In connexion with this transitional period, drawings for the _Graphic_
by Houghton, Pinwell, Sir Hubert von Herkomer, E. J. Gregory, H. Woods,
Charles Green, H. Paterson (Mrs Allingham) and William Small deserve
honourable mention. Yet it was the last-named who was mainly
instrumental in bringing about the change from line-work to pigment,
which depressed the artistic value of illustration during the 'seventies
and the 'eighties to almost absolute mediocrity. Several artists of
great ability practised illustration during this period: in addition to
those _Graphic_ artists already mentioned there were Luke Fildes, Frank
Holl, S. P. Hall, Paul Renouard and a few others of smaller merit. But
the interest was for the time shifting from black-and-white work and
turning to colour. Kate Greenaway began to produce her charming idyllic
renderings of children in mob-caps and long skirts. Walter Crane on
somewhat similar lines designed his illustrated nursery rhymes; while
Randolph Caldecott took the field with his fresh and breezy scenes of
hunting life and carousal in the times most typical of the English
squirearchy. Working with a broad outline, suggestive of the brush by
its easy freedom, and adding washes of conventional colour for
embellishment, he was one of the first in England to show the beginnings
of Japanese influence. Even more dependent upon colour were his
illustrated books for children; while in black and white, in his
illustrations to _Bracebridge Hall_ (1876), for instance, pen and ink
began to replace the pencil, and to produce a new and more independent
style of draughtsmanship. This style was taken up and followed by many
artists of ability, by Harry Furniss, Hugh Thomson and others, till the
influence of E. A. Abbey's more mobile and more elaborate penmanship
came to produce a still further development in the direction of fineness
and illusion, and that of Phil May, with Linley Sambourne for his
teacher, to simplify and make broad for those who aimed rather at a
journalistic and shorthand method of illustration. (See also CARICATURE
and CARTOON.)
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