OPEN-AIR illustration is less influenced by the tradition of Rossetti
and of the romanticists of 'the sixties' than any other branch of
illustrative art. The reason is obvious. Of all illustrators, the
illustrator of open-air books has least concern with the interpretation
of literature, and is most concerned with recording facts from
observation. It is true that usually he follows where a writer goes,
and studies garden, village or city, according to another man's
inclination. But the road they take, the cities and wayside places, are
as obvious to the one as to the other. The artist has not to realize
the personal significance of beauty conceived by another mind; he has
to set down in black and white the aspect of indisputable cities and
palaces and churches, of the actual highways and gardens of earth. No
fugitive light, but the light of common day shows him his subject. So,
although Stevenson's words, that reaching romantic art one becomes
conscious of the background, are completely true in application to the
drawings of Rossetti, of Millais, Sandys and Houghton, these
'backgrounds' have had no traceable effect on modern open-air
illustration. Nor are the landscape drawings in works such as 'Wayside
Poesies,' or 'Pictures of English Landscape,' at the beginning of the
style or styles--formal or picturesque--most in vogue at present.
Birket Foster has no followers; the pensive landscape is not suited to
holiday excursion books; and, though Mr. J. W. North is among artists
of to-day, as a book-illustrator he has unfortunately added little to
his fine record of landscape drawings made between 1864 and 1867. One
cannot include his work in a study of contemporary illustration, though
it is a pleasure passed over to leave unconsidered drawings that in
'colour,' in effects of winter-weather, of leaf-thrown light and shade
amid summer woods and over the green lanes of English country, are
delightfully remote from obvious and paragraphic habits of rendering
facts.
With few exceptions the open-air illustrators of to-day began their
work and took their place in public favour, and in the estimation of
critics, after 1890. Mr. Joseph Pennell, it is true, had been making
sketches in England, in France, and in Italy for some years; Mr.
Railton had made some preliminary illustrations; Mr. Alfred Parsons
illustrated 'Old Songs' with Mr. Abbey in 1889; and Mr. Fulleylove
contributed to 'The Picturesque Mediterranean,' and published his
'Oxford' drawings, in the same year. Still, with a little elasticity,
'the nineties' covers the past activity of these men. The only
important exception is Sir George Reid, President of the Royal Scottish
Academy, much of whose illustrative work belongs to the years prior to
1890. The one subject for regret in connection with Sir George Reid's
landscape illustrations is that the chapter is closed. He makes no more
drawings with pen-and-ink, and the more one is content with those he
has made, the less does the quantity seem sufficient. Those who know
only the portraits on which Sir George Reid's reputation is firmly
based will find in his landscape illustrations a new side to his art.
Here, as in portraiture, he sees distinctly and records without
prejudice the characteristics of his subject. He renders what he sees,
and he knows how to see. His conception being clear to himself, he
avoids vagueness and obscurity, finding, with apparent ease, plain
modes of expression. A straight observer of men and of the
country-side, there is this directness and perspicuity about his work,
whether he paints a portrait, or makes pen-drawings of the village
worthies of 'Pyketillim' parish, or draws Pyketillim Kirk, small and
white and plain, with the sparse trees beside it, or great river or
city of his native land.
But in these pen-stroke landscapes, while the same clear-headed survey,
the same logical record of facts, is to be observed as in his work as a
portrait painter, there is besides a charm of manner that brings the
indefinable element into one's appreciation of excellent work. Of
course this is not to estimate these drawings above the portraits of
Sir George Reid. That would be absurd. But he draws a country known to
him all his life, and unconsciously, from intimate memory, he suggests
more than actual observation would discover. This identification of
past knowledge with the special scrutiny of a subject to be rendered is
not usually possible in portraiture. The 'portrait in-time' is a
question of occasion as well as of genius.
The first book in which his inimitable pen-drawing of landscape can be
properly studied is the illustrated edition of 'Johnny Gibb of
Gushetneuk, in the Parish of Pyketillim,' published in 1880. Here the
illustrations are facsimile reproductions by Amand-Durand's
heliogravure process, and their delicacy is perfectly seen. These
drawings are of the Aberdeenshire country-folk and country, the native
land of the artist; though, as a lad in Aberdeen, practising
lithography by day, and seizing opportunities for independent art when
work was over, the affairs and doings of Gushetneuk, of Smiddyward, of
Pyketillim, or the quiet of Benachie when the snow lies untrodden on
its slopes, were things outside the city of work.
It is as difficult to praise these drawings intelligibly to those who
have not seen them, as it is unnecessary to enforce their charm on
those who have. Unfortunately, a reproduction of one of them is not
possible, and admirable as is the drawing from 'Royal Edinburgh,' it is
in subject and in treatment distinct from the 'Gushetneuk' and 'North
of Scotland' illustrations. The 'Twelve Sketches of Scenery and
Antiquities on the Great North of Scotland Railway,' issued in 1883,
were made in 1881, and have the same characteristics as the
'Gushetneuk' landscapes. The original drawings for the engraved
illustrations in 'The Life of a Scotch Naturalist,' belonging to
1876--drawings made because the artist was 'greatly interested' in the
story of Thomas Edward--must have been of the same delicate force, and
the splendid volumes of plates illustrating the 'River Clyde,' and the
'River Tweed,' issued by the Royal Association for the Promotion of the
Fine Arts in Scotland, contain more of his fine work. It was this
society, that, in the difficult days following the artist's abandonment
of Aberdeen and lithography for Edinburgh and painting, gave him the
opportunity, by the purchase of two of his early landscapes, for study
in Holland and in Paris. There is something of Bosboom in a rendering
of a church interior such as 'The West Kirk,' but of Israels, who was
his master at the Hague, there is nothing to be seen in Sir George
Reid's illustrations. They are never merely picturesque, and when too
many men are 'freakish' in their rendering of architecture, the
drawings of North of Scotland castles--well founded to endure weather
and rough times of war--seem as real and true to Scottish romance as
the "pleasant seat," the martlet-haunted masonry of Macbeth's castle
set among the brooding wildness of Inverness by the fine words of
Duncan and Banquo.
The print-black of naked boughs against pale sky, a snow-covered
country where roofs are white, and the shelter of the woods is thin
after the passing of the autumn winds--this black and white is the
black and white of most of Sir George Reid's studies of northern
landscape. To call it black and white is to stretch the octave and omit
all the notes of the scale. Pure white of plastered masonry, or of
snow-covered roof or field in the bleak winter light, pure black in
some deep-set window, in the figure of a passer-by, or in the bare
trees, are used with the finesse of a colourist. Look at the
'Pyketillim Kirk' drawing in 'Johnny Gibb.' Between the white of the
long church wall, and the black of the little groups of village folk in
the churchyard, how quiet and easy is the transition, and how true to
colour is the result. Of the Edinburgh drawings the same may be said;
but, except in facsimile reproduction, one has to know the scale of
tone used by Sir George Reid in order to see the original effect where
the printed page shows unmodified black and white. In 'Holyrood Castle'
the values are fairly well kept, and the rendering of the ancient
building in the deep snow, without false emphasis, yet losing nothing
of emphatic effect, shows the dominant intellectual quality of the
artist's work.
[Illustration: HOLYROOD CASTLE. BY SIR GEORGE REID. FROM MRS.
OLIPHANT'S "ROYAL EDINBURGH."