Doyle’s First Family (Ashcroft, British Columbia: Calabash Press, 2004)The Illustrated Letters of Richard Doyle to His Father, 1842–1843
Introduction
Richard Doyle is best known today for his relationship to his more famous nephew, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and for his work as the illustrator who designed the famous cover of Punch magazine. He is also remembered for his illustrations of fairy tales and children’s stories, and for his folio edition, In Fairyland (1869), a masterpiece of the book arts. In 1843, at the age of nineteen, he became one of the principal graphic artists for Punch, devising hundreds of ornamental initials, border designs, caricatures, and political cartoons over the course of his seven-year career. After resigning from Punch, Doyle set out on a long career as a book illustrator, creating designs for popular works by authors such as Dickens and Thackeray, and publishing his own series of cartoon sketches in the comic adventure The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson (1854). Toward the end of his life he abandoned the medium of illustration for watercolor, sending his work to the Grosvenor Gallery and the Royal Exhibition. When he died in 1883 at the age of fifty-nine, his fairy painting and watercolors had already fallen out of fashion. A retrospective of his work at the Grosvenor Gallery, followed a year later by his estate sale, generated only modest interest.1
The decline in Doyle’s reputation after his death was made worse by a number of biographical and material circumstances. He was trained at home by his father, the political cartoonist and satirist John Doyle (“HB”), and never attended the Royal Academy Schools. Nor was he apprenticed to a professional working painter or studio. Although he loved the RA exhibitions, at least as a young man, and although one of his great ambitions was to be made an academician, he did not display his first painting there until 1868, by which time he was forty-four years old.2 Near the end of his career in the late 1870s his pictures at last began to appear regularly in the galleries, but because they were executed in the less durable medium of watercolor they proved hard to sell. Many of his ingenious earlier sketches and family productions never made it to the public eye, remaining for years in private hands and eventually descending to the special collections of libraries and museums.
Doyle’s reputation in the twentieth century was handicapped by his commitment to illustration, not only because of the common prejudice that holds illustrators are not truly artists—that is, active makers and interpreters rather than amanuenses of meaning—but also because of their perceived status as secondary. The author’s text was always considered paramount; the illustrator merely decorated or was charged with the task of simplifying the verbal text to ensure comprehension and mass appeal. As an illustrator of children’s and fairy tales and as a painter of fairy scenes, moreover, Doyle was further disadvantaged. If read at all, these works were considered appropriate only for children, fanciful and innocent, at most harmless fun. By the early 1900s the consensus view was summed up by Anthony R. Montalba, who in his introduction to Doyle’s work repeatedly calls his creations “charming” and defuses the word “satirist” with “gentle”: “He never approached bitterness or indelicacy, and his humourous work is a standing refutation of the preposterous notion that humour cannot exist apart from coarseness.”3 Similarly, The Dictionary of National Biography quietly damned him as “the kindliest of pictorial satirists” and “the most sportive and frolicsome of designers.”4 The American illustrator Joseph Pennell put it more bluntly, calling the majority of his designs “simply rubbish.”5 Small wonder then that Doyle’s first biographer, Lewis Lusk, never found a publisher for his book, though he worked on it for nearly ten years.6 In the first half of the twentieth century Doyle seemed destined to remain a genteel lightweight whose artwork was considered clever and amusing but ultimately superficial.
In 1983 the tide turned briefly with the centenary exhibition of Doyle family artwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum together with the publication of the first full-length biography by Rodney Engen.7 While providing a wealth of information about the Doyle family and plenty of new material, these two events did little to alter critical opinion or attract popular interest. Few scholarly articles appeared as a result, and only one fresh edition of Doyle’s work was published in the succeeding years.8 In spite of Engen’s biography, which went a long way toward providing a more comprehensive overview of his achievement, the standard notion persisted that Doyle was witty and whimsical, a graceful “limner” of fairyland, but a gifted amateur nonetheless. Today most critics believe that he never sustained the brilliance of his seven years at Punch and never, like his more famous colleagues John Leech and John Tenniel, went on to leave a lasting mark on the field of book illustration.9
While his early commitment to magazine publication and book illustration may have injured Doyle’s long-term reputation, it made him very popular in his day. His lively vignettes and initials, along with the elaborate designs for title pages, prefaces, and indices of the Punch biannual volumes, were deftly executed and warmly comic, attracting the attention of Walter Crane, whose early illustrations show a strong influence by Doyle’s work; Edwin Landseer, who encouraged his art students to copy from him; and William Heath Robinson, who was inspired by the cover of Punch. By the late 1840s, members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were studying Doyle’s composition of figures in his series on the Manners and Customs of Ye Englyshe and admiring its iconographic echoes of medieval tapestry. William Holman Hunt and Dante Rossetti were both impressed by Doyle’s powers of observation and attention to details of fashion and physiognomy. And it was precisely this work—Doyle’s witty parodies of polite society—that drew Thackeray and Dickens to him. Both men would commission illustrations for their novels and stories and also become close friends.10
One of the primary claims of the present edition is that Doyle was already a talented and prolific artist before his tenure with Punch, and that the works of his early period have been neglected because of the unorthodox means of their production, their select audience, and their relative scarcity. In an astonishing surge of creativity between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, the young “Dicky Doyle” executed a series of brilliant private and semi-public works. These consisted of unique and often illuminated manuscripts, some published in small editions subscribed by family and friends, others reproduced posthumously in facsimile editions. Between 1840 and 1843, Doyle produced at least ten works of varied genres: The Tournament (1840), Fores National Envelopes (1840), Dick Doyle’s Journal (1840), Comic Histories (1841), Dick Kitcat’s Book of Nonsense (1842), Jack the Giant Killer (1842), Beauty and the Beast (1842), A Grand Historical, Allegorical, Classical and Comical Procession of Remarkable Personages Ancient, Modern and Unknown (1842), The Christening Procession of Prince Taffy (1842), and The Brother to the Moon’s Visit to the Court of Queen Vic (1843) (see figs. 1–4).11 These projects are remarkable for their skillful handling of satire, their beautiful coloring and level of finish, and their maturity. The last three works in particular explore Doyle’s favorite theme of the procession,
