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 — John Shaqi
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
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:
'My long hair floating in the boisterous wind,
My white hands lightly grasping Theseus' knees,
While he, his wild eyes staring, urged his slaves
To some last effort of their well-tried skill.'
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.