'The Centaur,' 'The Bacchant,' 'The Metamorphoses of Pan,'
'Siegfried'--young Siegfried, wood-nurtured, untamed, setting his lusty
strength against the strength of the brutes, hearing the bird-call
then, and following the white bird to issues remote from savage
life--these are subjects realized by the imagination of Mr. T. Sturge
Moore. There are few artists illustrating books to-day whose work is
more unified, imaginatively and technically. It is some years since
first Mr. Moore's wood-engravings attracted notice in 'The Dial' and
'The Pageant,' and the latest work from his graver--finer, more
rhythmic in composition though it be--shows no change in ideals, in the
direction of his talent. He has said, I think, that the easiest line
for the artist is the true basis of that artist's work, and it would
seem as though much deliberation in finding that line for himself had
preceded any of the work by which he is known. The wood-engraving of
Mr. Sturge Moore is of some importance. Always the true understanding
of his material, the unhesitating realization of his subject, combine
to produce the effect of inevitable line and form, of an inevitable
setting down of forms in expression of the thought within. Only that
gives the idea of formality, and Mr. Moore's art handles the strong
impulse of the wild creatures of earth, of the solitary creatures,
mighty and terrible, haunting the desert places and fearing the order
men make for safety. Designs to Wordsworth's 'Poems,' not yet
published, represent with innate perception the earth-spirit as
Wordsworth knew it, when the great mood of 'impassioned contemplation'
came upon his careful spirit, when his heart leapt up, or when,
wandering beneath the wind-driven clouds of March, at sight of
daffodils, he lost his loneliness.
'The Evergreen,' that 'Northern Seasonal,' represented the pictorial
outlook of an interesting group of artists--Robert Burns, Andrew K.
Womrath, John Duncan, and James Cadenhead, for example--and the racial
element, as well as their own individuality, distinguishes the work of
Mr. W. B. Macdougall and Mr. J. J. Guthrie of 'The Elf.' Mr. Macdougall
has been known as a book-illustrator since 1896, when 'The Book of
Ruth,' with decorated borders showing the fertility of his designing
power, and illustrations that were no less representative of a unique
use of material, appeared. The conventionalized landscape backgrounds,
the long, straightly-draped women, seemed strange enough as a reading
of the Hebrew pastoral, with its close kinship to the natural life of
the free children of earth. Their unimpassioned faces, unspontaneous
gestures, the artificiality of the whole impression, were undoubtedly a
new reading of the ancient charm of the story. Two books in 1897, and
'Isabella' and 'The Shadow of Love,' 1898, showed beyond doubt that the
manner was not assumed, that it was the expression of Mr. Macdougall's
sense of beauty. The decorations to 'Isabella' are more elaborate than
to 'Ruth,' and inventive handling of natural forms is as marked. Again,
the faces are de-characterized in accordance with the desire to make
the whole figure the symbol of passion, and that without emphasis. Mr.
J. J. Guthrie is hardly among book-illustrators, since 'Wedding Bells'
of 1895 does not represent Mr. Guthrie, nor does the child's book of
the following year, while the illustrations to Edgar Allan Poe's
'Poems' are still, I think, being issued from the Pear Tree Press in
single numbers. His treatment of landscape is inventive, his rhythmic
arrangements, his effects of white line on black, are based on a real
sense of the beauty of earth, of tall trees and wooded hills, of
mysterious moon-brightness and shade in the leafy depths of the
woodlands.
Mr. Granville Fell made his name known in 1896 by his illustrations to
'The Book of Job.' In careful detail, drawn with fidelity, never
obtrusive, his art is pre-Raphaelite. He touches Japanese ideals in
the rendering of flower-growth and animals, but the whole effect of his
decorative illustrations is far enough away from the art of Japan. In
the 'Book of Job' he had a subject sufficient to dwarf a very vital
imaginative sense by its grandeur. In the opinion of competent critics
Mr. Granville Fell proved more than the technical distinction of his
work by the manner in which he fulfilled his purpose. The solid black
and white, the definite line of these drawings, were laid aside for the
sympathetic medium of pencil in 'The Song of Solomon' (1897). Again,
his conception is invariably dramatic, and never crudely dramatic,
robust, with no trace of morbid or sentimental thought about it. The
garden, the wealth of vineyard and of royal pleasure ground, is used as
a background to comely and gracious figures. His other work,
illustrative of children's books and of legend, the cover and
title-page to Mr. W. B. Yeats's 'Poems,' shows the same definite yet
restrained imagination.
Mr. Patten Wilson is somewhat akin to Mr. Granville Fell in the energy
and soundness of his conceptions. Each of these artists is, as we know,
a colourist, delighting in brilliant and iridescent colour-schemes, yet
in black and white they do not seek to suggest colour. Mr. Patten
Wilson's illustrations to Coleridge's 'Poems' have the careful fulness
of drawings well thought out, and worked upon with the whole idea
realised in the imagination. He has observed life carefully for the
purposes of his art. But it is rather in rendering the circumstance of
poems, such as 'The Ancient Mariner,' or, in a Chaucer
illustration--Constance on the lonely ship--that he shows his grasp of
the subject, than by any expression of the spiritual terror or
loneliness of the one living man among the dead, the solitary woman on
strange seas.
Few decorative artists habitually use 'wash' rather than line. Among
these, however, is Mr. Weguelin, who has illustrated Anacreon in a
manner to earn the appreciation of Greek scholars, and his
illustrations to Hans Andersen have had a wider and not less
appreciative reception. His drawings have movement and atmosphere. Mr.
W. E. F. Britten also uses this medium with fluency, as is shown by his
successful illustrations to Mr. Swinburne's 'Carols of the Year' in the
'Magazine of Art' in 1892-3. Since that time his version of 'Undine,'
and illustrations to Tennyson's 'Early Poems,' have shown the same
power of graceful composition and sympathy with his subject.