And This Is It
Illustration and illustrators
The Early Works of Aubrey Beardsley, The Later Work of Aubrey Beardsley, Fifty Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, Under the Hill and Other Essays, The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser by Aubrey Beardsley; The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley; and The Pierrot of the Minute, written by Ernest Dowson and illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley; Language of Flowers by Kate Greenaway; Walter Crane’s Painting Book, Flowers from Shakespeare’s Garden, The Baby’s Own Aesop, A Floral Fantasy in an Old English Garden, The Baby’s Opera, The Baby's Bouquet, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, The Frog Prince, The Absurd ABC, A Flower Wedding and The Sleeping Beauty Picture Book by Walter Crane; The Complete Graphic Works by Alphonse Mucha; Alphonse Mucha Photographs, edited by Graham Ovenden, and Nymphets and Fairies and The Illustrators of “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” by Graham Ovenden; and English Book Illustration, 1800—1900 by Philip James
It is an under examined, overlooked part of art, book art. We give it to our children when they cannot read, and when they can read but only with accompanying encouragement. It shows us how things ought to look in our own minds, at least in so far as someone with formal training in line and proportion thinks it ought.
We like the seasoned pair of eyes; we like the elaboration of illustrators; we like their willingness to make a scene distilled, or deepened, or distorted. The towering figure so large his spine bends at the corner, and his back advances parallel to the top of the frame. The small thing blown up in great detail — an inch-wide pearl turned into an orb, a globe. Those pieces of the grotesque that fill books for children — strange beings, odd situations, Escher-esque tricks of light and perspective and form.
It is no wonder that as visual media sped up and multiplied in the modern age — with photography, with the emergence of moving pictures, with the transmission of images and sounds via radio waves, via cables, via satellite — the demand for illustration has not fallen. Nor that illustration has become more vivid and different, more difficult to determine and to box in. The more distinctive, the better. The more vital and exuberant, the better. Artists like Gerald Scarfe and Quentin Blake are institutions. Men like Richard Chopping, technically skilled though they may be, less so.
Aubrey Beardsley’s work is so modern, so strange, that it does not seem to originate from the late nineteenth century. It is art nouveau; it is art deco; it is everything that came more than twenty years after Beardsley’s death at the shockingly young age of twenty-five in 1898. Beardsley would have been a great success in the Germany of Expressionism. He would have been an interwar star beyond compare, had he lived.
And there were yet men like Walter Crane and women like Kate Greenaway, quite justifiably considered among the finest illustrators of their generation, with such purity of line, such care in creation of precise renderings — of faces, of forms, of flora. There is no better thing for a child than to be given a Crane edition — things so precisely done, so beautiful. There is no better thing.
Many writers did not much like their illustrators; they were the cherry on top, it’s true, but they detracted from the purity of word and idea. They seemed to say, via their communion with the magazines and the masses, that some works were genre works, not to be taken seriously. Arthur Conan Doyle did not, after some time, much like his creation Sherlock Holmes, from whose shadow he struggled so hard and so unsuccessfully to escape. But was Holmes’s unhappy fame at least partially the result of the illustrations of Sidney Paget, of Frederic Dorr Steele, of Leo O'Mealia? But Doyle himself illustrated his own works, in his fashion; he gave them form, the form that was to be derided by some twentieth century critics as ‘boy’s stories for adults,’ himself.
Doyle’s own illustrations of Holmes show him as something of a floppy-haired dreamer, a bohemian, the kind of man that a character in an early P. G. Wodehouse novel would try to catch the eye of in the street, begging to be given the secret key or password to permit him, too, to advance with certainty into the creative life, the life of the far-sighted, the life beyond the ordinary.
It was Paget who made Holmes tall and painfully thin, with limbs like iron. A tightly-wrapped cipher of hard angles enveloped in harsh clothes. It is Paget who gave Holmes much of his assumed severity.
Some illustrated books are the definitive — the ne plus ultra of their type. Who could think of Alice — in any of her guises — without Sir John Tenniel, who also so defined a style at Punch? Who could think of the dank romances and mysteries embroidered, and so profoundly added to, by Gustave Doré?
Would any of us give up Tenniel’s view of characters, with their immense and heavy faces, covered in detail, riven with hatching and cross-hatching, even if we might prefer another iteration of Alice, an attempt to make her stories a little less austere and grown up, to ornament them with softer edges?
Studies of illustrators leave their subjects a little in the shade. These people were just some of many, they seem to say. All of them trying for the same effect, trying to do the same work. But they are not the same — nor is what good they did.