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
Nor at the time was his position as an illustrator misunderstood. When
we find that he received £30 each for the small Tennyson drawings on
wood, the fact proves at the outset that the market value of his work
was not ignored by his publishers. At the present day when any writer
on men of the sixties is accused of an attempt to 'discover' them, and
the appreciation he bestows is regarded as an attempt to glorify the
appreciator at the expense of the appreciated, it is well to insist
upon the fact that hardly one of the men in favour to-day failed to
meet with substantial recognition at the time. It was not their fate
to do drawings for love, or to publish engravings at their own cost,
or sell as cheap curios works which now realise a thousand times their
first cost.
Drawings paid for at the highest market rate, or, to speak more
accurately, at 'star' prices, published in popular volumes that ran
through large editions, received favourably by contemporary critics,
and frequently alluded to as masterpieces by writers in current
periodicals, cannot be said to have been neglected, nor have they even
been out of favour with artists.
That work, which has afforded so much lasting pleasure, was not
achieved without an undue amount of pain, is easily proved in the case
of Rossetti. So pertinent is a description by his brother, published
lately, that it may be quoted in full, to remind the illustrators of
to-day, who draw on paper and card-board at their ease to any scale
that pleases them, how much less exacting are the conditions under
which they work than those encountered by the artists who were forced
to draw upon an unpleasant surface of white pigment spread upon a
shining wooden block:--