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
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.
CHAPTER XII: SOME ILLUSTRATORS OF THE SIXTIES