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
With 1865 we reach the height of the movement--this and the following
year being of all others most fertile in books illustrated by the best
representative men. It saw Rossetti's frontispiece and title to _The
Prince's Progress_ (Macmillan, 1866), these two designs being almost
enough to make the year memorable. _A Round of Days_ (Routledge), one
of the finest of the illustrated gift-books, contains Walker's _Broken
Victuals_ (p. 3), _One Mouth More_ (p. 58), and the well-known _Four
Seasons_ (pp. 37, 39, 41, 43), for one of which the drawing on wood
is at South Kensington Museum. A. Boyd Houghton appears with fourteen
examples (pp. 1, 2, 5, 19, 20, 21, 22, 30, 47, 48, 71, 73, 77, 78),
J. W. North with three exquisite landscapes (pp. 15, 17, 18), G. J.
Pinwell with five subjects, Paul Gray with one (p. 81), J. D. Watson
with five (pp. 26, 28, 62, 64, 66), T. Morten with one (p. 79), A. W.
Bayes with two, T. Dalziel with seven, and E. Dalziel with two. These
complete its contents, excepting two delicately engraved studies of
heads after Warwick Brookes. The book itself is distinctly a lineal
descendant from the annuals of the earlier half of the century; a
typical example of a not very noble ideal--a scrap-book of poems and
pictures made important by the work of the artists.
Yet, with full recognition of the greater literalism of reproductive
process to-day, one doubts if even _The London Garland_ (Macmillan,
1895), which most nearly approaches it, will maintain its interest more
fully, after thirty years' interval, than does this sumptuous quarto,
and a few of its fellows. That we could get together, at the present
time, as varied and capable a list of artists is quite possible; but
where is the publisher who would risk paying so much for original work
designed for a single book, when examples by the same men are to be
obtained in equally good reproductions, and not less well printed in
many of the sixpenny weeklies and the monthly magazines? The change of
conditions seems to forbid a revival of volumes of this class, although
the _Yellow Book_, _The Pageant_, _The Savoy_, and _The Quarto_, are
not entirely unrelated to them.