French and English Illustrated Magazines

AN illustrated popular literature is the creation of our century and of the English people. The English have made the largest use of wood engraving as an adjunct of the art of bookmaking. The pictured page of the magazine, made for a great reading public, charms and instructs the eye and stimulates the curiosity; and it would be difficult to say whether children or grown people enjoy it more.

Wood engraving is the modest art of our home life ; and from the old Dutch Bible, with its curious cuts of literal art, to the last Christmas Almanac, what a simple and attractive service it has rendered to literature ! Discovered at nearly the same time as printing, it has always marched hand in hand with it, illustrating and popularizing the thoughts and imaginations of poets and artists, and enlarging the experience of the eye. None of the later arts, like lithography or photography, have succeeded in displacing it, and in England it holds the first place.

Since the making of the first book the desire to adorn the most precious has always found an art of illustration close to our need. In the Bibliothèque Impériale at Paris, one may see, under glass and screened from light, the gemmed covers and painted pages of mediæval missals. The heavy binding crusted with rich profusion of rare stones, and curious with work in silver and gold, the parchment sheets adorned with delicate and complicated designs in vivid colors, fanciful and grotesque and naïve, attest the beautiful office of an abandoned art, — a costly art naturally practised when books were few and in the hands only of princes and priests.

When printing rendered the multiplication of books an easy matter, the grave and simple design drawn and cut upon the wood was made to adorn the printed page with much of the skill, but none of the glittering glory and splendor, of the monk’s vellum sheet. Now instead of a few costly volumes, we have cheap and beautiful books from a press productive like time. Our modern art is not to illuminate a few books, but to illustrate thousands of them ; yet the chromolithograph would enable us to duplicate the most costly examples of mediæval color. At present, however, the use of the chromo-lithograph for magazines is not as satisfactory as the engraving upon wood.

In the art of book illustration the French and English are our masters. It is to the credit of English book-makers that they first secularized the art of book illustration, and first placed the woodcut at the service of the people. The English originated the Penny Magazine, which determined the character and publication of the more artistic Magasin Pittoresque for the French public. But the English make the largest use of the illustrated magazine for the pleasure of home-life and the instruction of the people. The French have no publications corresponding to such illustrated magazines as The Cornhill, London Society, Good Words, The Sunday Magazine, and Once a Week, magazines which minister through art and literature to domestic life, and express the conservatism of the English character.

The Englishman thinks of ministering to his purely private life, and in his illustrated magazine he shares with his countrymen, by his own fireside, the pleasure meant for the home circle. This is one of those significant facts which tell us that the centre of the Englishman’s life is home. For Frenchmen public life has the dominating attraction. But it would be a misrepresentation to say the French make an inadequate provision for the home life simply because they have not a batch of illustrated magazines like the English.

French social life is full of beautiful exceptions, and the popular literature of the French is admirably illustrated in such unequalled publications as the Magasin Pittoresque and La Vie à la Campagne.

The custom of the English publishers, which is to give the text of a story into the hands of the designer to illustrate, somewhat exclusively practised in England, seems to me not so good because not so instructive and varied as the plan of the French publishers, who give the principal place to woodcuts or etchings after celebrated contemporary paintings and of picturesque or historical places. The illustrations in La Vie à la Campagne and Magasin Pittoresque afford me greater pleasure and instruction, certainly stimulate my curiosity more, than the designs in English magazines by Walker, Millais, Leighton, or Du Maurier, illustrative of stories of contemporary life. The Freach illustrated magazine seems to elicit more variety, and requires a greater versatility of talent in its designers.

A volume of La Vie à la Campagne, which I have before me, gives upon the first page an admirable engraving of one of Rosa Bonheur’s most celebrated and perfect paintings, — the Rendezvous de Chasse, — which represents in a frosty morning a group of French hunters and dogs; it is certainly more instructive and pleasing than any bit of English character, sentiment, or society, drawn upon the block by Walker, Millais, or Keene, yet the talent of the English artist is not less capable of producing work equally instructive and pleasing. The groove into which the English system sooner or later throws all of their famous draughtsmen for magazines places the English illustrated publication below the French in point of interest and art. The designs by Leech were an exception, for he always derived the motif of his sketches from nature, not from stories or poems. Many of Leech’s and Keene’s drawings for Punch have all the freshness and force of work from the life ; they are not “ made up.”

The French magazine to which I have referred is illustrated with landscapes by Daubigny; charming, crisp, and brilliant sketches by Andrieux; with full-page engravings after carefully studied pictures, illustrative of life in the country, by Horace Vernet, Courbet, Thiollet, Yan’ Dargent, Lalanne, Jacques, and Laurens. Many of the vignettes are evidently bits from nature, and gratify the artistic sense by their style, which is always free and often brilliant.

The Magasin Pittoresque gives beautiful engravings upon wood of parts of famous cathedrals, chateaux, and bridges, — of celebrated or recently discovered fragments of antique or mediæval art; of anything and everything interesting and instructive or beautiful; and it generally avoids vulgar and ephemeral subjects. It contained a marvellous rendering of Decamp’s “Oriental Butcher Shop,” and a superb portrait of the artist, which is a most vigorous piece of wood engraving. In fact, most of what is finest in art or nature, sooner or later, is drawn and engraved for the Magasin Pittoresque, which at the same time does not fall exclusively under the classification of an art magazine, but remains fully at the service of the general and varied subjects of social and civilized life.

I must think that our own illustrated magazines would be much improved and do an excellent work in giving fullpage drawings after the most remarkable contemporary American pictures,— the three or four best pictures of the annual exhibition of our Academy of Design, for example. Good wood engravings or etchings, after the pictures of Johnson, Gifford, Kensett, McEntee, Griswold, Wyant, Martin, Homer, Vedder, Lafarge, and Hennessy would be a great help to all people who are interested in art, but are not able to visit its great centre in this country. But I have to consider our masters, and I must invite attention to famous English and French designers.

Tony Johannot, Doré, and Morin in France ; Gilbert, Millais, Walker, Bennet, Du Maurier, and Pinwell in England, are the masters of the art of illustrating books and magazines, while Darley, Homer, Sheppard, Hows, Eytinge, Vedder, Cary, Fenn, Lafarge, Parsons, and Hennessy have done the best work for American publications.

John Gilbert is conventional in his drawing, but always picturesque, rich, and often splendid in his effects ; he is a greater master of grouping figures, and can represent a crowd better than any other English artist. But Gilbert’s work is now almost wholly set aside by what may be called the new school of English designers upon the block, beginning with Rossetti and Millais, and reaching a more liberal expression in Walker and Du Maurier.

Gilbert and Birket Foster are not comparable to Walker, Du Maurier, and Millais ; and the French landscape draughstman Lalanne surpasses Foster. Gilbert and Foster are mannered and general ; they have a tricky style, — a style that lowers one’s sense of nature and places the imitator wholly in subjection to the pictorial element.

Walker’s drawings for the Cornhill Magazine, Du Maurier’s book illustrations, and Millais’s work for Once a Week and Good Words, are the best things that have been done in England. Millais is first in delicacy of sentiment and refined perception; Du Maurier, in invention, variety, and brilliant and suggestive execution ; Walker, in positive and frank style. The last has a natural and poetical sense of his subject, and his work seems to be the most thorough, while it is delightfully free. Some of his drawings, in beautiful and flowing lines, firm and sure, cannot be excelled. Du Maurier is lighter, more artistic, has a certain sparkling and rapid touch, which makes his work the most attractive of any of the contemporary draughtsmen upon the wood, save the daring and admirable work of Morin, the French illustrator.

Very charming and childlike and admirably engraved by Swain, is Millais’s sketch of a curly-headed child repeating the immortal child’s prayer taught under English and American roofs. I remember another drawing by Millais that recalls the work of Velasquez. It indicates the same qualities as the painting of the illustrious Spanish master,— it is delicate, sympathetic, natural, vivid.

The women and girls and children of Millais are unrivalled as expressions of the most cherished and appropriate qualities of grace, refinement, simplicity, and purity, which properly belong to them. But Millais always draws civilized and well-dressed children. Barbarian boys have no place in his world ; not one so sturdy and hearty as Whittier’s Barefoot Boy or Hawthorne’s Little Cannibal and Glutton, who swallowed two Jim Crows, several camels and elephants, and sundry other gingerbread figures between sunrise and dinner, and threatened to demolish the whole gingerbread menagerie in good Hepzibah’s shop.

It should give pleasure to consider the most noticeable of the illustrations of the English draughtsmen. Frederick Walker’s drawings for Thackeray’s Phillip, and for Miss Thackeray’s Village on the Cliff, are excellent pictures, and I may venture to say no other English artist would have done the work so well. A little drawing called “ The Meeting,” another called “ The Vagrants,” another delineating Miss Thackeray’s “ René,” and still another representing two boys of the last century over an old chest, examining a pistol, are admirable examples of drawing upon the wood, and by their character and form mark the culmination of Walker’s delightful and honest style. The drawing entitled “ The Vagrants” is full of undefinable sentiment and poetry. The standing figure of the gypsy girl is comparable to the work of the finest of the French painters, Jules Breton, whose genre of subject it recalls. Pinwell has made some very artistic and many careful drawings. One specimen of his work now before me, slightly and spiritedly pencilled, seems to me a model of masterly drawing upon the wood. The best drawings upon the block are either very black or very gray, and the very gray are oftenest the most unsatisfactory. If an artist does not see any force, or emphasis of shadow, or effect, in nature, he would do best in using the pure line to express his subject.

It is to be remarked that the style of French draughtsmen upon wood is larger and bolder and simpler than the English ; the style of the English is more detailed ; they are more scrupulous about accessories than the French. The English are not so successful as the French in composition, in groups of figures, or in rendering action; but, on the other hand, they are superior to the French in expressing character, and their work has a higher value as a rendering of the minor sacred or domestic sentiments of life. The French artist is satisfied with the drawing of a type of character ; the Englishman always seeks to render the individual, and is contented only with a positive and particular personality. Bennet was one of the most English of English draughtsmen ; lie had no sense of beauty, but he was an intense and uncommon physiognomist, and was as literal as Holbein. Doyle was an unerring satirist, very clever and very comic, but not much of an artist. Small’s illustrations of “Griffith Gaunt” are creditable and careful ; he is one of the most indefatigable of English draughtsmen for the illustrated magazines, and he is also one of the most tiresome. He maintains his work at a good level, but is without a touch of genius. The only two English illustrators, — after Gilbert,— who have genius, are Du Maurier and Millais ; they are never commonplace ; when they are bad they are very bad ; when they are at their best they are individual and unrivalled. Houghton’s Eastern subjects are sprawling and unsatisfactory. Tenniel is the most formal and academic in his style of any English draughtsman. He may be said to know the academy model well. His full-page drawings for Punch are positive and excellent works. Their hard and thorough style of drawing is in marked contrast with the slovenly and slight lithographic caricatures for Charivari. Keene, the successor of Leech, is an excellent draughtsman upon the block, close to nature, and master of a better style than the lamented Leech. But of all living English draughtsmen upon the wood, Du Maurier—who is claimed as a Frenchman in Paris, and the claim is sustained by Du Maurier’s name and style — seems to me entitled to the first place. For variety of character, great invention, unfailing sense of beauty, and brilliant, rapid, effective style, he is unrivalled in England. He has the quick hand, the rapid intellect, the active fancy, and lively sympathy with all forms of life, characteristic of the artistic nature. My high appreciation of Du Maurier is based upon his illustrations of Douglas Jerrold’s “ Story of a Feather.”

There are many clever women illustrators of books and magazines in England. Miss E. Edwards seems to be the best. But not one of them is capable of putting upon the block such a spirited and well-drawn picture as that made for the Paris Guide by Rosa Bonheur, representing a drove of cattle, on the high road, in full movement.

The French book and magazine illustrators introduce us to a more varied and entertaining world than the English. They take us outside of the narrow circle of home life, so dear to Englishmen, and through an exquisite pictorial art make us acquainted with the whole of our inheritance in time.

Morin, Doré, Brown, Grevin, Marcelin, Lalanne, Preault, Daubigny, Yan’ Dargent, Francais, Chevignard, Celestin Nanteuil, Brion, and Bida are the most celebrated living French illustrators. Lalanne’s drawings of Paris are full of the most admired French qualities, — suggestiveness, precision, and force of style. Morin — spotty, blotchy, swift, and elegant and delicate in his drawings—has the most remarkable style of any of the French draughtsmen. Nothing could apparently be slighter than his drawing ; nothing more broken and lost, and rapidly caught again, than his fine pencil strokes ; yet his work is full of nature. I believe him to be the man of most genius for drawing upon the block, the man most brilliant, natural, effective, among the living book illustrators. He deals with contemporary nature, as all the best men do, — Paris, its people, streets, squares, parks, palaces, bridges, and balls. His sketches in the Paris Guide — “ Coming out of the Ball of the Opera,” “ Café Concert,” “ The Gallery of Goupil & Co.,” “The Flower Market,” “ The Rowing Club on the Seine” — are inimitable and admirable. The Sortie du Bal de l'Opéra is surprisingly effective ; it renders the flickering, flaring lights, the dazzle and movement, and general aspect of the street in front of the Opera, on a stormy night of winter, as every Parisian has seen it. The design is full of color, and in absolute contrast with the work of English draughtsmen. Morin is the type of the Parisian artist, the model of a dozen draughtsmen upon the block, but still an inimitable master, showing the most ungraspable qualities. He is daring, suggestive, rapid, spirited, in his work ; he is an intelligent and incessant observer of nature, an elegant mind, never mannered or conventional, and he has an astonishing facility of execution ; he is beyond all others the artist of fêtes, of the brilliant, seductive, and varied life of the world of elegance in Paris ; the representative artist upon wood of the gay capital of France, the centre of art and science. His designs are scattered through the pages of La Vie Parisienne, Paris Caprice, Semaine des Enfants, and the Paris Guide.

It is not necessary to characterize Doré’s drawings, for they are well known. He is French rather than Parisian. The illustrations of Balzac’s Contes Drôlatiques are Doré’s best work, and hold the proper relation to the letter-press. In his Dante and Don Quixote the illustrations override the printed page, and subordinate the story to its pictorial element. In illustrated magazines or books, a few fullpage pictures and numerous vignettes and fanciful head-letters make the most delightful work. This is the plan of two model French magazines for the people.

In examining the illustrated art magazines of England and France, we see at once that the Gazette des Beaux Arts is a finer publication than the London Art Journal. The steel-plate engraving, the most inartistic means to render a picture, is used as the leading illustration in the London Art Journal. The Gazette des Beaux Arts gives the preference to etching for its leading picture ; all its beautiful minor illustrations are woodcuts. The English public did not sustain their best illustrated art publication, — the Fine Arts Quarterly Review.

Illustrated magazines are very costly publications, but they are a means of education for the people second only to art galleries and museums.

French illustrated literature is more varied, instructive, and interesting than English, not only because the French have a greater aptitude for the illustrative and ornamental arts, but because of the vast museums and galleries of France which instruct and enrich the French artist. The Cabinet des Estampes is almost as much felt in French illustrated work as the Louvre in French painting.

In contemporary subjects, such as we find in illustrated papers, the English, with their practical and energetic spirit, have produced the best. The Graphic, the London Illustrated News, and Punch reach a higher point of merit in their illustrations than Le Monde Illustré and Charivari.

It remains for me briefly to consider modern engravers upon the wood. The fathers of wood engraving, who had the simplest method, did not aim to reach the results of the modern engraver. They did not dream of any of the subtle effects of atmosphere and fine gradation of surface which are now produced by French and English engravers. They were laconic and elementary, but precise, vigorous, and always intelligible, and I think they illustrated the distinctive character of the art of engraving upon wood. Holbein’s designs are rude and vigorous, but sure and expressive in line. Albert Dürer’s are vigorous and simple. None of the old draughtsmen upon wood made so much use of black or color as the modern designers. They seemed to think the line a sufficient means of expression. They aimed to be literal and natural, and did not trouble themselves about " imitation ” or the textures of objects. They sought for strength and correctness of line ; and strength and correctness of line are the fundamental essentials of drawing and engraving.

It is said of Albert Dürer, whose style is so grand upon the block, that his work teaches the concise and “ male manner,” which should always be expressed in wood engraving ; that when he designed for the wood engraver, he renounced all demi-tints and fine transitions ; he drew grandly, aimed to be vigorous and imposing, and to make a work that should impress itself upon the memory.

The draughtsman gives the law to the engraver in tracing the design, which the engraver is scrupulously to follow ; and he follows it just so far as his temperament will permit him : for it is to be remarked that if he be dry and cold, his work will be dry and cold, which is fatal to a drawing made by the hand of a man of fervid and rich nature, like Delacroix, for example. It is because of this positive but subtle action of the sentiment of the engraver upon his work, this play of his own nature modifying his rendering of another’s work, that it is best to let the artist or draughtsman select his own engraver.

The French engravers seem more varied in style than the English. Pisan has produced some very beautiful work ; Boetzel is called the most artistic, that is, free, accurate, and fine ; and his sister, Mlle. Boetzel, is entitled to high consideration as an artist. Boetzel, Marias, Moller, Pisan, Soltain, Delduc, Coste, Sargent, Lefevre, Joliet, Gerard, Gillot, Gillaumont, Peulot, and Ansseau hold the first place in France.

In spite of the great cost of wood engraving, which threatens to make it give place to the various “ processes ” derived from photography, it is the most democratic of illustrative arts, and lends itself to every subject. It is the intelligible and pleasant accompaniment of our most charming literature, the literature of the affections, — and it may be said to be consecrated by its place in the service of home and the family. As a means of education for vast populations compelled to forego the liberating experience of travel, and out of the reach of museums and art galleries, it is invaluable. The illustrated magazine and the illustrated paper, which are scattered over our country, are positive and rapidly civilizing influences. When not vulgar or brutal, they are elevating, refining, and stimulating to the mind, beyond any other habitual and general influence in our village or provincial life.

It would be a sufficient work, meriting the gratitude of a nation, to make a popular and artistic illustrated magazine for children and grown people. What is truly interesting to the former should interest the latter. It is said that the venerable editor and director of the Magasin Pittoresque, Edouard Charton, — the ancient representative of the people, secretary of the Minister of Public Instruction in France in 1849, — cherishes no part of his public services so much as his gift of the Magasin Pittoresque to the French people. The plan and execution of that work could come only from a liberal head and a corps of useful writers and intelligent artists. As an illustrated magazine for young and old, it is the model publication of our century.

I must conclude that the Gazette desBeaux Arts and the Magasin Pittoresque — the last for the general public, old and young, the first for a cultivated and particular public — are the most perfect examples of illustrated magazine literature, and offer us the best examples of artistic taste. That they are sustained by the art-wealth of the Continent, and especially of Paris, is the sufficient reason for their superiority. The habit of French artists is to sketch from nature, and study the great examples of art which are happily accessible to them.

For unthinking persons and simple minds, knowledge — and, in fact, all the charm of a beautiful narrative—remains dull without the help of such objective and concrete proofs of travel, character, and distant events as we may look upon in a picture. The illustration may be said to give body and reality to the written story ; and words, to a mind conversant only with things, gain an additional interest, and force the sluggish attention, when they are accompanied with pictures. Of all our modern illustrative arts, save etching, wood engraving seems the best adapted to all subjects. I prefer an etching of Notre Dame, or of a fishing village on the French coast, to a photograph of either subject; and if not an etching, a wood engraving is the next best artistic means of illustration.

Whoever has succeeded in giving a good illustrated literature to children and grown people has accomplished a delightful work, the enjoyment of which grows with its most intelligent development. Such a work as Hetzel and Charton have done for the French public. Can it be done for us ?

The illustrated magazine in the family may be compared to the presence of a liberal and cultivated friend, rich in souvenirs of travel, at times eloquent, and always discreet, illuminating the minds about him, and giving a zest to knowledge. In the home circle, by the light of the evening lamp, through the winter nights, what pleasure and what profit to the indoor life are his simple communications, which, while enriching us, do not impoverish him. A home circle without an illustrated magazine is torpid and poor in its sources of pleasure. It has neither eyes for art or nature, nor a liberal interest in anything but its routine and mechanical existence. I consider the illustrated magazine one of the essentials of a beautiful home life ; while we sit by the fireside, the pictured page lets us see the art and science, the habits and customs, of all the great historic ages, and at the same time represents to us the remarkable or beautiful things scattered over our contemporary world.