That Thornbury's Legendary Ballads (dated 1876) should be regarded as a most important volume in a collection of the 'sixties' is not odd, when you find that its eighty-one illustrations were reprinted from Once a Week. Many of the drawings were republished in this book, with the poem they originally illustrated; others, however, were joined to quite different text. If the memories of those living are to be trusted, not a few of the artists concerned were extremely annoyed to find their designs applied to new purposes. To take a single instance, the Sandys design to King Warwolf re-accompanied the poem itself, but the drawing by John Lawson, which is herein supposed to illustrate the lines,
was first published with a poem, Ariadne, by W. J. Tate, in August 1866, long after King Warwolf first appeared. Its design is obviously based on this passage:
But it requires a great effort of perverted imagination to drag in the picture, which shows a Greek hero on one ship, watching, you suppose, the dying Norse king on another ship; when the ballad infers, and the dramatic situation implies, that the old monarch put out at once across the bar, and his people from the shore watched his ship burn in the night. To wrench such a picture from its context, and apply it to another, was a too popular device of publishers. As, however, it preserves good impressions of blocks otherwise inaccessible, it would be ungracious to single out this particular instance for blame. Yet all the same, those who regard the artist's objection to the sale of clichés for all sorts of purposes, as a merely sentimental grievance, must own that he is justified in being annoyed, when the whole intention of his work is burlesqued thereby.
A contemporary review says that the illustrations had 'appeared before in Once a Week, The Cornhill, and elsewhere.' It would be a long and ungrateful task to collate them, but, so far as my own memory can be trusted, they are all from the first named. In place of including a description of the book itself, a few extracts, from a review by Mr. Edmund Gosse in the Academy (February 1876, p. 177), will not only give a vivid appreciation of the work of two of the artists, but show that twenty years ago the book was prized as highly as we prize it to-day. He says: 'We have thought the illustrations sufficiently interesting to demand a separate notice for themselves, the more so as in many cases they are totally unconnected with Mr. Thornbury's poems.... We are heartily glad to have collected for us some of the most typical illustrations of a school that is, above all others, most characteristic of our latest development in civilisation, and of which the principal members have died in their youth, and have failed to fulfil the greatness of their promise.
'The artists represented are mainly those who immediately followed the so-called pre-Raphaelites, the young men who took up many of their principles, and carried them out in a more modern and a more quiet way than their more ambitious masters. Mr. Sandys, who pinned all his early faith to Holbein, and Messrs. Walker, Pinwell, Lawless, and Houghton, who promised to form a group of brother artists unrivalled in delicacy and originality of sentiment, are here in their earliest and strongest development.... M. J. Lawless contributes no less than twenty designs to the volume. We have examined these singular and beautiful drawings, most of them old favourites, with peculiar emotion. The present writer [Mr. Edmund Gosse] confesses to quite absurd affection for all the few relics of this gifted lad, whose early death seems to have deprived his great genius of all hope of fame. Years ago these illustrations, by an unknown artist, keenly excited a curiosity which was not to be satisfied till we learned, with a sense of actual bereavement, that their author was dead. He seems to have scarcely lived to develop a final manner; with the excessive facility of a boy of high talent we find him incessantly imitating his elder rivals, but always with a difference.... No doubt, in M. J. Lawless, English art sustained one of the sharpest losses it ever had to mourn.
'Of Pinwell no need to say so much. He has lived, not long enough indeed to fulfil the great promise of his youth, but to ensure his head a lasting laurel. There have been stronger intellects, purer colourists, surer draughtsmen among his contemporaries, but where shall we seek a spirit of poetry more pathetic, more subtle, more absolutely modern than his? The critics are for ever urging poets and painters to cultivate the materials that lie about them in the common household-life of to-day. It is not so easy to do so; it is not to be done by writing "idylls of the gutter and the gibbet"; it is not to be done by painting the working-man asleep by his baby's cradle. Perhaps no one has done it with so deep and thorough a sympathy as Pinwell; and it is sympathy that is needed, not curiosity or pity.' But it would be hardly fair to quote further from Mr. Gosse's appreciation twenty years ago of artists still living. The volume contains eight designs by Sandys, namely, Labours of Thor (Harold Harfagr), King Warwolf, The Apparitor of the Secret Tribunal (Jacques de Caumont), Tintoretto (Yet once more on the organ play), The Avatar of Zeus (The King at the Gate), The search of Ceres for Proserpine (Helen and Cassandra), The Boy Martyr, The Three Statues of Egina, and The Miller's Meadow (The Old Chartist); the alternative title given in brackets is that of the original as it first appeared in Once a Week. To show how carelessly the author treated the artists, to whom, in a flowery preface, he says he owes so much, 'for they have given to his airy nothings a local habitation and a name, and have caught and fixed down on paper, like butterflies in an entomologist's cabinet, many a fleeting Cynthia of his brain,' it will suffice to quote his profuse acknowledgments to 'Mr. Poynter, an old schoolfellow of the author's, and now Professor in the London University, [who] has expended all his learning, taste, and thought in the The Three Statues. The drapery might be copied by a sculptor, it is arrayed with such fine artistic feeling, and over the whole the artist has thrown the solemnity of the subject, and has shown, in Pluto's overshadowing arm, the vanity of all things under the sun—even the pure ambition of a great artist.' This charming eulogy, be it noted, is bestowed on a drawing that is by Frederick Sandys!!! not by Poynter, who is unrepresented in the book.
The four Whistlers of Once a Week are all here, absurdly renamed. There are twenty by M. J. Lawless, seven by T. Morten, ten by J. Lawson, one by A. Boyd Houghton, two by Fred Walker, eight by G. J. Pinwell, six by W. Small, three by J. Tenniel, three by F. Eltze, and one each by J. D. Watson, C. Keene, G. Du Maurier, Towneley Green, C. Green, T. R. Macquoid, P. Skelton, A. Fairfield, E. H. Corbould, and A. Rich. The book is well printed, and a treasure-house of good things, which appear to more advantage upon its 'toned paper' than in the pages of the periodical where they first saw daylight.
The preface to Dalziels' Bible Gallery is dated October 1880, so that the volume was probably issued for the season of 1880–81. As we have seen, the work was in active preparation in the early sixties. It contained sixty-nine blocks excellently printed upon an India tint. These include nine by the late Lord Leighton, P.R.A., three by G. F. Watts, R.A., five by F. R. Pickersgill, R.A., twelve by E. J. Poynter, R.A., three by E. Armitage, R.A., two by H. H. Armstead, R.A., one by Sir E. Burne-Jones, one by Holman Hunt, three by Ford Madox Brown, six by Simeon Solomon, two by A. Boyd Houghton, two by W. Small, one by E. F. Brewtnall, fourteen by T. Dalziel, one by E. Dalziel, two by A. Murch, and one by F. S. Walker, and one by Frederick Sandys. The praise lavished on these designs is amply justified if you regard them as a whole; but, turning over the pages critically after a long interval, there is a distinct sense of disillusion. At the time they seemed all masterpieces; sixteen years after they stand confessed as a very mixed group, some conscientious pot-boilers, others absolutely powerful and intensely individual. The book is monumental, both in its ambitious intention and in the fact that it commemorates a dead cause. It is easy to disparage the work of the engravers, but when we see what fine things owe their very existence to Messrs. Dalziels' enterprise, it is but just to pay due tribute to the firm, and to regret that so powerful an agency is no longer actively engaged in similar enterprises.
As copies are both scarce and costly, it may be well to call attention to a volume entitled Art Pictures from the Old Testament (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1897), wherein the whole sixty-nine reappear supplemented by twenty-seven others, which would seem to have prepared for the Bible Gallery, but not previously issued: thirteen of these added designs are by Simeon Solomon, two by H. H. Armstead, R.A., three by E. Armitage, R.A., three by F. R. Pickersgill, R.A., three by T. Dalziel, and one each by F. S. Waltges (sic), G. J. Pinwell, and E. G. Dalziel.
As impressions of the famous blocks are obtainable at a low cost, it would be foolish to waste space upon detailed descriptions. Of course the popular reprint ought not to be compared with the fine proofs of the great édition-de-luxe, which cost about twenty times as much. But for many purposes it is adequate, and gives an idea of the superb qualities of the Leighton designs, and the vigour and strongly dramatic force of the Poynters. It is interesting to compare Sir Edward Burne-Jones's original design for The Boiling Pot, reproduced in Pen-Drawing and Pen-Draughtsmen by Joseph Pennell (Macmillan, 1894), with the engraving, which is from an entirely different version of the subject. Other drawings on wood obviously intended for this work, but never used, can be seen at South Kensington Museum.
A few belated volumes still remain to be noticed—they are picked almost at random, and doubtless the list might be supplemented almost indefinitely: The Trial of Sir Jasper, by S. C. Hall (Virtue, undated), with illustrations by Gilbert, Cruikshank, Tenniel, Birket Foster, Noel Paton, and others, including W. Eden Thomson and G. H. Boughton. The latter, a drawing quite in the mood of the sixties, seems to be the earliest illustration by its author. Another design by H. R. Robertson, of a dead body covered by a cloth in a large empty room, is too good to pass without comment. Beauties of English Landscape, drawn by Birket Foster, is a reprint, in collected form, of the works of this justly popular artist; it is interesting, but not comparable to the earlier volume with a similar title. In Nature Pictures, thirty original illustrations by J. H. Dell, engraved by R. Paterson (Warne), the preface, dated October 1878, refers to 'years of patient painstaking labour on the part of artist and engraver'; so that it is really a posthumous child of the sixties, and one not unworthy to a place among the best.
Songs of Many Seasons, by Jemmett Brown (Pewtress and Co., 1876), contains two little-known designs by Walter Crane, two by G. Du Maurier and one by C. M. (C. W. Morgan). Pegasus Re-saddled (H. S. King, 1877), with ten illustrations by G. Du Maurier is, as its title implies, a companion volume to the earlier Puck on Pegasus, by H. Cholmondeley Pennell. The Children's Garland (Macmillan, 1873), contains fourteen capital things by John Lawson—no relative of 'Cecil' or 'F. W. Lawson.'
The Lord's Prayer, illustrated by F. R. Pickersgill, R.A., and Henry Alford, D.D. (Longmans, 1870), has a curiously old-fashioned air. One fancies, and the preface supports the theory, that its nine designs should be considered not as an aftermath to the sixties, but as a presage of the time, near the date of The Music-master. Their vigorous attempt to employ modern costume in dignified compositions deserves more than patronising approval. Any art-student to-day would discover a hundred faults, but their one virtue might prove beyond his grasp. Although engraved on wood by Dalziel, printed as they are upon a deep yellow tint, the pictures at first sight suggest lithographs, rather than wood-engravings. Rural England, by L. Seguin (Strahan, 1885) has many delightful designs by Millais and Pinwell, but all, apparently, reprints of blocks used in Good Words and elsewhere.
Possibly the whole series of Mr. Walter Crane's toy-books, which began to be issued in the mid-sixties, should be noticed here; but they deserve a separate and complete iconography. In fact, any attempt to go beyond the arbitrary date is a mistake, and this chapter were best cut short, with full consciousness of its being a mere fragment which may find place in some future volume, upon 'the seventies,' that I hope may find its historian before long.
A book of this sort, which aimed to be complete, should contain a critical summary of the period it attempts to record. But to extract from the mass of material a clearly-defined purpose, and build up a plausible theory to show that all the diverse tendencies could be traced to a common purpose, would surely be at best merely an academic argument. All that the sixties prove, to a very sincere if incapable student, seems to be that the artist, if he be indeed an artist, can make the meanest material serve his purpose. The men of the sixties tried obviously to do their best. They took their art seriously, if not themselves. It is tempting to affirm that the tendency now is for no one to take himself seriously, and even at times to look upon his art, whatever it may be, as merely a useful medium to exploit for his own ends. Yet such an opinion would be probably too sweeping; and one is driven back to the primal fact, that the energy and knowledge which results in masterly achievement is, and must always be, beyond rules, beyond schools, as it is beyond fashion or mood. A man who tries to do his best, if he be endowed with ripe knowledge and has the opportunity, will make a fine thing; which, whether intended for a penny paper, or a guinea gift-book, will possess both vitality and permanent value.
But the men of the sixties took themselves quite seriously; and this is surely evident from their drawings. Not a few committed suicide, or died from over-work; neither catastrophe being evidence of flippant content with the popularity they had achieved. Whether inspired by pure zeal for art, by rivalry, or by money-making, they felt the game well worth the candle, and did all they could do to play it fairly. Those of us to-day who try to do our best may be inept, ignorant, and attain only failure; yet the best is not achieved by accident, and the only moral of the sixties is the moral of the nineties: 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.'
Whether it be the triumph of a master or a pot-boiling illustrator, the real artist never takes his art lightly. Life, even reputation, he may play with, but his craft is a serious thing. In short, the study of the thousands of designs—some obviously burlesqued by the engraver, others admirably rendered—will not leave an unprejudiced spectator with a cut and dried opinion. That, as it happened, a number of really distinguished men enlisted themselves as illustrators may be granted, but each one did his own work in his own way; and to summarise the complex record in a sentence to prove that any method, or any manner, is a royal road to greatness is impossible. Yet no one familiar with the period can avoid a certain pride in the permanent evidence it has left, that English art in illustration, (no less than English music in the part-songs of the Elizabethan period), has produced work worthy to be entered on the cosmopolitan roll of fame. This is unquestionable; and being granted, no more need be said, for an attempt to appraise the relative value of totally distinct things is always a foolish effort.
Although it would be retraversing beaten paths to trace the illustrator of the sixties back to Bewick, or to still earlier progenitors in Dürer or the Florentines, there can be little doubt that the pre-Raphaelites gave the first direct impulse to the newer school. That their work, scanty as it is, so far as book-illustration is concerned, set going the impulse which in Kelmscott Press Editions, the Birmingham School, the Vale Press, Beardsley, Bradley, and a host of others on both sides of the Atlantic, is 'the movement' of the moment is too obvious to need stating. But for 'the sixties' proper, the paramount influence was Millais—the Millais after the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had disbanded. Despite a very ingenious attempt to trace the influence of Menzel upon the earlier men, many still doubt whether the true pre-Raphaelites were not quite ignorant of the great German. Later men—Fred Walker especially, and Charles Keene many years after—knew their Menzel, and appreciated him as a few artists do to-day, and the man in the street may at no distant future. But some of the survivors of the pre-Raphaelites, both formal and associated, deny all knowledge of Menzel at this date; others, however, have told Mr. Joseph Pennell that they did know his work, and that it had a distinct influence. Some who did not know him then regret keenly that they were unaware of his very existence until they had abandoned illustration for painting. All agree, of course, in recognising the enormous personality of one who might be called, without exaggeration, the greatest illustrator of the century; so that, having stated the evidence as it stands, no more need be added, except a suggestion that the theory of Menzel's influence, even upon those who declare they knew not the man, may be sound. An edition of Frederick the Great, by Kügler, with five hundred illustrations by Menzel, was published in England (according to the British Museum Catalogue, the book itself is undated) in 1844.7 It is quite possible that any one of the men of the time might have seen it by chance, and turned over its pages ignorant of its artist's name. A few minutes is enough to influence a young artist, and the one who in all honesty declares he never heard of Menzel may have been thus unconsciously influenced. But, if a foreign source must be found, so far as the pre-Raphaelites are concerned, Rethel seems a far more possible agent. His famous prints, Death the Friend and Death the Avenger, had they met his eye, would doubtless have influenced Mr. Sandys, and many others who worked on similar lines.
Whether Lasinio's 'execrable engravings,' as Ruskin calls them, or others, will be found to have exerted any influence, I have no evidence to bring forward. In fact the theory is advanced only as a working hypothesis, not as an argument capable of proof. It is possible that France at that time was an important factor as regards technique, as it has been since, and is still. But, without leaving our own shores, the logical sequence of development from Bewick, through Harvey, Mulready and others, does not leave very many terrible gaps. It is true that this development is always erratic—now towards the good, now to meretricious qualities.
The more one studies the matter, the more one fancies that certain drawings not intended for engraving by Mulready, and others by Maclise, must have had a large share in the movement which culminated about 1865 and died out entirely about 1870. But whatever the influence which set it going, the ultimate result was British; and, for good or evil, one cannot avoid a feeling of pride that in the sixties there was art in England, not where it was officially expected perhaps, but in popular journals.
It is quite possible that the revival of etching as a fine art, which took place early in the second half of this century, had no little direct influence on the illustration of the period. Many artists, who are foremost as draughtsmen upon wood, experimented with the etcher's needle. The Germ, 1850, was illustrated by etchings; but, with every desire to develop this suggestion, it would be folly to regard the much discussed periodical as the true ancestor of Once a Week and the rest; even the etching which Millais prepared for it, but never issued, would not suffice to establish such claim. Two societies, the Etching Club and the Junior Etching Club, are responsible for the illustration of several volumes, wherein the etched line is used in a way almost identical with the same artists' manner when drawing for the engraver. Indeed, the majority of these etchings would suffer little if reproduced by direct process to-day, as the finesse of rebroussage and the more subtle qualities of biting and printing are not present conspicuously in the majority of the plates.
The Poems by Tom Hood, illustrated by the Junior Etching Club, include two delightful Millais', The Bridge of Sighs and Ruth, a Lee Shore by Charles Keene, and two illustrations to the Ode to the Moon, and The Elm-tree by Henry Moore.
Passages from Modern English Poets, illustrated by the Junior Etching Club, was issued (undated), by Day and Son, in 1862, in a large octavo. In 1876 another edition in larger quarto, with the etchings transferred to stone, and printed as lithographs, was published by William Tegg. In this notable volume Millais is represented by Summer Indolence (p. 10), a most graceful study of a girl lying on her back in a meadow with a small child, who is wearing a daisy chain, seated at her side. Mr. J. McNeill Whistler contributes two delightful landscapes, The Angler (p. 7) and A River Scene (p. 45). In these the master-hand is recognisable at a glance, although the authorship of many of the rest can only be discovered by the index. They would alone suffice to make the book a treasure to light upon. To praise them would be absurd, for one can conceive no more unnecessary verbiage than a eulogy of Mr. Whistler's etchings—one might as well praise the beauty of June sunshine. There are many other good things in the book—a Tenniel, War and Glory (p. 3), four capital studies by Henry Moore (pp. 1, 16, 27, 28), which come as a revelation to those who only know him as a sea-painter. Four others by M. J. Lawless, an artist who has been neglected too long, The Drummer (p. 2), Sisters of Mercy (p. 12), The Bivouac (p. 30), and The Little Shipwrights (p. 36), are all interesting, if not quite so fascinating, as his drawings upon wood. H. S. Marks has a genre subject, A Study in the Egyptian Antiquity Department of the British Museum. This portentous title describes an etching of a country lad in smock-frock, who, with dazed surprise, is staring into vacancy amid the gigantic scarabs, the great goddess Pasht, and other familiar objects of the corridor leading to the Refreshment-room in the great Bloomsbury building, which people of Grub Street hurry through daily, with downcast eyes, to enjoy the frugal dainties that a beneficent institution permits them to take by way of sustenance during the intervals of study in the Reading-room. Another plate, Scene of the Plague in London, 1665, by Charles Keene, would hardly tempt one to linger before it, but for its signature. It is a powerful bit of work, but does not show the hand of the great Punch artist at its best. The rest of the contributions to this volume are by C. Rossiter, F. Smallfield, Viscount Bury, Lord G. Fitzgerald, J. W. Oakes, A. J. Lewis, F. Powell, J. Sleigh, H. C. Whaite, Walter Severn, and W. Gale. Two by J. Clark deserve mention. To find the painter of cottage-life, with all his Dutch realistic detail, in company with Mr. Whistler, is a curious instance of extremes meeting.
Without wishing to press the argument unduly, it is evident that etching which afterwards developed so bravely, and left so many fine examples, exerted also a secondary influence on the illustration of the sixties. Hence the somewhat extended reference to the few books which employed it largely for illustrations.
Those who would have you believe that the great English masters of illustration failed to obtain contemporary appreciation should note the three editions of this work as one fact, among a score of others, which fails to support their theory. Whether from a desire to extol the past or not, it is certain that those publishers who have been established more than a quarter of a century claim to have sold far larger editions of their high-priced illustrated volumes then than any moderately truthful publisher or editor would dare to claim for similar ventures to-day. Of course there were fewer books of the sort issued, and the rivalry of illustrated journalism was infinitely less; still the people of the fifties, sixties, and seventies paid their tribute in gold freely and lavishly, and if they offered the last insult of the populace—popularity—to these undoubted works of art, it prevents one placing artists of the period among the noble army of martyrs. Their payment was quite equal to that which is the average to-day, as a file-copy of one of the important magazines shows. They were reproduced as well as the means available permitted; the printing and the general 'get-up' of the books, allowing for the different ideals which obtained then, was not inferior to the average to-day, and, as a rule, the authorship of the drawings was duly acknowledged in the table of contents, and the artists 'starred' in contemporary advertisements. It is painful to own that even the new appreciation is not absolutely without precedent. One notable instance of depreciation cannot be forgotten. Mr. Ruskin, who never expressed admiration of the illustrations of the sixties, in Ariadne Florentina, chose the current number of the Cornhill Magazine for the text of a diatribe in which the following passages occur:—
'The cheap popular art cannot draw for you beauty, sense, or honesty; but every species of distorted folly and vice—the idiot, the blackguard, the coxcomb, the paltry fool, the degraded woman—are pictured for your honourable pleasure in every page, with clumsy caricature, struggling to render its dulness tolerable by insisting on defect—if, perchance, a penny or two may be coined out of the cockneys' itch for loathsomeness.... These ... are favourably representative of the entire art industry of the modern press—industry enslaved to the ghastly service of catching the last gleams in the glued eyes of the daily more bestial English mob—railroad born and bred, which drags itself about the black world it has withered under its breath. In the miserable competitive labour of finding new stimulus for the appetite—daily more gross, of this tyrannous mob, we may count as lost beyond any hope, the artists who are dull, docile, or distressed enough to submit to its demands. And for total result of our English engraving industry for the last hundred and fifty years, I find that practically at this moment [1876] I cannot get a single piece of true, sweet, and comprehensible art to place for instruction in any children's school.'
But ignoring Mr. Ruskin—if it be possible to ignore the absolute leader of taste in the sixties—we find little but praise. Yet the popularity of 1860–1870 naturally incurred the inevitable law of reaction, and was at its lowest ebb in the eighties; but now late in the nineties our revived applause is but an echo of that which was awarded to the work when it appealed not only by all its art, but with novelty and an air of being 'up to date' that cannot, in the course of things, be ever again its portion. We are not so much better than our fathers, after all, in recognising the good things of the sixties, or in trying to do our best in our way. Which is just what they tried to do in theirs.
Although space forbids biographical notice, even in the briefest form, of all the artists mentioned in the preceding pages, and it would be folly to summarise in a few hasty sentences the complete life-work of Sir J. E. Millais, P.R.A., Sir John Gilbert, R.A., Mr. Birket Foster, or Mr. G. Du Maurier, to take but a few instances; yet in the case of Mr. Arthur Hughes, the late M. J. Lawless, and others, to give more exact references to their published illustrations is perhaps easier in this way than any other, especially as a complete iconography of all the chief artists in the movement had perforce to be abandoned for want of space. Many illustrators—Ford Madox Brown, Charles Keene, A. Boyd Houghton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, W. B. Scott, Fred Walker, and J. Wolf—have already been commemorated in monographs; not confined, it is true, in every instance to the subject of this book, but naturally taking it as part of the life-work of the hero, even when, as in Rossetti's case, the illustrations form but an infinitesimally small percentage of the works he produced. The artists hereafter noticed have been chosen entirely from the collector's standpoint, and with the intention of assisting those who wish to make representative or complete collections of the work of each particular man.
George Housman Thomas (1824–1868) was born in London, December 4, 1824. When only fourteen he became apprenticed to G. Bonner, a wood-engraver, and at fifteen obtained the prize of a silver palette from the Society of Arts, for an original drawing, Please to remember the Grotto. After he had served his apprenticeship, in conjunction with Henry Harrison he set up in Paris as a wood-engraver. The firm became so successful that they employed six or seven assistants. He was then tempted to go to New York to establish an illustrated paper, which was also a success, although losses on other ventures forced the proprietors to give it up. This led the artist to turn his attention to another field of engraving for bank notes, which are estimated among the most beautiful of their kind. A few years later he returned to England, and became attached to the Illustrated London News. In 1848 a special expedition to Italy, which resulted in a long series of illustrations of Garibaldi's defence of Rome against the French, not merely established his lasting reputation, but incidentally extended his taste and knowledge by the opportunity it gave him for studying the works of the old masters. In 1854 a sketch of sailors belonging to the Baltic Fleet, which was published in the Illustrated London News, attracted the attention of the Queen, who caused inquiries to be made, which led to the artist being employed by Her Majesty to paint for her the principal events of her reign. Besides a series of important paintings in oil, he executed a large number of drawings and sketches which form an album of great interest.
'As an illustrator of books he was remarkable,' says his anonymous biographer,8 'for facility of execution and aptness of character.' His illustrations of Hiawatha (Kent and Co.), Armadale (Wilkie Collins), and The Last Chronicle of Barset (Anthony Trollope), are perhaps the most important; but London Society, Mrs. Gatty's Parables, Cassell's Magazine, The Quiver, Illustrated Readings, and many other volumes of the period, contain numerous examples of his work in this department. In the person of his brother, Mr. W. Luson Thomas, the managing director of the Graphic and the Daily Graphic, and his nephew, Carmichael Thomas, Art Director of the Graphic, the family name is still associated with the most notable movement in illustration during the period which immediately followed that to which this book is devoted.
Sir John Everett Millais, Bart., P.R.A. (born June 8, 1829, died August 13, 1896).—As these proofs were being sent to press, the greatest illustrator of all (having regard to his place as the pioneer of the school which immediately succeeded the pre-Raphaelites, the number of his designs, and their superlative excellence), has joined the majority of his fellow-workers in the sixties. It would be impossible in a few lines to summarise his contributions to the 'black-and-white' of English art; that task will doubtless be undertaken adequately. But, if all the rest of the work of the period were lost, his contributions alone might justly support every word that has been or will be said in praise of 'the golden decade.' From the 1857 Tennyson to his latest illustration he added masterpiece to masterpiece, and, were his triumphant career as a painter completely ignored, might yet be ranked as a great master on the strength of these alone.
Paul Gray (1848–1868).—A most promising young illustrator, whose early death was most keenly regretted by those who knew him best, Paul Gray was born in Dublin, May 17, 1848. He died November 14, 1868. In the progress of this work mention has been made of all illustrations which it has been possible to identify; many of the cartoons for Fun, being unsigned, could not be attributed to him with certainty. The Savage Club Papers, First Series (Tinsley, 1863), contain his last drawing, Sweethearting. In the preface we read: 'When this work was undertaken, that clever young artist [Paul Gray] was foremost in offering his co-operation; for he whom we mourned, and whose legacy of sorrow one had accepted, was his dear friend. The shock which his system, already weakened by the saddest of all maladies, received by the sudden death of that friend was more than his gentle spirit could sustain. He lived just long enough to finish his drawing, and then he left us to join his friend.' In the record of the periodicals of the sixties will be found many references to his work, which is, perhaps, most familiar in connection with Charles Kingsley's Hereward the Wake.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (b. 1828, d. 1882). The comparatively few illustrations by Rossetti have been described and reproduced so often, that it would seem superfluous to add a word more here. Yet, recognising their influence to-day, we must also remember that many people who are attracted by this side of Rossetti's art may not be familiar with the oft-told story of his career. He, more than any modern painter, would seem to be responsible for the present decorative school of illustrators, whose work has attracted unusual interest from many continental critics of late, and is recognised by them as peculiarly 'English.' While the man in the street would no doubt choose 'Phiz,' Cruikshank, Leech, Tenniel, Gilbert, Fred Walker, or Pinwell as typically 'English,' the foreigner prefers to regard the illustrations by Rossetti, his immediate followers, and his later disciples as representing that English movement, which the native is apt to look upon as something exotic and bizarre.
Yet it is not necessary to discuss Rossetti's position as founder of the pre-Raphaelite school, nor to weigh his claims to the leadership against those of Ford Madox Brown and Holman Hunt. But, without ignoring the black-and-white work of the two last named, there can be no doubt that it is Rossetti who has most influenced subsequent draughtsmen.
Nor at the time was his position as an illustrator misunderstood. When we find that he received £30 each for the small Tennyson drawings on wood, the fact proves at the outset that the market value of his work was not ignored by his publishers. At the present day when any writer on men of the sixties is accused of an attempt to 'discover' them, and the appreciation he bestows is regarded as an attempt to glorify the appreciator at the expense of the appreciated, it is well to insist upon the fact that hardly one of the men in favour to-day failed to meet with substantial recognition at the time. It was not their fate to do drawings for love, or to publish engravings at their own cost, or sell as cheap curios works which now realise a thousand times their first cost.
Drawings paid for at the highest market rate, or, to speak more accurately, at 'star' prices, published in popular volumes that ran through large editions, received favourably by contemporary critics, and frequently alluded to as masterpieces by writers in current periodicals, cannot be said to have been neglected, nor have they even been out of favour with artists.
That work, which has afforded so much lasting pleasure, was not achieved without an undue amount of pain, is easily proved in the case of Rossetti. So pertinent is a description by his brother, published lately, that it may be quoted in full, to remind the illustrators of to-day, who draw on paper and card-board at their ease to any scale that pleases them, how much less exacting are the conditions under which they work than those encountered by the artists who were forced to draw upon an unpleasant surface of white pigment spread upon a shining wooden block:—
'The Tennyson designs, which were engraved on wood and published in the Illustrated Tennyson, in which Millais, Hunt, Mulready, and others co-operated,' says Mr. William Michael Rossetti, 'have in the long run done not a little to sustain my brother's reputation with the public. At the time they gave him endless trouble and small satisfaction. Not indeed that the invention or the mere designing of these works was troublesome to him. He took great pains with them, but, as what he wrought at was always something which informed and glowed in his mind, he was not more tribulated by these than by other drawings. It must be said, also, that himself only, and not Tennyson, was his guide. He drew just what he chose, taking from his author's text nothing more than a hint and an opportunity. The trouble came in with the engraver and the publisher. With some of the doings of the engraver, Dalziel (not Linton, whom he found much more conformable to his notion), he was grievously disappointed. He probably exasperated Dalziel, and Dalziel certainly exasperated him. Blocks were re-worked upon and proofs sent back with vigour. The publisher, Mr. Moxon, was a still severer affliction. He called and he wrote. Rossetti was not always up to time, though he tried his best to be so. In other instances he was up to time, but his engraver was not up to his mark. I believe that poor Moxon suffered much, and that soon afterwards he died; but I do not lay any real blame on my brother, who worked strenuously and well. As to our great poet Tennyson, who also ought to have counted for something in the whole affair, I gather that he really liked Rossetti's designs when he saw them, and he was not without a perceptible liking and regard for Rossetti himself, so far as he knew him (they had first met at Mr. Patmore's house in December 1849); but the illustration to St. Cecilia puzzled him not a little, and he had to give up the problem of what it had to do with his work.'9
Later on, in the same volume, we find an extract from a letter dated February 1857, which Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to W. Bell Scott:—
'I have designed five blocks for Tennyson, save seven which are still cutting and maiming. It is a thankless task. After a fortnight's work my block goes to the engraver, like Agag delicately, and is hewn in pieces before the Lord Harry.
'ADDRESS TO DALZIEL BROTHERS
'O woodman spare that block,
O gash not anyhow!
It took ten days by clock,
I'd fain protect it now.
Chorus—Wild laughter from Dalziels' Workshop.'
Several versions of this incident are current, but Mr. Arthur Hughes's account has not, I think, been published. It chanced that one day, during the time he was working in Rossetti's studio, the engraver called, and finding Rossetti was out, poured forth his trouble and stated his own view of the matter with spirit. For his defence, as he put it, much sympathy may be awarded to him. The curious drawings executed in pencil, ink, and red chalk, crammed with highly-wrought detail, that were to be translated into clean black and white, were, he declared, beyond the power of any engraver to translate successfully. How Mr. Hughes pacified him is a matter of no importance; but it is but fair to recollect that, even had the elaborate designs been executed with perfection of technique, any engraver must have needs encountered a task of no ordinary difficulty. When, however, the white coating had been rubbed away in parts, and all sorts of strokes in pen, pencil, and pigment added, it is not surprising that the paraphrase failed to please the designer. Although the drawings naturally perished in the cutting, and cannot be brought forward as decisive evidence, we may believe that the engraver spoilt them, and yet also believe that no craftsman who ever lived would have been absolutely successful.
The number of Rossetti's book-illustrations is but ten in all, according to the list given in Mr. William Sharp's admirable monograph. To these one might perhaps add the frontispiece to that volume; as although the pen-drawing, A sonnet is a moment's monument, was never intended for reproduction, it forms a most decorative page. There is also a design for a frontispiece to the Early Italian Poets, which was first reproduced in the English Illustrated Magazine, No. 1. The actual frontispiece was etched but never used, and the exquisitely dainty version survives only in two impressions from the plate, both owned by Mr. Fairfax Murray. Another frontispiece, to The Risen Life,10 a poem by R. C. Jackson, in a cover designed by D. G. R. (R. Elkins and Co., 10 Castle St., East Oxford St., W., 1884), belongs to the same category, in which may be placed The Queen's Page, drawn in 1854, and reproduced in Flower Pieces by Allingham (Reeves & Turner, 1888). The ten which were all (I believe) drawn upon the wood include: Elfen-mere, published first in William Allingham's The Music-master, 1855, and afterwards reprinted in a later volume, Life and Phantasy, and again in Flower Pieces (1888), by the same author. This design 'revealed to young Burne-Jones' (so his biographer, Mr. Malcolm Bell, has recorded) that there existed a strange enchanting world beyond the hum-drum of this daily life—a world of radiant, many-coloured lights, of dim mysterious shadows, of harmonies of form and line, wherein to enter is to walk among the blest—that far-off world of Art into which many a time since he has made his way and brought back visions of delight to show his fellow-men. The first suspicion of that land of faëry came to him when, in a small volume of poems by William Allingham, he found a little wood-cut, 'Elfen-mere,' signed with a curious entwinement of the initials D. G. R. The slumbering spirit of fancy awoke to life within him and cast her spells upon him never to be shaken off.'
In the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856, Mr. Burne-Jones wrote of this very design: 'There is one more I cannot help noticing, a drawing of higher finish and pretension than the last, from the pencil of Rossetti, in Allingham's Day and Night Songs, just published. It is, I think, the most beautiful drawing for an illustration I have ever seen: the weird faces of the maids of Elfen-mere, the musical, timed movement of their arms together as they sing, the face of the man, above all, are such as only a great artist could conceive.'
This picture, 'three damsels clothed in white,' who came