In a recent work, illustrations to Leigh Hunt's 'Old Court Suburb,' Mr.
Shepperson collaborates with Mr. E. J. Sullivan and Mr. Herbert
Railton, to realize the associations, literary, historical and
gossiping, that have Kensington Palace and Holland House as their
principal centres. On the whole, of the three artists, the subject
seems least suggestive to Mr. Shepperson. Mr. Sullivan contributes
many portraits, and some subject drawings that show him in his
lightest and most dexterous vein. These drawings of _beaux_ and
_belles_ are as distinct in their happy flattery of fact from the rigid
assertion of the artist's 'Fair Women,' as they are from the
undelightful reporting style that in the beginning injured Mr.
Sullivan's illustrations. One may describe it as the 'Daily Graphic'
style, though that is to recognize only the basis of convenience on
which the training of the 'Daily Graphic' school was necessarily
founded. Mr. Sullivan's early work, the news-illustration and
illustrations to current fiction of Mr. Reginald Cleaver and of his
brother Mr. Ralph Cleaver, the black and white of Mr. A. S. Boyd and of
Mr. Crowther, show this journalistic training, and show, too, that such
a training in reporting facts directly is no hindrance to the later
achievement of an individual way of art. Mr. A. S. Hartrick must also
be mentioned as an artist whose distinctive black and white developed
from the basis of pictorial reporting, and how distinctive and
well-observed that art is, readers of the 'Pall Mall Magazine' know. As
a book-illustrator, however, his landscape drawings to Borrow's 'Wild
Wales' represent another art than that of the character-illustrator.
Nor can one pass over the drawings of Mr. Maurice Greiffenhagen, also a
contributor to the 'Pall Mall Magazine,' if better known in
illustrations to fiction in 'The Ladies' Pictorial,' though in an
article on book-illustration he has nothing like his right place. As an
admirable and original technician and draughtsman of society, swift in
sight, excellent in expression, he ranks high among black-and-white
artists, while as a painter, his reputation, if based on different
qualities, is not doubtful.
[Illustration: FROM MR. E. J. SULLIVAN'S 'SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL.'