English Illustration 'The Sixties': 1855-70: With Numerous Illustrations by Ford Madox Brown: A. Boyd Houghton: Arthur Hughes: Charles Keene: M. J. Lawless: Lord Leighton, P.R.A.: Sir J. E. Millais, P.R.A.: G. Du Maurier: J. W. North, R.A.: G. J. Pinwell: Dante Gabriel Rossetti: W. Small: Frederick Sandys: J. Mcneill Whistler: Frederick Walker, A.R.A.: and Others
Dante Alighieri · en
_Odes and Sonnets_, illustrated by Birket Foster (Routledge, 1859), has
also devices by Henry Sleigh, printed in colours. It is not a happy
experiment; despite the exquisite landscapes, the decoration accords
so badly that you cannot linger over its pages with pleasure. _Byron's
Childe Harold_, with eighty illustrations by Percival Skelton, is
another popular book of 1859.
_Hiawatha_, with twenty-four drawings by G. H. Thomas, and _The
Merchant of Venice_ (Sampson Low, 1860), illustrated by G. H. Thomas,
Birket Foster, and H. Brandling, with ornaments by Harry Rogers, are
two others a trifle belated in style. Of different sort is _The Voyage
of the Constance_, a tale of the Arctic Seas (Edinburgh, Constable),
with twenty-four drawings by Charles Keene, a singularly interesting
and apparently scarce volume which reveals powers of imagining
landscape which he had never seen in a very realistic manner. I once
heard him declare that he had never in his life been near either an
Irish bog or a Scotch moor, both subjects being very frequent in his
work.
_The Seasons_, by James Thomson (Nisbet, 1859), illustrated by
Birket Foster, F. R. Pickersgill, R.A., J. Wolf, G. Thomas, and Noel
Humphreys, is another small quarto gift-book with the merits and
defects of its class. Yet, after making all due allowance, one feels
that even these average volumes of the fifties, if they do not interest
us as much as those of the sixties, are yet ahead, in many important
qualities, of the average Christmas gift-book to-day. The academic
scholarship and fine craft of this era would equip a whole school of
'decorative students,' and leave still much to spare. Yet if we prefer,
in our heart of hearts, the Birmingham books to-day, this is merely
to confess that modernity, whether it be frankly actual, or pose as
mediæval, attracts us more than a far worthier thing out of fashion
for the moment. But such preference, if it exists, is hardly likely to
outlast a serious study of the books of 'the sixties.'
CHAPTER VIII: SOME ILLUSTRATED BOOKS OF THE PERIOD 1860-1864