Rackham and Dulac

The years between 1890 and 1920 could be said to be the golden age of British illustration.  The number of periodicals throughout the 1890s and into the Edwardian era was large and always needed a good supply of fresh talent to do the pen and ink line illustrations, which accompanied their stories and articles.  Two such artists were Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac.

Arthur Rackham was born in Lewisham in 1867 and worked for a time as a clerk in the Westminster Fire Office.  He took night classes at Lambeth School of Art and began to get work illustrating for magazines such as The Windsor Magazine, usually supplying an end design for an article or story, often a silhouette or small roundel.  His first book illustration was for 'To the Other Side' by Thomas Rhodes, which appeared in 1893, and he then followed this with illustrations for 'The Dolly Dialogues' by Anthony Hope, in 1894.

Arthur Rackham

But his first big success came in 1905 when he was commissioned to illustrate Washington Irving's 'Rip Van Winkle'.  He produced no less than fifty-one colour plates for this, which must have been a struggle, but it put him at the forefront of the luxury-book gift market.  He followed it equally successfully with 'Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens,' By J. M. Barrie.  He produced beautiful colour work for some wonderful books, some of his best being for Wagner's Ring cycle, that really capture the dark northern world of gods and dwarves, dragons and heroes.  
 

'Loge, Loge, appear!'  Arthur Rackham.  One of the best Rackham images from his work on Wagner's 'Ring 'cycle, depicting the God Odin calling on the God Loki.  At the time that Wagner and Rackham were working, it was thought that Loki was a fire God (which he wasn't) and that's why he's shown in flames.

 He really did  for the 'Ring of the Nibelung,' what Alan Lee later did for the 'Lord of the Rings.'  When Rackham died in 1939 he had produced a wide range of superbly illustrated storybooks, always indulging his love of twisting pen lines and the grotesque; his world is one of dark gnarled forests, wild mountains and is rugged and bracing.  It is overlaid with a certain sweetness but is never far from the threatening and mysterious.  

Edmund Dulac

  But for most of his career Rackham had a rival, in the form of Edmund Dulac, another brilliant exponent of  luxury book illustrations who was born in Toulouse, France in 1882.  At first he set out to become a lawyer, but soon left his studies and went to study art instead at the École des Beaux Arts, and then briefly at the Académie Julián.  He did work illustrating magazines in Paris, but came to London in 1905, and was soon given a commission to illustrate 'Jane Eyre,' which was followed by nine other Brontë novels.  In Britain, like Rackham, he regularly contributed to popular periodicals and magazines, and went on to illustrate 'The Arabian Nights,' and then Shakespeare's 'The Tempest.'  Dulac became naturalised in 1912.

Dulac's work is softer and sweeter than Rackhams; the Englishman tended to use pen and ink lines to define his images, colouring them with watercolour, so his work has a harsher look - it's spiky, with lines of varying thickness to delineate masses and forms.  Dulac was essentially a painter, and rarely picked up a pen, his work is almost completely watercolour and Gouache.  Both artists understood the new printing techniques that were being used in the early twentieth century, and knew exactly how their work would look, varying it slightly to accommodate types of paper.

Scene from the Tempest, by William Shakespear.  Edmund Dulac.  I love the use of space in this design, that great cloud of mist billowing down, so that the figures stand out really well, and look at the movement of both the creature and the men!

 And of course these two artists weren't really rivals, as the kind of work they did suited particular types of subject.  Rackham was great for northern fairly tales, and tales of knightly quests and Nordic gods, while Dulac fitted 'The Arabian Nights' and Chinese and Persian subjects beautifully, although there was some overlap in the subjects they tackled.

Dulac lived further into the twentieth century than Rackham, being a little younger but does seem to have experimented more with the look of his work than Rackham who's work, however good was fairly static in it's approach.  There is a noticable change in Dulac's work, as he moved through the thirties, where something of Art Deco painting starts to show up in the way he paints the human figure, and the decorative way he did landscapes.  His last work was for the 1951 Great Exhibition and stamp designs commemorating the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second.  He died in 1953.

Together they represent the short time when these kind of lavish colour works would have been a fixture of children's Christmas gifts, filled with pictures that were realistic, exacting, and intelligent.  What a shame they will probably never appear again.  

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Shades of the northern Homer.

We've all heard of Homer and his epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, which tell the story of the outbreak and the aftermath of the Trojan Wars.  They are not only epic poems but have had an epic influence on world literature, for they've been known and studied for centuries, as they are thousands of years old.  The Romans liked to associate themselves with the events of the poem and claim decent from the hero's whose deeds it records, and then every European kingdom and society after them wanted to at least claim sympathy with Homer.

So that was the poetry epic of the south, but what about the north?  All those cold chilly countries that were gaining ascendancy wanted to have a really important epic work of literary greatness to help buttress their ideas about themselves.  Step forward James Macpherson, (1736 - 1796) a Scottish poet and translator who starting in 1760 began to publish fragments of Gaelic manuscripts he claimed to have found in his researches around the Western Isles.  Then, in 1761 he claimed to have discovered a complete epic poem on the subject of Fingal by the ancient poet Ossian, thought to be the son of the legendary Irish king Finn Mac Cumhail.

James Macpherson by George Romney.  Wikipedia Commons

This was published to huge success throughout Britain, and celebrated as one of the literary finds of the century.  It also had an influence on other writers of the period, although Dr Samuel Johnson was very scathing about it.  Artists were also influenced to paint pictures based on the poem, most famously JMW Turner, but as the eighteenth century drew to a close they seemed less enthusiastic.  Meanwhile its popularity started to spread into Europe, for the German Romantic poet Goethe translated part of the epic to include in the climactic scene of his poem 'The sorrows of young Werther'.

As the nineteenth century got under way, more and more European artists began to do Ossian inspired work, especially the French as the poem was an especial favourite of the emperor Napoleon.  The young radical classicist painter Maurice Quay (an odd figure if ever there was one) is quoted as saying,

'Homer - Ossian, the sun, the moon.  That is the question.  In truth I prefer the moon, as it is more primitive.'

Quay was a member of a small number of artists in the studio of J. L. David who had decided to live as ancient Greeks, called themselves the 'Barbus' or bearded ones and wandered Paris dressed in Greek robes and sandals.  They believed that to live a 'primitive' life away from luxury and wealth was the only way for a decent person to exist.  Apart from giving Paris something to laugh at, they had little impact as almost nothing of their work survives.  But Quay admired Homer, the Bible and Ossian and felt almost no other literature was worth a second look.

Fingel defeats the spirit of Loda by Asmus Jacob Carsters. (1754 - 1798)

The list of European artists who painted Ossian inspired work reads like the neoclassic painters hall of fame induction list, starting with mister big himself,  J.A.D. Ingres, then Ary Scheffer, Paul Duqueylar, François Gérard, Nicolai Abildgaard, Johan Peter Krafft, and Asmus Jacob Carsters.  To name just a few.

 Anne Louis Girodet, another pupil of David also wanted to suck up to Napoleon by painting him a big Ossian inspired work, and this time he had the idea of combining the fallen French heroes of the Napoleonic wars with Ossian.  He painted a six foot by six foot painting of these fallen soldiers being welcomed into a kind of Ossianaic Valhalla by Odin and Ossian himself, all realised with a bizarre light glow flooding over everything.  It has the sleep inducing title of - Apotheosis of French Heroes who Died for the Fatherland during the War of Liberation.
 

Anne Louis Girodet (1767 - 1824) Apotheosis of French Heroes who Died for the Fatherland during the War of Liberation. 1802.

As might be expected it didn't please everybody, but it was a brave and honest attempt to do something different.  Its difficult to take in everything in a picture as busy as this so you really need to see a high resolution image to appreciate what's going on, but it has real three dimensional depth and is even cinematic in its realisation of a supernatural event.  When he saw it David said,

'Ah, that picture!  Girodet, is he mad?  .  .  . either he is crazy or I no longer understand my own trade.  Those are figures of Glass that he's produced.  What a shame; with his beautiful skills he will never achieve anything but follies.' 

Well, you can't please the people all of the time, and that also applied to James Macpherson when they finally realised what Dr Johnson had been saying decades before was right.  Ossian was a fake, concocted from scraps and fragments of written and spoken verse that Macpherson had collected and mixed with a goodish amount that he'd penned himself.  The British had realised this towards the end of the eighteenth century and this was responsible for the cooling off of their enthusiasm for the poem, but in Europe the craze was only just starting in the latter years of the century - and well, Napoleon wasn't in a mood to take advice from the British.
 

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. (1780 - 1867)  The Dream of Ossian 1813

 
So the craze had to burn itself out like any other fever, and was still throwing up paintings and other works as late as the eighteen twenties.  Macpherson's work is deemed to be a pretty good pastiche and his skills as a poet of his time were not unworthy.  It's a little unclear what his motives were, but I suppose he just thought there'd be more interest in his poems if they were deemed to be a lost work of ancient origin, however the fraud would never have taken the imagination of the artists and thinkers of the time if they'd had no merit whatsoever.  So he had an idea, and for a time something big grew from it.  It often happens that away.

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As cheap as a pot of ink.

 Ètienne de Silhouette was a French finance minister in the middle of the eighteenth century who because of pressures caused by the seven years war found himself (and the country) a bit out of pocket.  So in 1759 he brought about changes(as finance ministers so often do) that forced strict economic measures on the people, especially the rich.  This meant that everybody had to make cutbacks and economise in their daily lives and so the ministers name was applied to anything that was deemed cheap.  Like a small cut out portrait.

I suppose this dose of harsh living may have helped to lead the French to their revolution later in the century, and it did introduce a new word to the English language - Silhouette.  And the cheap cut out or painted portraits which came to bare the finance minister's name were much quicker and easier to have made than the traditional miniature portrait.   

Actually the name Silhouette wasn't generally applied to English cutout miniatures until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and there was at least a century long tradition of making them before the name was applied.  They were the ideal thing for small business, could be cut out of black card with a pair of scissors at a fete or fairground or as a party piece at a drawing room gathering.  Or a pot of ink and a brush together with some fancy paper and some skill was all that was needed.  Of course there's always a sliding scale of such things, and more expensive versions were produced on glass, gesso and stone.

Aubrey Beardsley:  self portrait in sillhouette.

The ancient Greeks were using black figure images on their pots and amphrora thousands of years ago and Pliny the Elder states that he believed that painting itself originated when ancient artists painted around a shadow cast on to a flat surface.  We usually think, however, of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth century as the heyday of this art form, and a number of practitioners made quite a good living once it became fashionable, even having prime ministers and presidents as their clients.  Photography pretty much put an end to the widespread desire for such images, after all why pay for a mere black outline when you can have a realistic face or image of someone you know sitting there as if they were real, for little more in outlay?

Cinderella by Arthur Rackham.  Wikipedia Commons.

But in the world of illustration silhouette's continued to be used by some very famous artists to help the process of telling a story and to decorate chapter headings.  Aubrey Beardsley, a natural black and white artist occasionally used silhouettes early in his career, and Arthur Rackham used them as extra decoration to the luxury illustrated works he published in the early twentieth century. 

One of the most magical uses of silhouette I have seen however was with the publication of 'The kingdom Under the Sea' by Joan Aiken with illustrations by Jan Pieńkowski in 1971.  My young brother had only just been born and this was one of his first books.  I took a keen interest in it as the approach was novel, it being a method I'd not seen used in illustration before.  The pictures used marbling of paper, where liquid oil paints are floated on water in a tray, and paper is then placed onto the surface for long enough for the swirls of colour to be transferred onto the paper.  I assume the paper was then stretched as quickly as possible and allowed to dry before the actual work was done.  He then painted his silhouette's on to the paper.  This is merely my interpretation of his approach, because I remember trying this at about the age of 15, and finding it hellishly difficult.

By Jan Pieńkowski from 'The Kingdom under the Sea' by Joan Aiken.  This story involves the hut of the Russian witch the Baba Yaga.  Click on the picture to go to Jan's website.

I've probably got the whole thing wrong, as marbled paper has been used as end papers for expensive books for a hundred years and more, printed obviously but probably from a source that was a lot easier to produce than my efforts.  Maybe Pieńkowski's silhouettes were cutouts that were glued onto the paper, I don't know but the effect was exceptional.  As I write this in the early hours of Friday the 4th, by complete coincidence I see on Google that it would have been Joan Aiken's 91st birthday today, and so thanks Joan,  - and you too Jan for a great book.

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