Between roughly 1880 and 1920, illustration reached a peak of artistic ambition and popular significance that has rarely been matched. Printing advances made high-quality image reproduction commercially viable, the mass circulation magazine provided an unprecedented platform, and a generation of exceptionally gifted artists applied their full ambition to the printed page.
Two forces converged. Photomechanical reproduction, specifically the halftone process, allowed photographs and drawings to be reproduced at scale in newspapers and magazines. And the mass-circulation illustrated magazine, The Strand, Punch, Harper's Weekly, Scribner's, gave illustrators an audience measured in millions.
The result was a period in which illustration was genuinely prestigious. The leading illustrators were public figures whose work was anticipated and discussed, and the best of them commanded fees reflecting it.
Britain
Arthur Rackham defined the visual imagination of an era through his illustrated editions of Grimm's Fairy Tales, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and A Midsummer Night's Dream. He worked in a distinctive combination of ink line and watercolour wash producing images of great delicacy and a persistent unease. His gnarled trees, with half-human faces emerging from bark and root, express a sense of nature as animate and not particularly friendly that influenced illustrators for a century.
Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielsen and Harry Clarke worked in a more internationally inflected style, drawing on Art Nouveau, Japanese woodblock and Persian miniature painting, bringing a dreamlike quality to fairy tale and fantasy. Clarke, Dublin-born, also produced some of the finest stained glass of the twentieth century.
Scotland
Any account of this period that stops at Rackham has missed one of its most distinctive strands.
Jessie M. King, born in Bearsden in 1875, trained at Glasgow School of Art and became one of the finest book illustrators working anywhere in the period. Her line is unmistakable: attenuated, delicate, obsessively detailed, with a use of empty space that owes as much to Japanese print as to anything European. She illustrated Milton, Morris and Spenser, designed for Liberty, worked in jewellery, textiles and bookplates, and later settled at Kirkcudbright, where she was central to the artists' colony.
She belongs in the same sentence as Rackham and Dulac and is rarely put there.
The Glasgow Style more broadly, the Mackintoshes, Margaret and Frances Macdonald, Herbert MacNair, Annie French, Mabel Royds, produced an internationally recognised body of graphic work, and the Glasgow Girls were doing serious professional illustration at a point when that was still unusual.
John Duncan, meanwhile, was the central painter of the Scottish Celtic Revival, and The Evergreen, Patrick Geddes' Edinburgh journal of 1895 to 1896, was its print vehicle. Duncan's St Bride, painted in 1913 and hanging in the Scottish National Gallery, is the most reproduced Scottish image of the period and it belongs to exactly this moment.
The Celtic Revival matters beyond art history, because it is the movement that generated a great deal of what now circulates as ancient Celtic tradition. That connection is covered elsewhere on this site.
America
Howard Pyle, who taught at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia and later at his own school in Wilmington, was perhaps the most influential figure in establishing American illustration as a discipline. His historical work, particularly the pirates, knights and colonial scenes, had a cinematic quality that shaped generations, among them N. C. Wyeth and Jessie Willcox Smith. Maxfield Parrish attended his Drexel lectures, though Pyle reportedly told him he had little to teach him.
Norman Rockwell sits slightly outside the period as defined here, since his 321 covers for The Saturday Evening Post run from 1916 to 1963 and most of his career is mid-century. He was a technically extraordinary draughtsman working from elaborate photographic reference, able to render any texture or expression with complete conviction, and long dismissed by critics who confused popularity with sentimentality. The critical reassessment of the last two decades has been substantial and deserved.
Decline and afterlife
The golden age ended gradually. Photography took over as the documentary medium of magazines, film and television became the dominant entertainment media, and printing economics changed.
Illustration did not disappear. Editorial illustration continued to produce important work, and Ralph Steadman, Gerald Scarfe, Brad Holland and Marshall Arisman have made bodies of work of real artistic weight. Digital tools have opened new possibilities, and the internet has let illustrators reach audiences without a print publisher in between.
The contemporary landscape is arguably more diverse, more international and more adventurous than any previous period. What it lacks is the concentrated cultural prestige the golden age commanded.
What it made
The golden age shaped the visual imagination of the twentieth century in ways still visible. The iconography of fantasy, the dragon, the knight, the fairy, was largely established here. The visual language of adventure, the dramatic viewpoint, the moment of peak action, was developed by Pyle and his students.
And the Celtic Revival strand established something more specific: a look for Celtic and Scottish material, all attenuated line and interlace and twilight, which has proved so durable that most people now experience it as authentically ancient rather than as a design decision made around 1895.
Sources
- Meyer, S. E. (1978). A Treasury of the Great Children's Book Illustrators. Abrams.
- Hamilton, J. (1990). Arthur Rackham: A Life with Illustration. Pavilion.
- White, C. (1989). Jessie M. King, and the collections of The Hunterian and Glasgow Museums, which hold the major Glasgow Style holdings.
- Burkhauser, J. (ed.) (1990). Glasgow Girls: Women in Art and Design 1880–1920. Canongate. The book on this subject.
- Scottish National Gallery for John Duncan and the Celtic Revival painters.
- The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal (1895–96), Patrick Geddes, digitised at the University of Edinburgh and via Internet Archive.
- Pitz, H. C. (1975). The Brandywine Tradition, on Pyle and his school.
- Solomon, D. (2013). American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Related: [Knotwork and Illumination]; [Tartan: Scotland's Colour Code]; [The Palette]; [Drawing from Observation]