Mr. D. Y. Cameron has illustrated a book or two with etchings--notably
White's 'Selborne' 1902,--but to consider him as a book-illustrator
would be to stretch a point. A few of his etchings are to be seen in
books, and one would like to make them the text for the consideration
of other etchings by him, but it would be a digression. He is not among
painter-illustrators, but among painters who have illustrated, and that
would bring more names into this chapter than it could hold except in
catalogue arrangement.
Coming to artists who are illustrators, not on occasion but always,
there is no question with whom to begin. It is true that Mr. Pennell is
American, but he is such an important figure in English illustration
that to leave him out would be impossible. He has been illustrating
Europe for more than fifteen years, and the forcible fashion of his
work, and all that he represents, have influenced black-and-white
artists in this country, as his master Rico influenced him. In range
and facility, and in getting to the point and keeping there, there is
no open-air illustrator to put beside Mr. Pennell. Always interested
and always interesting, he is apparently never bewildered, always ready
and able to draw. Surely there was never a mind with a greater faculty
for quick study; and he can apply this power to the realization of an
architectural detail, or of a cathedral, of miles of country with
river curves and castles, trees, and hills and fields, and a stretch of
sky over all; or of a great city-street crowded with traffic, of new or
old buildings, of Tuscany or of the Stock Exchange, with equal ease. To
attempt a record of Mr. Pennell's work would leave no room for
appreciation of it. As far as the English public is concerned, it began
in 1885 with the publication of 'A Canterbury Pilgrimage,' and since
then each year has added to Mr. Pennell's notes of the world at the
rate of two or three volumes. The highways and byways of England--east,
west, south and north--France from Normandy to Provence, the cities and
spaces of Italy, the Saone and the Thames, the 'real' Alps and the New
Zealand Alps, London and Paris, the Cathedrals of Europe, the gipsy
encampment and the Ghetto, Chelsea and the Alhambra--Mr. Pennell has
been everywhere and seen most things as he went, and one can see it in
his drawings.
He draws architecture without missing anything tangible, and his
buildings belong to cities that have life--and an individual life--in
their streets. But where he is unapproachable, or at all events
unapproached among pen-draughtsmen, is in drawing a great scheme of
country from a height. If one could reproduce a drawing such as that of
the country of Le Puy in Mr. Wickham Flower's 'Aquitaine,' or, better
still, the etching of the same amazing country, one need say no more
about Mr. Pennell's art in this kind. Unluckily the page is too small.
This strange and lovely landscape, where curving road and river and
tree-bordered fields are dominated by two image-crowned rocks, built
about with close-set houses, looks like a design from a dream fantasy
worked out by a master of definite imagination. One knows it is not.
Mr. Pennell is concerned to give facts in picturesque order, and here
he has a theme that affects us poetically, however it may have affected
Mr. Pennell. His eye measures a landscape that seems outside the
measure of observation, and his ability to grasp and render the
characteristics of actuality serves him as ever. It is an unforgettable
drawing, though the skill displayed in the simplification and relation
of facts is no greater than in other drawings by the artist. That power
hardly ever fails him. The 'Devils of Notre Dame' again stands out in
memory, when one thinks generally of Mr. Pennell's drawings. And again,
though it seems as if he were working above his usual pitch of
conception, it is only that he is using his keenness of sight, his
logical grasp of form and power of expression, on matter that is
expressive of mental passion. The man who carved the devils, like those
who crowned the rocks of Le Puy with the haloed figures, created facts.
The outrageous passion that made these evil things made them in stone.
You can measure them. They are matter-of-fact. Mr. Pennell has drawn
them as they are, with so much trenchancy, such assertion of their
hideous decorativeness, their isolation over modern Paris, that no
drawings could be better, and any others would be superfluous. It is
impossible to enumerate all that Mr. Pennell has done and can do in
black-and-white. He is a master of so many methods. From the sheer
black ink and white paper of the 'Devils,' to the light broken line
that suggests Moorish fantastic architecture under a hot sun in the
'Alhambra' drawings, there is nothing he cannot do with a pen. Nor is
it only with a pen that he can do what he likes and what we must
admire. He covers the whole field of black-and-white drawing.
[Illustration: THE HARBOUR, SORRENTO. BY JOSEPH PENNELL. FROM HOWELL'S
"ITALIAN JOURNEYS."