block books, more often loose sheets, were printed from designs, picture and text, cut on the wood, in one piece, sometimes possibly engraved in metal. These blocks, being inked, and having sheets of paper placed on their inked surfaces, and the paper being rubbed, gave off an impression; as many blocks having to be cut as there were pages, and as many impressions having to be taken from each block as there were copies desired. The first of these illustrated blocks is the St. Christopher, 1423, though playing-cards, produced in the same way, were known much earlier.
It is only, however, with the invention of printing with movable types, practised by the Chinese centuries before we ever thought of it, that illustration, in its modern sense, may be said to have been created; though printing with movable type is but the cutting up into separate letters of the pages of the block books. As soon as the artist was able to make his design upon a block of wood, have that engraved, and set up in the press with movable type, and print from it, a new art was discovered.
From the day of Gutenberg and Schœffer, illustration has, in the main, never changed; new methods have been employed, new processes for making the blocks have been perfected, but an illustration still continues to be a design on a wood block or metal plate, so cut, engraved, or etched as to produce a printing surface from which impressions may be taken, either in connection with type, when we call it letterpress or relief printing, or separate from the type, when it usually becomes intaglio or plate printing.
These methods have undergone, and still are undergoing, incessant modifications, developments, and improvements; and anyone who wishes to take up illustration as a profession or a study, must learn the rudiments of the science, as well as master the great principles of art, if he wishes to succeed.
To-day, the methods of making the design are many, but the methods of reproducing it are virtually endless; still one must try to learn something of the most important, and the more one understands the requirements of drawing for engraving and printing, the better will be the results obtained.
In the fifteenth century one had but to design the picture on the side of a plank, write in the text in reverse, cut everything else away, wet the block thoroughly, ink the face of it, lay damp paper over it, and rub or press the back of the sheet of paper till the ink came off on it, producing a print.
To-day one must understand drawing in all sorts of mediums, know something of the effect of photographing a drawing on to the wood block or metal plate, take at least an intelligent interest in engraving on wood and metal, understand process and lithography, and be prepared to struggle with that terrible monster, the modern steam-press, and its slave, the modern printer. To do this intelligently requires, not only a training in Art, but in the arts and sciences of engraving, reproduction, printing; and it is to these arts and sciences that I propose to call your attention.
An illustration—using the term in its artistic sense—is a design intended to give an artist’s idea of an incident, episode, or topographical site, or it may be but a mere diagram referred to by a writer; and an illustrator is one who makes pictures or illustrations which illustrate or explain his own text, or that of another writer.
An illustration really is a work of art, or rather it should be, which is explanatory; but, as a matter of fact, so too is all graphic art, explanatory of some story, sentiment, emotion, effect, or fact; and it would be very difficult indeed to point out when art is not illustrative.
As the word is used to-day, however, an illustration is a design made for the purpose of publication in book or magazine or paper. The fashion of making such designs to accompany lettering or type is, as I have shown, as old as the art of writing. The art of illustration, or rather the existence of illustration as a separate craft, and of illustrators as a distinct body of craftsmen, is virtually the growth of this century, more properly of the last sixty years since the invention of illustrated journalism.
Until the other day illustration had no place among the Fine Arts, and it has been said that, to win renown, an illustrator must achieve it in some other branch of art.
A few great artists of the past have made illustrations which will be prized for ever, and to-day these men are spoken of as illustrators; with Dürer and Holbein it was but one of the many forms of art in which they excelled, but they were not altogether given up to it.
To-day, however, illustration is the most living and vital of the Fine Arts, and among its followers are found the most able and eminent of contemporary artists.
It cannot, however, be said that this prominence which has been so suddenly thrust upon illustration is altogether due to its increase in artistic excellence; there are a number of other reasons.
Illustration has indeed reached technically, on the part of artist, engraver, and printer, such a point of perfection, that it has at length forced critics and amateurs to give it the attention it has so long demanded.
More important reasons are the developments in reproduction and printing, started, and to a great extent carried on, merely to lessen the cost of production, but capable of giving better and truer results in the hands of intelligent craftsmen, than anything previously known.
Still, cheapness in reproduction by process, cheapness in the cost of printing, has enabled numbers of absolutely ignorant people (ignorant, that is, of art), but possessed of, they think, fine commercial instincts, to start illustrated papers and publish illustrated books. The result has been that an army of out-of-works in other fields of art, of immature or even utterly untrained students, escaping from the hard labour and drudgery of an art school, ignorant even of the fact that great illustrators have always studied and worked before they have found a chance to start, have rushed into illustration. They are led blindly by the advice of the blind, they find even manuals on the subject written authoritatively by people who are either not artists, engravers, or printers, or, if they do pretend to practise any of these arts and crafts, are unknown and unheard of among the artists with whom they would rank themselves; and more wonderful still, the pupils of these blind leaders of the blind find publishers and printers ignorant enough to employ them; but not so ignorant as to pay more than the wage of an inferior servant for the worthless work supplied them.
There are many of these papers, magazines, and books being published to-day—eminent authors even contribute to their pages; but the illustrations they contain are more primitive in their depth of ignorance than the work of the cave-dwellers, and would be equally valuable to future ages if it were not that they were mainly made up of an unintelligent cribbing, and stealing from photographs and other men’s work.
Therefore, as a mass, instead of advancing, illustration is sinking lower and lower, owing to the action of those who pretend to be its patrons; at the present moment we find ourselves in a critical situation, good work crowded out by mediocrity—because mediocrity is cheaper—real artists lost sight of amid the crowd of squirming, struggling, advertising hacks. Any spark of originality is stamped out if possible. The mere attempt to say anything in one’s own fashion is a crime, and on all sides the prayer for the extinction of the artist is heard; after him will go the process man as the commercial wood engraver has vanished, and then—well, things will take a new start, good work will be done, and we may as well prepare for the time coming soon, when cheapness and nastiness, having struggled to the bitter end, will kill each other for want of something better.
Still, to-day, as good work is being done as ever there was; only cheapness has to shriek so loud, and advertise so large, to be seen at all, that people are deafened by the shrieking, and at times the best is but seen through a glass, darkly. Nevertheless, good art will as surely live as bad will perish. Let us then endeavour not only to learn what good work is, but how to do it. In the near future this will be absolutely necessary. When one sees the greatest artists in England drawing for penny papers, one realises that illustration is only apparently
