Page:EB1911 - Volume 14.djvu/343

Rh tended sometimes to rather inane technical results. Among its leaders may be named Arthur Gaskin, C. M. Gere and E. H. New; while work not dissimilar but more independent in spirit had already been done by Selwyn Image and H. P. Horne in the Century Guild Hobby-Horse. But far greater originality and force belonged to the work of a group, known for a time as the neo-Pre-Raphaelites, which joined to an earnest study of the past a scrupulously open mind towards more modern influences. Its earliest expression of existence was the publication of an occasional periodical, the Dial (1889–1897), but before long its influence became felt outside its first narrow limits. The technical influence of Abbey, but still more the emotional and intellectual teaching of Rossetti and Millais, together with side-influences from the few great French symbolists, were, apart from their own originality, the forces which gave distinction to the work of C. S. Ricketts, C. H. Shannon, R. Savage and their immediate following. Beauty of line, languorous passion, symbolism full of literary allusions, and a fondness for the life of any age but the present, are the characteristics of the school. Their influence fell very much in the same quarters where Morris found a welcome; but an affinity for the Italian rather than the German masters (shown especially in the “Vale Press” publications), and a studied note of world-weariness, kept them somewhat apart from the sturdy medievalism of Morris, and linked them intellectually with the decadent school initiated by the wayward genius of Aubrey Beardsley. But though broadly men may be classed in groups, no grouping will supply a formula for all the noteworthy work produced when men are drawn this way and that by current influences. Among artists resolutely independent of contemporary coteries may be named W. Strang, whose grave, rugged work shows him a pupil, through Legros, of Dürer and others of the old masters; T. Sturge Moore, an original engraver of designs which have an equal affinity for Blake, Calvert and Hokusai; W. Nicholson, whose style shows a dignified return to the best part of the Rowlandson tradition; and E. J. Sullivan. In the closing years of the 19th century Aubrey Beardsley became the creator of an entirely novel style of decorative illustration. Drawing inspiration from all sources of European and Japanese art, he produced, by the force of a vivid personality and extraordinary technical skill, a result which was highly original and impressive. To a genuine liking for analysis of repulsive and vicious types of humanity he added an exquisite sense of line, balance and mass; and partly by succès de scandale, partly by genuine artistic brilliance, he gathered round him a host of imitators, to whom, for the most part, he was able to impart only his more mediocre qualities.

In America, until a comparatively recent date, illustration bowed the knee to the superior excellence of the engraver over the artist. Not until the brilliant pen-drawing of E. A. Abbey carried the day with the black-and-white artists of England did any work of real moment emanate from the United

States, unless that of Elihu Vedder be regarded as an exception. Howard Pyle is a brilliant imitator of Dürer; he has also the ability to adapt himself to draughtsmanship of a more modern tendency. C. S. Reinhart was an artist of directness and force, in a style based upon modern French and German examples; while of greater originality as a whole, though derivative in detail, is the fanciful penmanship of Alfred Brennan. Other artists who stand in the front rank of American illustrators, and whose works appear chiefly in the pages of Scribner’s, Harper’s and the Century Magazine, are W. T. Smedley, F. S. Church, R. Blum, Wenzell, A. B. Frost, and in particular C. Dana Gibson, the last of whom gained a reputation in England as an American du Maurier.

The record of modern French illustration goes back to the day when political caricature and the Napoleonic legend divided between them the triumphs of early lithography. The illustrators of France at that period were also her greatest artists. Of the historical and romantic school were D.

Raffet, Nicholas J. Charlet, Géricault, Delacroix, J. B. Isabey and Achille Devéria, many of whose works appeared in L’Artiste, a paper founded in 1831 as the official organ of the romanticists; while the realists were led in the direction of caricature by two artists of such enormous force as Gavarni and Honoré Daumier, whose works, appearing in La Lithographie Mensuelle, Le Charivari and La Caricature, ran the gauntlet of political interference and suppression during a troubled period of French politics—which was the very cause of their prosperity. Behind these men lay the influence of the great Spanish realist Goya. Following upon the harsh satire and venomous realism of this famous school of pictorial invective, the influence of the Barbizon school came as a milder force; but the power of its artists did not show in the direction of original lithography, and far more value attaches to the few woodcuts of J. F. Millet’s studies of peasant life. In these we see clearly the tendency of French illustrative art to keep as far as possible the authentic and sketch-like touch of the artist; and it was no doubt from this tendency that so many of the great French illustrators retained lithography rather than commit themselves to the middleman engraver. Nevertheless, from about the year 1830 many French artists produced illustrations which were interpreted upon the wood for the most part by English engravers. Cunier’s editions of Paul et Virginie and La Chaumière Indienne, illustrated by Huet, Jacque, Isabey, Johannot and Meissonier, were followed by Meissonier’s more famous illustrations to Contes rémois. After Meissonier came J. B. E. Detaille and Alphonse M. de Neuville and, with a voluminous style of his own, L. A. G. Doré. By the majority of these artists the drawing for the engraver seems to have been done with the pen; and the tendency to penmanship was still more accentuated when from Spain came the influence of M. J. Fortuny’s brilliant technique; while after him, again, came Daniel Vierge, to make, as it were, the point of the pen still more pointed. During the middle period of the 19th century the best French illustration was serious in character; but among the later men, when we have recognized the grave beauty of Grasset’s Les Quatre Fils d’Aymon (in spite of his vicious treatment of the page by flooding washes of colour through the type itself), and the delicate grace of Boutet de Monvel’s Jeanne d’Arc, also in colours, it is to the illustrators of the comic papers that we have to go for the most typical and most audacious specimens of French art. In the pages of Gil Blas, Le Pierrot, L’Écho de Paris, Le Figaro Illustré, Le Courrier Français, and similar publications, are to be found, reproduced with a dexterity of process unsurpassed in England, the designs of J. L. Forain, C. L. Léandre, L. A, Willette and T. A. Steinlen, the leaders of a school enterprising in technique, and with a mixture of subtlety and grossness in its humour. Caran d’Ache also became celebrated as a draughtsman of comic drama in outline.

Among illustrators of Teutonic race the one artist who seems worthy of comparison with the great Menzel is Hans Tegner, if, indeed, he be not in some respects his technical superior; but apart from these two, the illustrators respectively of Kügler’s Frederick the Great and Holberg’s Comedies, there is no

German, Danish or Dutch illustrator who can lay claim to first rank. Max Klinger, A. Böcklin, W. Trübner, Franz Stück and Hans Thoma are all symbolists who combine in a singular degree force with brutality; the imaginative quality in their work is for the most part ruined by the hard, braggart way in which it is driven home. The achievements and tendency of the later school of illustration in Germany are best seen in the weekly illustrated journal, Jugend, of Munich. Typical of an older German school is the work of Adolf Oberländer, a solid, scientific sort of caricaturist, whose illustrations are at times so monumental that the humour in them seems crushed out of life. Others who command high qualities of technique are W. Dietz, L. von Nagel, Hermann Vogel, H. Lüders and Robert Haug. Behind all these men in greater or less degree lies the influence of Menzel’s coldly balanced and dry-lighted realism; but wherever the influence of Menzel ceases, the merit of German illustration for the most part tends to disappear or become mediocre.

—W. J. Linton, The Masters of Wood Engraving (London, 1889); C. G. Harper, English Pen Artists of To-day (London, 1892); Joseph Pennell, Pen Drawing and Pen Draughtsmen (London, 1894), Modern Illustration (London, 1895); Walter Crane, The Decorative Illustration of Books (London, 1896); Gleeson White, English Illustration: “The ’Sixties”: 1855–1870 (Westminster, 1897); W. A. Chatto, A Treatise on Wood Engraving (London, n.d.); Bar-le-Duc, Les Illustrations du XIX&#8202;e siècle (Paris, 1882); T. Kutschmann, Geschichte der deutschen Illustration vom ersten Auftreten des Formschnittes bis auf die Gegenwart (Berlin, 1899).

Technical Developments.

The history of illustration, apart from the merits of individual artists, during the period since the year 1875, is mainly that of the development of what is called (q.v.), the term applied to methods of reproducing a drawing or photograph which depend on the use of some mechanical agency in the making of the block, as distinguished from such products of manual skill as steel or wood-engraving, lithography and the like. There is good reason to believe that the art of stereotyping—the multiplication of an already existing block by means of moulds and casts—is as old as the 15th century; and the early processes were, in a measure, a refinement upon this: with the difference that they aimed at the making of a metal block by means of a cast of the lines of the drawing itself, the background of which had been cut away so as to leave the design in a definite relief. Experiments of this nature may be said to have assumed practical shape from the time of the invention of Palmer’s process called at first Glyphography, about the year 1844; this was afterwards perfected and used to a considerable extent under the name of Dawson’s Typographic Etching, and its results were in many cases quite admirable, and often appear in books and periodicals of the first part of the period with which we are now concerned. The Graphic, for instance, published its first process block in 1876, and the Illustrated London News also made similar experiments at about the same time.

From this time begins the gradual application of photography to the uses of illustration, the first successful line blocks made by