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Journal 2 covers a broader
canvas than the first, addressing the work of a more disparate selection of artists whose
work spans a much longer period. It once again has 144 pages, finely printed on ivory paper. It has 27 full-colour
illustrations and is presented in full colour laminated covers.
Robin de Beaumont provides an account of the life of Eleanor Vere Boyle, whose images of childhood are peopled by squat, earnest beings that seem always
to have a vaguely sinister, threatening quality about them, even when portrayed playing in
sunshine. Her landscapes have a dream-like quality that derives from a combination of Pre-Raphaelite
hyper-reality with a strong sense of the gothic and the picturesque. When she sets out to introduce
an element of horror to her work, as in the cover picture of Beauty and the Beast, then the effect
is truly terrifying. Her beast, dragged out from some dark corner of her subconscious, is much
farther removed from the human form than those of other artists.The article includes the first
comprehensive bibliography of her work.
JE Millais was foremost among the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood in leading a movement away from
the Regency and early Victorian styles of illustration that sought to exaggerate and dramatise
for comic or tragic effect, towards a more naturalistic style. He concentrates on the figures
in his drawings, rather than on their environment. Where earlier illustrators showed the emotions
and moods of their characters through facial expression or symbolic detail elsewhere in the picture,
in Millais' work they are expressed by gesture and attitude. Paul Goldman argues that Millais was
"The Consumate Illustrator".
Florence Upton's fame rests on her invention of the Golliwogg but, even without this character,
her children's books, firmly grounded as they are in contemporary events and developments, would
have been innovative and exciting to their young audience. There is a refreshing candour and
freedom from moralising in the stories and a liveliness about the illustrations that had been
lacking in the majority of earlier children's books. The frequent violent scrapes that her
characters find themselves in must have given her readers a frisson of excitement whilst remaining
confident that all would turn out all right in the end.Geraldine Beare's account of Upton's life and
work is accompanied by a full listing of her book and magazine illustrations.
Vera Willoughby's early magazine illustrations are indistinguishable from the mass of 1890s
work, but by the 1920s she was producing sophisticated and complex illustrations influenced by
cubism, asian painting styles and the fashionable Art Deco sensibility. For a time she paralleled
the work of Edmund Dulac and John Austen, but in her later work she developed a unique personal
style akin to bas relief. This seems to be based on a synthesis of Assyrian carvings and mediaeval
illumination, perhaps also informed by the work of Gill and Jones at Ditchling. Bill Connelly
introduces readers to the life and work of this neglected illustrator.
These monographs on single artists are grouped around a study by Geoffrey Beare and Lorraine Janzen
Kooistra of the illustrated editions of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner which range in date
from 1837 to 2000. The intensely visual quality of the poem has inspired at least 70 artists to
attempt to illustrate it. But it is also that quality that, together with the emotional intensity of
the verse, presents artists with such a challenge. Those capable of rising to it range from painters,
such as David Scott and Patrick Procktor, tempted to make an occasional foray into the world of
illustration, to established illustrators like Gustav Doré, Mervyn Peake and David Jones. Each produces
an intensely original interpretation of the text, which whether representational and figurative in
approach or near-abstract, represents a singular vision.
IBIS Journal 2: Singular Visions
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