Modern Book Illustrators and Their Work

WHO does not love a picture-book? Yet how few comparatively still love it for anything but the pleasure of recognizing images mentally familiar or readily suggested—personalities, incidents, scenes—irrespective of any sensuous gratification from artistic qualities of presentation, of design, of composition! How few, in short, appreciate the distinction between illustration that is merely reproductive and illustration that is both interpretative and decorative! This appreciation is certainly on the increase, but, much as the artists and the makers of books are doing to stimulate it, much remains to do. The appeal of the picture-book is universal; but the Book Beautiful, in which the printed text and the illustrative scheme are conceived as a decorative whole, is as yet a rare thing. How much our joy in a book may be enhanced by pictorial embellishment must depend, of course, upon our individual conception of illustration in relation to the permanent elements of pictorial art.

That most human of book-lovers, Charles Lamb, admitted that he preferred to read Shakespeare, not in the First Folio, but in the common editions with plates so execrably bad that they served as maps, or modest remembrancers, to the text without pretending any supposable emulation with it. But we must remember that Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery engravings were then the example—the awful example, one might say—of the highest illustration of the poet, Sir John Gilbert’s vigorous dramatic illustrative designs being, of course, of much later date. Perhaps few of us would not have agreed with Lamb in his day. In our own day, however, we have come to look in book-illustration for something more than “maps, or modest remembrancers, to the text.” We are coming, in fact, if we have not already come, to demand of illustration that it shall not merely interpret for us the literary idea, or the mental image suggested by it, but that it shall do this with decorative effect—that it shall take its place upon the page with charm, dignity, and beauty. We are thus aiming at a higher standard of artistic book-illustration, which certain modern tendencies and achievements, as well as certain wider developments in the crafts of reproduction, have enabled us to conceive.

I do not pretend, of course, that in all of the great mass of book-illustration to-day there is any attempt to conform to this artistic standard—though the general average is higher. Let us therefore be clear as to what we mean by artistic illustration. To be regarded as a work of art, I take it, any graphic illustration must be composed of intrinsic decorative elements; its pictorial expression of the visualized idea must be controlled by such qualities, with harmonious balance, of form and tone as could in themselves give satisfaction as design or pattern apart from any question of literary or dramatic significance. When the expressive elements are perfectly fused with the decorative, then we get great illustration which may outlive all changes and fashions of taste. Thus, if we look with a sense of pictorial art at William Blake’s illustrations to the Book of Job or his own poems, at the noble woodcut designs of Millais, Sandys, Boyd Houghton, and the other great illustrators of the “sixties,” or at Aubrey Beardsley’s “Rape of the Lock” designs, we shall see why all these illustrations are likely to live for their own sakes as works of art, and we shall gather confidence in the permanent artistic value of not a little of the book-illustration being done to-day. We shall also understand why so much of the popular illustration of the period immediately preceding the “sixties” has died with the literature that called it forth; why even the immortal “Phiz” lives artistically chiefly because the types and episodes he made visually familiar to us have long been absorbed in our popular memories; why even the great George Cruikshank, with his infinity of illustrative invention and wit, his enormous range and facility of graphic expression, yet with his passion for significant detail uncontrolled by the decorative instinct, seems quite old-fashioned—old-fashioned as no drawing of Charles Keene’s, whatever contemporary phase of life it presented, could ever become.