English Book-Illustration of To-day Part 3

BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. MACMILLAN.]

The sobriety and decorum of Mr. New's architectural and landscape drawings are the ant.i.thesis of the flagrantly picturesque. I do not know whether Mr. Gere or Mr. New invented this order of landscape and house drawing, but Mr. New is the chief exponent of it, and has placed it among popular styles of to-day. It has the effect of sincerity, and of respectful treatment of ancient buildings. Mr. New does not lapse from the perpendicular, his hand does not tremble or break off when house-walls or the ridge of a roof are to be drawn. His is a convention that is frankly conventional, that confines nature within decorous bounds, and makes formality a function of art. But though a great deal of Mr. New's work is mechanical and done to pattern, so that sometimes little perpendicular strokes to represent gra.s.s fill half the pictured s.p.a.ce, while little horizontal strokes to represent brick-work, together with 'touches' that represent foliage, fill up the rest except for a corner left blank for the sky; yet, at his best, he achieves an effective and dignified way of treating landscape for the decoration of books. Sensational skies that repeat one sensation to monotony, scattered blacks and emphasized trivialities, are set aside by those who follow Mr. New. When they are trivial and undiscriminating, they are unaffectedly tedious, and that is almost pleasant after the hackneyed sparkle of the inferior picturesque.

Mr. New's reputation as a book-ill.u.s.trator was first made in 1896, when an edition of 'The Compleat Angler' with many drawings by him appeared.

The homely architecture of Ess.e.x villages and small towns, the low meadows and quiet streams, gave him opportunity for drawings that are pleasant on the page. Two garden books, or strictly speaking, one--for 'In the Garden of Peace' was succeeded by 'Outside the Garden'--contain natural history drawings similar to those of fish in 'The Compleat Angler' and of birds in White's 'Selborne.' The ill.u.s.trations to 'Oxford and its Colleges,' and 'Cambridge and its Colleges,' are less representative of the best Mr. New can do than books where village architecture, or the irregular house-frontage of country high-streets are his subject. Ill.u.s.trating Shakespeare's country, 'Suss.e.x,' and 'The Wess.e.x of Thomas Hardy,' brought him into regions of the country-town; but the most important of his recent drawings are those in 'The Natural History of Selborne,' published in 1900. The drawing of 'Selborne Street' is from that volume.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Selborne Street

BY E. H. NEW.

FROM WHITE'S 'SELBORNE.'

BY LEAVE OF MR. LANE.]

With Mr. New, Mr. R. J. Williams and Mr. H. P. Clifford ill.u.s.trated Mr.

Aymer Vallance's two books on William Morris. Their ill.u.s.trations are fit records of the homes and working-places of the great man who approved their art. Mr. Frederick Griggs, who since 1900 has ill.u.s.trated three or four garden books, also follows the principles of Mr. New, but with more variety in detail, less formality in tree-drawing and in the rendering of paths and roads and streams and suns.h.i.+ne, in short, with more of art outside the school, than Mr. New permits himself.

The open-air covers so much that I have little room to give to another aspect of open-air ill.u.s.tration--drawings of bird and animal-life. The work of Mr. Harrison Weir, begun so many years ago, is chiefly in children's books; but Mr. Charles Whymper, who has an old reputation among modern reputations, has ill.u.s.trated the birds and beasts and fish of Great Britain in books well known to sportsmen and to natural historians, as also books of travel and sport in tropical and ice-bound lands. The work of Mr. John Guille Millais is no less well known. No one else draws animals in action, whether British deer or African wild beast, from more intelligent and thorough observation, and of his art the graceful rendering of the play of deer in Cawdor Forest gives proof that does not need words. Birds in flight, beasts in action--Mr.

Millais is undisputably master of his subject. Many drawings show the humour which is one of the charms of his work.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIGURE-OF-EIGHT RING IN CAWDOR FOREST. BY J. G. MILLAIS.

FROM HIS 'BRITISH DEER AND THEIR HORNS.'

BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. SOTHERAN.]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Since this book was in type, I have learned with regret of the death of Miss Helen James.]

III. SOME CHARACTER ILl.u.s.tRATORS.

SO far, in writing of decorative ill.u.s.trators and of open-air ill.u.s.trators, the difference in scheme between a study of book-ill.u.s.tration and of 'black-and-white' art has not greatly affected the scale and order of facts. The intellectual idea of ill.u.s.tration, as a personal interpretation of the spirit of the text, finds expression, formally at least, in the drawings of most decorative black-and-white artists. The deliberate and inventive character of their art, the fact that such qualities are non-journalistic, and ineffective in the treatment of 'day by day' matters, keeps the interpretative ideal, brought into English ill.u.s.tration by Rossetti, and the artists whose spirits he kindled, among working ideals for these ill.u.s.trators. For that reason, with the exception of page-decorations such as those of Mr. Edgar Wilson, the subject of decorative ill.u.s.tration is almost co-extensive with the subject of decorative black-and-white. The open-air ill.u.s.trator represents another aspect of ill.u.s.tration. To interpret the spirit of the text would, frequently, allow his art no exercise. Much of his text is itinerary. His subject is before his eyes in actuality, or in photographs, and not in some phrase of words, magical with suggested forms, creating by its gift of delight desire to celebrate its beauty. Still, if the artist be independent of the intellectual and imaginative qualities of the book, his is no independent form of black and white. It is ill.u.s.tration; the author's subject is the subject of the artist. Open-air facts, those that are beautiful and pleasurable, are too uneventful to make 'news ill.u.s.tration.' Unless as background for some event, they have, for most people, no immediate interest. So it happens that open-air drawings are usually ill.u.s.trations of text, text of a practical guide-book character, or of archaeological interest, or of the gossiping, intimate kind that tells of possessions, of journeys and pleasurings, or, again, ill.u.s.trations of the open-air cla.s.sics in prose and verse.

But in turning to the work of those draughtsmen whose subject is the presentment of character, of every man in his own humour, the ill.u.s.tration of literature is a part only of what is noteworthy. These artists have a subject that makes the opportunities of the book-ill.u.s.trator seem formal; a subject, charming, poignant, splendid or atrocious, containing all the 'situations' of comedy, tragedy or farce; the only subject at once realized by everyone, yet whose opportunities none has ever comprehended. The writings of novelists and dramatists--life narrowed to the perception of an individual--are limitary notions of the matter, compared with the illimitable variety of character and incident to be found in the world that changes from day to day. And 'real' life, purged of monotony by the wit, discrimination or extravagance of the artist, or--on a lower plane--by the combination only of approved comical or sentimental or melodramatic elements, is the most popular and marketable of all subjects. The completeness of a work of art is to some a refuge from the incompleteness of actuality; to others this completeness is more incomplete than any incident of their own experience. The first bent of mind--supposing an artist who ill.u.s.trates to 'express himself'--makes an ill.u.s.trator of a draughtsman, the second makes literature seem no more than _la reste_ to the artist as an opportunity for pictorial characterization.

Character ill.u.s.tration is then a subject within a subject, and if it be impossible to consider it without overseeing the limitations, yet a different point of view gives a different order of impressions.

Caricaturists, political cartoonists, news-ill.u.s.trators and graphic humorists, the artists who pictorialize society, the stage, the slums or some other kind of life interesting to the spectator, are outside the scheme of this article--unless they be ill.u.s.trators also. For instance, the ill.u.s.trations of Sir Harry Furniss are only part of his lively activities, and Mr. Bernard Partridge is the ill.u.s.trator of Mr.

Austin Dobson's eighteenth-century muse as well as the 'J. B. P.' of 'socials' in 'Punch.'

An ill.u.s.trator of many books, and one whose ill.u.s.trations have unusual importance, both as interpretations of literature and for their artistic force, Mr. William Strang is yet so incongruous with contemporary black-and-white artists of to-day that he must be considered first and separately. For the traditions of art and of race that find a focus in the ill.u.s.trative etchings of this artist, the creative traditions, and instinctive modes of thought that are represented in the forms and formation of his art, are forces of intellect and pa.s.sion and insight not previously, nor now, by more than the one artist, a.s.sociated with the practice of ill.u.s.tration. To consider his work in connection with modern ill.u.s.tration is to speak of contrasts. It represents nothing that the gift-book picture represents, either in technical dexterities, founded on the requirements of process reproduction, or in its decorative ideals, or as expressive of the pleasures of literature. One phase of Mr. Strang's ill.u.s.trative art is, indeed, distinct from the ma.s.s of his work, with which the etched ill.u.s.trations are congruous, and the line-drawings to three masterpieces of imaginary adventure--to Lucian, to Baron Munchausen and to Sindbad--show, perhaps, some infusion of Aubrey Beardsley's spirit of fantasy into the convictions of which Mr. Strang's art is compounded. But these drawings represent an excursion from the serious purpose of the artist's work. The element in literature expressed by that epithet 'weird'--exiled from power to common service--is lacking in the extravagances of these _voyages imaginaires_, and, lacking the shadows cast by the unspeakable, the intellectual _chiaroscuro_ of Mr.

Strang's imagination, loses its force. These travellers are too glib for the artist, though his comprehension of the grotesque and extravagant, and his humour, make the drawings expressive of the text, if not of the complete personality of the draughtsman. The 'types, shadows and metaphors' of 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' with its poignancies of mental experience and conflict, its transcendent pa.s.sages, its theological and nave moods, gave the artist an opportunity for more realized imagination. The etchings in this volume, published in 1894, represent little of the allegorical actualities of the text. Not the encounters by the way, the clash of blows, the 'romancing,' but the 'man cloathed with rags and a great Burden on his back,' or Christiana his wife, when 'her thoughts began to work in her mind,' are the realities to the artist. The pilgrims are real and credible, poor folk to the outward sight, worn with toil, limited, abused in the circ.u.mstances of their lives; and these peasant figures are to Mr. Strang, as to his master in etching, Professor Legros, symbols of endurance, significant protagonists in the drama of man's will and the forces that strive to subdue its strength. To both artists the peasant confronting death is the climax of the drama. In the etchings of Professor Legros death fells the woodman, death meets the wayfarer on the high-road. There is no outfacing the menace of death.

But to Mr. Strang, the sublimity of Bunyan's 'poor man,' who overcomes all influences of mortality by the strength of his faith, is a possible fact. His ballad ill.u.s.trations deal finely with various aspects of the theme. In 'The Earth Fiend,' a ballad written and ill.u.s.trated with etchings by Mr. Strang in 1892, the peasant subdues and compels to his service the spirit of destruction. He maintains his projects of cultivation, conquers the adverse wildness of nature, makes its force productive of prosperity and order; then, on a midday of harvest, sleeps, and the 'earth fiend,' finding his tyrant defenceless, steals on him and kills him as he lies. 'Death and the Ploughman's Wife'

(1894) has a braver ending. It interprets in an impressive series of etchings how 'Death that conquers a" is vanquished by the mother whose child he has s.n.a.t.c.hed from its play. The t.i.tle-page etching shows a little naked child kicking a skull into the air, while the peasant-mother, patient, vigilant, keeps watch near by. In 'The Christ upon the Hill' of the succeeding year, a ballad by Cosmo Monkhouse with etchings by Mr. Strang, the artist follows, of course, the conception of the writer; but here, too, his work is expressive of the visionary faith that discerns death as one of those 'base things' that 'usher in things Divine.'

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM WILLIAM STRANG'S BALLAD, 'DEATH AND THE PLOUGHMAN'S WIFE' (REDUCED FROM THE ORIGINAL ETCHING).

BY LEAVE OF MR. A. H. BULLEN.]

The twelve etchings to 'Paradise Lost' (1896) do not, as I think, represent Mr. Strang's imagination at its finest. It is in the representation of rude forms of life, subjected to the immeasurable influences of pa.s.sion, love, sorrow, that the images of Mr. Strang's art, at once vague and of intense reality, primitive and complex, have most force. Adam and Eve driven from Paradise by the angel with the flaming sword, are not directly created by the artist. They recall Masaccio, and are undone by the recollection. Eve, uprising in the darkness of the garden where Adam sleeps, the speech of the serpent with the woman, the gathering of the fruit, are traditionary in their pictorial forms, and the tradition is too great, it imposes itself between the version of Mr. Strang and our admiration. But in the thirty etchings ill.u.s.trative of Mr. Kipling's works, as in the ballad etchings, the imagination of the artist is unfettered by tradition. The stories he pictures deal, for all their cleverness and definition, with themes that, translated out of Mr. Kipling's words into the large imagination of Mr. Strang, have powerful purpose. As usual, the artist makes his picture not of matter-of-fact--and the etching called 'A Matter of Fact' is specially remote from any such matter--but of more purposeful, more overpowering realities than any particular instance of life would show. He attempts to realize the value, not of an instance of emotion or of endeavour, but of the quality itself. He sets his mind, for example, to realize the force of western militarism in the east, or the att.i.tude of the impulses of life towards contemplation, and his soldiers, his 'Purun Bhagat,' express his observations or imaginations of these themes. Certainly 'a country's love' never went out to this kind of Tommy Atkins, and the India of Mr. Strang is not the India that holds the Gadsbys, or of which plain tales can be told.

But he has imagined a country that binds the contrasts of life together in active operation on each other, and in thirty instances of these schemed-out realities, or of dramatic events resulting from the clash of racial and national and chronological characteristics, he has achieved perhaps his most complete expression of insight into essentials. Mr. Strang's etchings in the recently published edition of 'The Compleat Angler,' ill.u.s.trated by him and by Mr. D. Y. Cameron, are less successful. The charm of his subject seems not to have entered into his imagination, whereas forms of art seem to have oppressed him.

The result is oppressive, and that is fatal to the value of his etchings as ill.u.s.trations of the book that 'it would sweeten a man's temper at any time to read.' Intensity and large statement of dark and light; fine dramatizations of line; an unremitting conflict with the superfluous and inexpressive in form and in thought; an art based on the realities of life, and without finalities of expression, inelegant, as though grace were an affectation, an insincerity in dealing with matters of moment: these are qualities that detach the ill.u.s.trations of Mr. Strang from the generality of ill.u.s.trations. Save that Mr. Robert Bryden, in his 'Woodcuts of men of letters' and in the portrait ill.u.s.trations to 'Poets of the younger generation,' shows traces of studying the portrait-frontispieces of Mr. Strang, there is no relation between his art and the traditions it represents and any other book-ill.u.s.trations of to-day.

Turning now to ill.u.s.trators who are representative of the tendencies and characteristics of modern book-ill.u.s.tration, and so are less conspicuous in a general view of the subject than Mr. Strang, there is little question with whom to begin. Mr. Abbey represents at their best the qualities that belong to gift-book ill.u.s.tration. It would, perhaps, be more correct to say that gift-book ill.u.s.tration represents the qualities of Mr. Abbey's black and white with more or less fidelity, so effective is the example of his technique on the forms of picturesque character-ill.u.s.tration. It is nearly a quarter of a century since the artist, then a young man fresh from Harper's drawing-office in New York, came to England. That first visit, spent in studying the reality of English pastoral life in preparation for his 'Herrick'

ill.u.s.trations, lasted for two years, and after a few months' interval in the States he returned to England. Resident here for nearly all the years of his work, a member of the Royal Academy, his art expressive of traditions of English literature and of the English country to which he came as to the actuality of his imaginings, one may include Mr. Abbey among English book-ill.u.s.trators with more than a show of reason. In 1882, when the 'Selections from the Poetry of Robert Herrick' was published, few of the men whose work is considered in this chapter had been heard of. Chronologically, Mr. Abbey is first of contemporary character-ill.u.s.trators, and nowhere but first would he be in his proper place, for there is no one to put beside him in his special fas.h.i.+on of art, and in the effect of his ill.u.s.trative work on his contemporaries.

There is inevitable ease and elegance in the pen-drawings of Mr. Abbey, and for that reason it is easy to underestimate their intellectual quality. He is inventive. The spirit of Herrick's muse, or of 'She Stoops to Conquer,' or of the comedies of Shakespeare, is not a quality for which he accepts any formula. He finds shapes for his fancies, rejecting as alien to his purpose all that is not the clear result of his own understanding of the poet. Accordingly there is, in all his work, the expression of an intellectual conception. He sees, too, with patience. If he isolates a figure, one feels that figure has stepped forward into a clear place of his imagination as he followed its way through the crowd. If he sets a pageant on the page, or some piece of turbulent action, or moment of decision, the actors have their individual value. He thinks his way through processes of gradual realization to the final picture of the characters in the play or poem.

One writes now with special reference to the ill.u.s.trations of the comedies of Shakespeare--so far, the ill.u.s.trative work most exigent to the intellectual powers of the artist. Herrick's verse, full of sweet sounds and suggestive of happy sights, 'She Stoops to Conquer,' where all the mistakes are but for a night, to be laughed over in the morning, the lilt and measure of 'Old Songs,' and of the charming verses in 'The Quiet Life,' called for sensitive appreciation of moods, lyrical, whimsical, humorous, idyllic, but--intellectually--for no more than this. As to Mr. Abbey's technique, curious as he is in the uses of antiquity as part of the pleasure of a fresh realization, clothing his characters in textiles of the great weaving times, or of a dainty simplicity, a student of architecture and of landscape, of household fittings, of armoury, of every beautiful accessory to the business of living, his clever pen rarely fails to render within the convention of black and white the added point of interest and of charm that these things bring into actuality. Truth of texture, of atmosphere, and of tone, an alertness of vision most daintily expressed--these qualities belong to all Mr. Abbey's work, and in the Shakespearean drawings he shows with greater force than ever his 'stage-managing' power, and the correctness and beauty of his 'mounting.' The drawings are dramatic: the women have beauty and individuality, while the men match them, or contrast with them as in the plays; the rogues are vagabonds in spirit, and the wise men have weight; the world of Shakespeare has been entered by the artist. But there are gestures in the text, moments of glad grace, of pa.s.sion, of sudden amazement before the realities of personal experience, that make these active, dignified figures of Mr. Abbey 'merely players,' his Isabella in the extremity of the scene with Claudio no more than an image of cloistered virtue, his Hermione incapable of her undaunted eloquence and silence, his Perdita and Miranda and Rosalind less than themselves.

As ill.u.s.trations, the drawings of Mr. Abbey represent traditions brought into English ill.u.s.trative art by the Pre-Raphaelites, and developed by the freer school of the sixties. But, as drawings, they represent ideas not effective before in the practice of English pen-draughtsmen; ideas derived from the study of the black and white of Spain, of France, and of Munich, by American art students in days when English ill.u.s.trators were not given to look abroad. Technically he has suggested many things, especially to costume ill.u.s.trators, and many names might follow his in representation of the place he fills in relation to contemporary art. But to work out the effect of a man's technique on those who are gaining power of expression is to labour in vain. It adds nothing to the intrinsic value of an artist's work, nor does it represent the true relations.h.i.+p between him and those whom he has influenced. For if they are mere imitators they have no relation with any form of art, while to insist upon derived qualities in work that has the superscription of individuality is no true way of apprehension. What a man owes to himself is the substantial fact, the fact that relates him to other men. The value of his work, its existence, is in the little more, or the much more, that himself adds to the sum of his directed industries, his guided achievements. And to estimate that, to attempt to express something of it, must be the chief aim of a study, not of one artist and his 'times,' but of many artists practising a popular art.

So that if, in consideration of their 'starting-point,' one may group most character-ill.u.s.trators, especially of wig-and-powder subjects, as adherents either of Mr. Abbey and the 'American school,' or of Mr. Hugh Thomson and the Caldecott-Greenaway tradition, such grouping is also no more than a starting-point, and everything concerning the achievements of the individual artist has still to be said.

Considering the intention of their technique, one may permissibly group the names of Mr. Fred Pegram, Mr. F. H. Townsend, Mr. Shepperson, Mr.

Sydney Paget, and Mr. Stephen Reid as representing in different degrees the effect of American black and white on English technique, though, in the case of Mr. Paget, one alludes only to pen-drawings such as those in 'Old Mortality,' and not to his Sherlock Holmes and Martin Hewitt performances. The art of Mr. Pegram and of Mr. Townsend is akin.

Mr. Pegram has, perhaps, more sense of beauty, and his work suggests a more complete vision of his subject than is realized in the drawings of Mr. Townsend, while Mr. Townsend is at times more successful with the activities of the story; but the differences between them seem hardly more than the work of one hand would show. They really collaborate in ill.u.s.tration, though, except in Ca.s.sell's survey of 'Living London,'

they have never, I think, made drawings for the same book.

Mr. Pegram served the usual apprentices.h.i.+p to book-ill.u.s.tration. He was a news-ill.u.s.trator before he turned to the ill.u.s.tration of literature; but he is an artist to whom the reality acquired by a subject after study of it is more attractive than the reality of actual impressions.

Neither sensational nor society events appeal to him. The necessity to compose some sort of an impression from the bare facts of a fact, without time to make the best of it, was not an inspiring necessity.

That Mr. Pegram is a book-ill.u.s.trator by the inclination of his art as well as by profession, the ill.u.s.trations to 'Sybil,' published in 1895, prove. In these drawings he showed himself not only observant of facial expression and of gesture, but also able to interpret the glances and gestures of Disraeli's society. From the completeness of the draughtsman's realization of his subject, ill.u.s.trable situations develop themselves with credibility, and his graceful women and thoughtful men represent the events of the novel with distinction. With 'Sybil' may be mentioned the ill.u.s.trations to 'Ormond,' wherein, five years later, the same understanding of the ways and activities of a bygone, yet not remote society, found equally satisfactory expression, while the technique of the artist had gained in completeness. In 'The Last of the Barons' (1897), Mr. Pegram had a picturesque subject with much strange humanity in it, despite Lord Lytton's conventional travesty of events and character. The names of Richard and Warwick, of Hastings and Margaret of Anjou, are names that break through conventional romance, but the ill.u.s.trator has to keep up the fiction of the author, and, except that the sham-mediaevalism of the novel did not prevent a right study of costumes and accessories in the pictures, the artist had to be content to 'Bulwerize.' Ill.u.s.trations to 'The Arabian Nights' gave him opportunity for rendering textures and atmosphere, and movements charming or grave, and the 'Bride of Lammermoor' drawings show a sweet-faced Lucy Ashton, and a Ravenswood who is more than melancholy and picturesque. Mr. Pegram's drawings are justly dramatic within the limits prescribed by a somewhat composed ideal of bearing. A catastrophe is outside these limits, and the discovery of Lucy after the bridal lacks real ill.u.s.tration in the artist's version, skilful, nevertheless, as are all his drawings, and expressed without hesitation. Averse to caricature, and keeping within ideas of life that allow of unbroken expression, the novels of Marryat, where action so bustling that only caricatures of humanity can endure its exigencies, and sentimental episodes of flagrant insincerity, swamp the character-drawing, are hardly suited to the art of Mr. Pegram. Still, he selects, and his selection is true to the time and circ.u.mstance of Marryat's work. In itself it is always an expression of a coherent and definite conception of the story.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM MR. PEGRAM'S 'THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR.'

BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. NISBET.]

Mr. Townsend has ill.u.s.trated Hawthorne and Peac.o.c.k, as well as Charlotte Bronte and Scott. Hawthorne's men and women--embodiments always of some essential quality, rather than of the combination of qualities that make 'character'--lend themselves to fine ill.u.s.tration as regards gesture, and Mr. Townsend's drawings represent, not insensitively, the movement and suggestion of 'The Blithedale Romance'

and 'The House of the Seven Gables.' In the Peac.o.c.k ill.u.s.trations the artist had to keep pace with an essentially un-English humour, an imagination full of shapes that are opinions and theories and sarcasms masquerading under fantastic human semblances. Mr. Townsend kept to humanity, and found occasions for representing the eccentrics engaged in cheerful open-air and society pursuits in the pauses of paradoxical discussion. One realizes in the drawings the pleasant aspect of life at Gryll Grange and at Crotchet Castle, the courtesies and amus.e.m.e.nts out of doors and within, while the subjects of 'Maid Marian,' of 'The Misfortunes of Elphin' and of 'Rhododaphne' declare themselves in excellent terms of romance and adventure. Mr. Townsend has humour, and he is in sympathy with the vigorous spirit in life; whether the vigour is intellectual as in Jane Eyre and in s.h.i.+rley Keeldar, or muscular as in 'Rob Roy,' in drawings to a manual of fencing, and in Marryat's 'The King's Own,' or eccentric as in the fantasies of Peac.o.c.k. His work is never languid and never formal; and if in technique he is sometimes experimental, and frequently content with ineffectual accessories to his figures, his conception of the situation, and of the characters that fulfil the situation, is direct and effective enough.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM MR. TOWNSEND'S 's.h.i.+RLEY.'

BY LEAVE OF MESSRS. NISBET.]

As an ill.u.s.trator of current fiction, Mr. Townsend has also a considerable amount of dexterous work to his name, but a record of drawings contributed to the ill.u.s.trated journals cannot even be attempted within present limits of s.p.a.ce.

Mr. Shepperson in his book-ill.u.s.trations generally represents affairs with picturesqueness, and with a nervous energy that takes the least mechanical way of expressing forms and substances. Ill.u.s.trating the modern novel of adventure, he is happy in his intrigues and conspiracies, while in books of more weight, such as 'The Heart of Midlothian' or 'Lavengro,' he expresses graver issues of life with un-elaborate and suggestive effect. The energy of his line, the dramatic quality of his imagination, render him in his element as an ill.u.s.trator of events, but the vigour that projects itself into subjects such as the murder of Sir George Staunton, or the fight with the Flaming Tinman, or the alarms and stratagems of Mr. Stanley Weyman, informs also his representation of moments when there is no action.

Technically Mr. Shepperson represents very little that is traditional in English black and white, though the tradition seems likely to be there for future generations of English ill.u.s.trators.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Ye are ill, Effie," were the first words Jeanie could utter; "ye are very ill."

FROM MR. SHEPPERSON'S 'THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN.'

BY LEAVE OF THE GRESHAM PUBLIs.h.i.+NG COMPANY.]

In a recent work, ill.u.s.trations to Leigh Hunt's 'Old Court Suburb,' Mr.

Shepperson collaborates with Mr. E. J. Sullivan and Mr. Herbert Railton, to realize the a.s.sociations, literary, historical and gossiping, that have Kensington Palace and Holland House as their princ.i.p.al centres. On the whole, of the three artists, the subject seems least suggestive to Mr. Shepperson. Mr. Sullivan contributes many portraits, and some subject drawings that show him in his lightest and most dexterous vein. These drawings of _beaux_ and _belles_ are as distinct in their happy flattery of fact from the rigid a.s.sertion of the artist's 'Fair Women,' as they are from the undelightful reporting style that in the beginning injured Mr.