Sullivan in ‘Sartor Resartus.’ Mr. Sullivan’s ‘Sartor’ and ‘Dream of Fair Women’ must be mentioned. His mastery over an assertive use of line and solid black, the unity of his effects, the humour and imagination of his decorative designs, are not likely to be forgotten, though the balance of his work in illustrations to Sheridan, Marryat, Sir Walter Scott, obliges one to class him with “character” illustrators, and so to leave a blank in this article.
Mr. Laurence Housman stands alone among modern illustrators, though one may, if one will, speak of him as representing the succession of the sixties, or as connected with the group of artists whose noteworthy development dates from the publication of ‘The Dial’ by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon in 1889. To look at Mr. Housman’s art in either connection, or to record the effect of Dürer, of Blake, of Edward Calvert, on his technique, is only to come back to appreciation of all that is his own. As an illustrator he has hardly surpassed the spirit of the ‘forty-four designs, drawn and written by Laurence Housman,’ that express his idea of George Meredith’s ‘Jump to Glory Jane’ (1890). These designs were the result of the appreciation which the editor, Mr. Harry Quilter, felt for Mr. Housman’s drawings to ‘The Green Gaffer’ in ‘The Universal Review.’ Jane—the village woman with ‘wistful eyes in a touching but bony face,’ leaping with countenance composed, arms and feet ‘like those who hang,’ leaping in crude expression of the unity of soul and body, making her converts, failing to move the bishop, dying at last, though not ingloriously, by the wayside—this most difficult conception has no ‘burlesque outline’ in Mr. Housman’s work, inexperienced and unacademic as is the drawing.
‘Weird Tales from Northern Seas,’ by Jonas Lie, was the next book illustrated by Mr. Housman. Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ (1893), offered greater scope for freakish imagination than did ‘Jane.’ The goblins, pale-eyed, mole and rat and weasel-faced; the sisters, whose simple life they surround with hideous fantasy, are realized in harmony with the unique effect of the poem—an effect of simplicity, of naïve imagination, of power, of things stranger than are told in the cry of the goblin merchants, as at evening time they invade quiet places to traffic with their evil fruits for the souls of maidens. The frail-bodied elves of ‘The End of Elfin Town,’ moving and sleeping among the white mushrooms and slender stalks of field flowers, are of another land than that of the goblin merchant-folk. Illustrations to ‘The Imitation of Christ,’ to ‘The Sensitive Plant,’ and drawings to ‘The Were-Wolf,’ by Miss Clemence Housman, complete the list of Mr. Housman’s illustrations to writings not his own, with the exception of frontispiece drawings to several books.
To explain Mr. Housman’s vision of ‘The Sensitive Plant’ would be as superfluous as it would be ineffectual. In a note on the illustrations he has told how the formal beauty, the exquisite ministrations, the sounds and fragrance and sweet winds of the garden enclosed, seem to him as ‘a form of beauty that springs out of modes and fashions,’ too graceful to endure. In his pictures he has realized the perfect ensemble of the garden, its sunny lawns and rose-trellises, its fountains, statues, and flower-sweet ways; realized, too, the spirit of the Sensitive Plant, the lady of the garden, and Pan, the great god who never dies, who waits only without the garden, till in a little while he enters, ‘effacing and replacing with his own image and superscription, the parenthetic grace... of the garden deity.’
Of a talent that treats always of enchanted places, where ‘reality’ is a long day’s journey down a dusty road, it is difficult to speak without suggesting that it is all just a charming dalliance with pretty fancies, lacking strength. Of the strength of Mr. Housman’s imagination, however, his work speaks. His illustrations to his own writings, fairy tales, and poems, cannot with any force be discussed by themselves. The words belong to the pictures, the pictures to the words. The drawings to ‘The Field of Clover’ are seen to full advantage in the wood-engravings of Miss Housman. Only so, or in reproduction by photogravure, is the full intention of Mr. Housman’s pen-drawings apparent.
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.