63He had apparently returned the blocks borrowed from Du Pré for theFalles of Princes, as none of them is used in 1527, although one or two are copied. I have not met with all the Chaucer illustrations, and it is possible that a few of these are new.64Used again the same year in a treatise by Richard Bonner.
63He had apparently returned the blocks borrowed from Du Pré for theFalles of Princes, as none of them is used in 1527, although one or two are copied. I have not met with all the Chaucer illustrations, and it is possible that a few of these are new.
64Used again the same year in a treatise by Richard Bonner.
CHAPTER XV
ENGRAVED ILLUSTRATIONS
Thegood bookman should have no love for “plates,” and to do them justice bookmen have shown commendable fortitude in resisting their attractions, great as these often are. As a form of book-decoration the plate reached its highest development in the Frenchlivres-à-vignettesof the eighteenth century, the charm of the best bookwork of Moreau, Eisen, and their fellows being incontestable. It would, indeed, have argued some lack of patriotism if French book-lovers had not yielded themselves to the fascination of a method of book-illustration which had thus reached its perfection in their own country, and they have done so. But as he reads the enthusiastic descriptions of these eighteenth century books by M. Henri Béraldi, a foreign book-lover may well feel (to borrow the phrase which Jonson and Herrick used of the over-dressed ladies of their day) that the book itself has become its “own least part.” A book which requires as an appendix an album of original designs, or of proofs of the illustrations, or (worse still) which has been mounted on larger paper and guarded so that these proofs or designs can be brought into connection with the text, is on its way to that worst of all fates, the Avernus of extra illustration or Graingerism. When it has reached this, it ceases to be a book at all and becomes a scrap-album of unharmonized pictures.
Lack of means may make it easy for a bookman to resist the temptation to supplement the illustrations in a book with duplicates in proof or any like extravagances, but even then few books which have plates in them fail to bring trouble. If the plates are protected with “flimsies,”the owner’s conscience may be perturbed with doubts as to whether these may lawfully be torn out. If there are no flimsies, the leaf opposite a plate often shows a set-off from it and is sometimes specially badly foxed. Moreover, not being an integral part of the book, the plate presents problems to publishers and binders which are too often left unsolved. It ought to be printed on paper sufficiently wide to allow of a flap or turn-over, so that the leaf can be placed in the quire and properly sewn. But the flap thus left is not pretty, and unless very thin may cause the book to gape. Thus too often the plate is only glued or pasted into its place, with the result that it easily comes loose. Hence misplacements, imperfections, and consequent woe.
It is the charm of the earlier books illustrated with incised engravings that the impressions are pulled on the same paper as the rest of the book, very often on pages bearing letterpress, and almost always, even when they chance to occupy a whole page, the back of which is left blank, as part of the quire or gathering. The price, however, which had to be paid for these advantages was a heavy one, the trouble not merely of double printing, as in the case of a sheet printed in red and black, but of double printing in two different kinds, one being from a raised surface, the other from an incised. It is clear that this trouble was found very serious, as both at Rome and Florence in Italy, at Bruges in the Low Countries, at Würzburg and Eichstätt in Germany, and at Lyon in France, the experiment was tried independently and in every case abandoned after one or two books had been thus ornamented.
At Rome, after the failure of his printing partnership with Pannartz, Conrad Sweynheym betook himself to engraving maps to illustrate an edition of Ptolemy’sCosmographia, and this was brought out after his death by Arnold Buckinck, 10 October, 1478. Thirteen months earlier Nicolaus Laurentii, of Breslau, had published at Florence theMonte Santo di Dioof AntonioBettini, with two full-page engravings and one smaller one. The first of these shows the ladder of Prayer and the Sacraments up which, by the virtues which form its successive rungs, a cassocked youth is preparing to climb to heaven, where Christ stands in a mandorla supported by angels. The second plate is given up entirely to a representation of Christ in a mandorla, both drawing and engraving being excellent, and the little angels who are lovingly upholding the frame being really delightful (see Plate XXXIV). The third picture, printed on a page with text, is smaller than these and represents the pains of hell.
When a second edition of theMonte Santo di Diowas needed in 1491 the copperplates were replaced by woodcuts, a fact which may remind us that not only the trouble of printing, but the small number of impressions which could be taken from copperplates, must have been a formidable objection to their use in bookwork. But at the time the first edition may well have been regarded as a success. If so, it was an unlucky one, as Nicolaus Laurentii was thereby encouraged to undertake a much more ambitious venture, an annotatedDivina Commediawith similar illustrations, and this, which appeared in 1481, can only be looked on as a failure. No space was left at the head of the first canto, and the engraving was printed on the lower margin, where it is often found cruelly cropped. In subsequent cantos spaces were sometimes left, sometimes not, but after the second the engravings are generally founded printed on separate slips and pasted into their places, and in no copy do they extend beyond canto xix. They used to be assigned to Botticelli, but the discovery of his real designs to theDivina Commediahas shown that these of 1481 were only slightly influenced by them.
In Germany the only copper engravings found in fifteenth century books are the coats of arms of the Bishops and Chapters of Würzburg and Eichstätt in the books printed for them at these places by Georg andMichel Reyser respectively. In order more easily to persuade the clergy of these dioceses to buy properly revised service-books to replace their tattered and incorrect manuscript copies, the Bishops attached certain “indulgences” to their purchase, and as a proof that the recital of these was not a mere advertising trick of the printer permitted him to print their arms at the foot of the notice. These arms, most charmingly and delicately engraved, are found in the Würzburg Missals of 1481 (this I have not seen) and 1484, and the “Agenda” of 1482 (see Plate XXXV), and no doubt also in other early service-books printed by Georg Reyser. The Eichstätt books of his kinsmen Michel are similarly adorned—for instance, theStatuta Synodalia Eystettensiaof 1484, though neither the design nor the engraving is so good. In how many editions by the Reysers these engraved arms appeared I cannot say, as the books are all of great rarity; but by 1495, if not earlier, they had been abandoned, for in the WürzburgMissale Specialeof that year we find the delicate engraving replaced by a woodcut copy of nearly four times the size and less than a fourth of the charm.
The only French book of the fifteenth century known to me as possessing copper engravings is a very beautiful one, the version of Breidenbach’sPeregrinatio ad Terram Sanctam, by Frère Nicole le Huen, printed at Lyon by Michel Topie and Jacob Heremberck in 1488, and adorned with numerous excellent capitals. In this all the cuts in the text of the Mainz editions are fairly well copied on wood, but the large folding plans of Venice and other cities on the pilgrims’ route are admirably reproduced on copper with a great increase in the delicacy of their lines.
We come now to a book bearing an earlier date than any of those already mentioned, but not entitled to its full pride of place because it is doubtful to what extent the engravings connected with it can be reckoned an integral part of it. This is the French version of Boccaccio’sDe casibus illustrium virorum(“Des cas des nobleshommes”), printed at Bruges by Colard Mansion and dated 1476. As originally printed there was no space left for any pictorial embellishments; but in at least two copies the first leaf of the prologue has been reprinted so as to leave room for a picture; in another copy, which in 1878 belonged to Lord Lothian, spaces are left also at the beginning of each of the nine books into which the work is divided, except the first and sixth, and all the spaces have been filled with copper engravings coloured by hand; in yet another copy there is a space left also at the beginning of Book VI. According to the monograph on the subject by David Laing (privately printed in 1878), the subjects of the engravings are:—
(1) Prologue, the Author presenting his work to his patron, Mainardo Cavalcanti.(2) Book I. Adam and Eve standing before the Author as he writes.(3) Book II. King Saul on horseback, and lying dead.(4) Book III. Fortune and Poverty.(5) Book IV. Marcus Manlius thrown into the Tiber.(6) Book V. The Death of Regulus.(7) Book VI. Not known.(8) Book VII. A combat of six men.(9) Book VIII. The humiliation of the Emperor Valerian by King Sapor of Persia.(10) Book IX. Brunhilde, Queen of the Franks, torn asunder by four horses.
(1) Prologue, the Author presenting his work to his patron, Mainardo Cavalcanti.
(2) Book I. Adam and Eve standing before the Author as he writes.
(3) Book II. King Saul on horseback, and lying dead.
(4) Book III. Fortune and Poverty.
(5) Book IV. Marcus Manlius thrown into the Tiber.
(6) Book V. The Death of Regulus.
(7) Book VI. Not known.
(8) Book VII. A combat of six men.
(9) Book VIII. The humiliation of the Emperor Valerian by King Sapor of Persia.
(10) Book IX. Brunhilde, Queen of the Franks, torn asunder by four horses.
From the reproductions which Laing gives in his monograph it is evident that the engraver set himself to imitate the style of the contemporary illuminated manuscripts of the Bruges school, and that he used his graver rather to get the designs on to the paper than with any real feeling for the characteristic charm of his own art. My own inclination is to believe that we must look on these plates as a venture of Colard Mansion’s rather in his old capacity as an illuminator, anxious to decorate a few special copies, than as a printer intent on embellishing a whole edition. The engravings may have beenmade at any time between 1476 and 1483, when they were clearly used as models by Jean Du Pré for his Paris edition, the wood-blocks for which, as we have seen, were subsequently sold or lent to Pynson. The variations in the number of spaces in different copies may quite as well be due to a mixing of quires as to successive enlargements of the plan, and the fact that more copies of the engravings have survived apart from than with the book draws attention once more to the difficulty found in printing these incised plates to accompany letterpress printed from type standing in relief.
There is still one more engraving connected with an early printed book to be considered, and though the connection is not fully established, the facts that the book in question was the first from Caxton’s press, and that the engraving may possibly contain his portrait, invite a full discussion of its claims. The plate (see Frontispiece to Chapter I, Plate II) represents an author on one knee presenting a book to a lady who is attended by five maids-of-honour, while as many pages may be seen standing in various page-like attitudes about the room. A canopy above a chair of state bears the initials CM and the mottoBien en aveingne, and it is thus clear that the lady represents Margaret Duchess of Burgundy, and that the offering of a book which it depicts must have taken place after her marriage with Charles the Bold, 3 July, 1468, and before the latter’s death at Nancy, 5 January, 1477. During the greater part of this time Caxton was in the service of the Duchess; the donor of the book is represented as a layman, and a layman not of noble birth, since there is no feather in his cap; he appears also to be approaching middle-age. All these points would be correct if the donor were intended for Caxton, and as we know from his own statement that before hisRecuyell of the histories of Troywas printed he had presented a copy of it (in manuscript) to the Duchess, probably in or soon after 1471, until some more plausible original is proposed the identification of the donor with our first printer mustremain at least probable. Unfortunately, although the unique copy of the engraving is at present in the Duke of Devonshire’s copy of theRecuyell, it is certain that it is an insertion, not an original part of the book, and beyond a high probability that it has occupied its present position since the book was bound for the Duke of Roxburghe some time before his sale in 1812, nothing is known as to how it came there. A really amazing point is that although the connection of this particular copy with Elizabeth, queen of Edward IV, caused it to be shown at the Caxton Exhibition, until the appearance of Mr. Montagu Peartree’s article in theBurlington Magazinefor August, 1905, no notice had ever been paid to the engraving. Analogy with theBoccacciosuggests that Caxton had the plate made before he realized the difficulties of impression, and that some prints were separately struck from it and one of these pasted inside the binding of the Devonshire copy, whence it was removed to its present position when the book was rebound. It should be noted that the style of the engraving is quite unlike that of theBoccaccioprints, and suggests that Caxton procured it from a Dutch rather than a Bruges engraver, possibly with the aid of Veldener, from whom, or with whose help, according to Mr. Duff’s suggestion, he procured his first type.
For over a quarter of a century after the engraving of the plans in the LyonBreidenbachprinters seem to have held aloof altogether from copperplates. In 1514 we find four engraved plans, of only slight artistic interest, printed as plates in a topographical work onNolaby Ambrogius Leo, the printer being Joannes Rubeus (Giovanni Rossi) of Venice. Three years later, in 1517, a really charming print is found (set rather askew in the Museum copy) on the titlepage of a thin quarto printed at Rome, for my knowledge of which I am indebted to my friend, Mr. A. M. Hind. The book is aDialogus, composed by the Right Reverend Amadeus Berrutus, Governor of the City of Rome, on the weighty and stilldisputable question as to whether one should go on writing to a friend who makes no reply,65and the plate shows the four speakers, Amadeus himself, Austeritas, Amicitia, and Amor, standing in a field or garden outside a building. The figures, especially that of Austeritas, are charmingly drawn (see Plate XXXVI); the tone of the little picture is delightful, and it is enclosed in a leafy border, which reproduces in the subtler grace of engraved work the effect of the little black and white frames which surround the Florentine woodcuts of the fifteenth century.
With theDialogusof Bishop Berrutus copper engravings as book-illustrations came to an end, as far as I know, for a period of some forty years. I make this statement thus blankly in the hope that it may provoke contradiction, and at least some sporadic instances be adduced. But I have hunted through descriptions of all the books most likely to be illustrated—Bibles, Horae, editions of Petrarch’sTrionfiand Ariosto’sOrlando Furiosoand books of emblems, and outside England (the necessity of the exception is almost humorous) I have lighted on nothing.
We may, perhaps, trace the revival of engraved illustrations to the influence of Hieronymus or Jerome Cock, an Antwerp engraver, who in May, 1551, issued a series of plates from the designs of F. Faber, entitledPraecipua aliquot Romanae antiquitatis ruinarum monimenta, without any letterpress save the name of the subject engraved on each plate. Cock followed this up in 1556 with twelve engravings from the designs of Martin van Veen illustrating the victories of Charles V, which are also celebrated in verses in French and Spanish. He issued also various other series of Biblical and antiquarian plates, which do not concern us, and in 1559 a set of thirty-two illustrating the funeral of Charles V. For this, aided by a subsidy, Christopher Plantin acted as publisher, and we thus get a connection establishedbetween engraving and printing. This did not, however, bear fruit at all quickly. Plantin’s four emblem-books of 1562, 1564, 1565, and 1566 were illustrated not with copper engravings, but with woodcuts; so was his Bible of 1566, so were his earlier Horae. That of 1565 has unattractive woodcut borders to every page and small woodcut illustrations of no merit. In 1570 he began the use of engravings for his Horae, but in a copy in the British Museum, printed on vellum almost as thick as cardboard, he was reduced to pulling the pictures on paper and pasting them in their places. In 1571 he illustrated theHumanae salutis monumentaof his friend Arias Montanus with some rather pretty copperplates, each surrounded with an effective engraved border of flowers and birds, but for a new Horae (on paper) in 1573, for which he had commissioned a set of full-page plates of some merit (printed with the text on their back), he had not troubled to procure borders. Two years later he produced a really curious edition in which the engraved illustrations (some of them from theHumanae salutis monumenta) are surrounded with woodcut borders, and in many cases have red underlines, so that each page must have undergone three printings.66
Although woodcuts were considered sufficiently good for Plantin’s Bible of 1566, for his great Polyglot it was indispensable to have titlepages engraved on copper, and to the first volume he prefixed no fewer than three, engraved by P. van der Heyden after designs by P. van der Borcht. All of them are emblematical, the first symbolizing the unification of the world by the Christian faith and the four languages in which the Old Testament was printed in the Polyglott, the second the zeal of Philip II for the Catholic faith, the third the authority of the Pentateuch. While some volumes had no frontispiece others contained a few illustrations, and the totalnumber of plates was twenty-eight. Some of these were used again in Plantin’s Bible of 1583, and Raphelengius, into whose possession the whole set passed in 1590, used sixteen of them three years later to illustrate theAntiquitates Judaicaeof Arias Montanus.
For his Missals and Breviaries as for his Horae Plantin sometimes used woodcuts, sometimes copperplates. For his editions of the works of S. Augustine and S. Jerome (1577) he caused really fine portrait frontispieces to be engraved by J. Sadeler from the designs of Crispin van den Broeck. As regards his miscellaneous secular books he was by no means given to superfluous illustrations, and, as we have seen, continued to use woodcuts contemporaneously with plates. Probably his earliest secular engravings (published in 1566, but prepared some years earlier) are the anatomical diagrams in imitation of those in the Roman edition ofValverdementioned below, to which he prefixed a better frontispiece than that of his model. In 1574 he produced a fine book of portraits of physicians and philosophers,Icones veterum aliquot ac recentium medicorum philosophorumque, in sixty-eight plates, with letterpress by J. Sambucus. The next year he issued another illustrated book, theDe rerum usu et abusuof Bernardus Furmerius, sharing the expense of it with Ph. Gallus, a print-seller, for whom later on he published several books on commission. From 1578 onwards he printed for Ortelius, the great cosmographer. In 1582 he published thePegasidesof Y. B. Houwaert, in 1584 Waghenaer’sSpieghel der Zeevaerdt, and other illustrated books followed. But none of them, little indeed that Plantin ever produced, now excite much desire on the part of collectors.
Of what took place in other countries and cities in the absence of even tentative lists of the books printed after 1535 anywhere except in England it is difficult to say. In 1560 an anatomical book translated from the Spanish of Juan de Valverde was published at Rome with engraved diagrams of some artistic merit and a ratherpoorly executed frontispiece. In 1566 “in Venetia appresso Rampazetto,” a very fine book of impresas, or emblematical personal badges, made its appearance under the titleLe Imprese Illustre con espositioni et discorsi del SorIeronimo Ruscelli, dedicated “al serenissimo et sempre felicissimo re catolico Filippo d’Austria.” This has over a hundred engravedImpreseof three sizes, double-page for the Emperor (signed G. P. F.), full-pagers for kings and other princely personages, half-pagers for ordinary folk (if any owner of animpresamay be thus designated), and all these are printed with letterpress beneath, or on the back of them, and very well printed too. In another book ofImprese, published in this same year 1566, the text, consisting of sonnets by Lodovico Dolce, as well as the pictures, is engraved, or rather etched. This is theImprese di diuersi principi, duchi, signori, etc., di BattaPittoni Pittore Vicentino. It exists in a bewildering variety of states, partly due to reprinting, partly apparently to the desire to dedicate it to several different people, one of the British Museum copies being dedicated by Pittoni to the Earl of Arundel and having a printed dedicatory letter and plate of his device preceding that of the Emperor himself.
Another noteworthy Venetian book, with engraved illustrations, which I have come across is anOrlando Furiosoof 1584, “appresso Francesco de Franceschi Senese e compagni,” its engraved titlepage bearing the information that it has been “nuouamente adornato di figure di rame da Girolamo Porro,” a little-known Milanese engraver, who had reissued Pittoni’sImpresein 1578. The illustrations are far too crowded with incident to be successful, and their unity is often sacrificed to the old medieval practice of making a single design illustrate several different moments of the narrative. Their execution is also very unequal. Nevertheless, they are of interest to English collectors since, as we shall see, they served as models for the plates in Sir John Harington’s version of theOrlandoin 1591. All ofthem are full-pagers, with text on the back, and the printer was also compliant enough to print at the head of each canto an engraved cartouche within which is inserted a type-printed “Argomento.”
Of sixteenth century engraved book-illustrations in France I have no personal knowledge. In Germany, as might be expected, they flourished chiefly at Frankfort, which in the last third of the century had, as we have seen, become a great centre for book-illustration. Jost Amman, who was largely responsible for its development in this respect, illustrated a few books with copper engravings, although he mainly favoured wood. But it is the work of the De Brys, Theodor de Bry and his two sons Johann Israel and Johann Theodor, which is of conspicuous importance for our present purpose, for it was they who originated and mainly carried out the greatest illustrated work of the sixteenth century, that known to collectors as theGrands et petits voyages. This not very happy name has nothing to do with the length of the voyages described, but is derived from the fact that the original series which is concerned with America and the West Indies is some two inches taller (fourteen as compared with twelve) than a subsequent series dealing with the East Indies. For the idea of such a collection of voyages Theodor de Bry was indebted to Richard Hakluyt, whose famous bookThe Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, published in 1589, was in preparation when De Bry was in England, where he worked in 1587-8. The first volume, moreover, was illustrated with engravings by De Bry after some of the extraordinarily interesting water-colour drawings made by an Englishman, John White, in Virginia, and now preserved in the British Museum.67This first part was published in Latin at Frankfort by J. Wechel in 1590 and a second edition followed the sameyear. A second part describing Florida followed in 1591, a third describing Brazil in 1592. By 1602 nine parts had been issued, all at Frankfort, though by different publishers, the name of J. Feyrabend being placed on the fourth, and that of M. Becker on the ninth. After an interval of seventeen years two more parts of the Latin edition (x. and xi.) were printed at Oppenheim “typis H. Galleri,” and then an appendix to part xi. at Frankfort in 1620, where also were issued part xii. in 1624 and part xiii., edited by M. Merian, in 1634, this last being accompanied by an “Elenchus,” or index-volume, to the whole series. Parallel with this Latin series ran a German one with about the same dates. One or two parts were also issued in French and at least one in English. There is also an appendix of “other voyages” usually added, mostly French, and issued at Amsterdam, and of nearly every volume of the whole series there were several issues and editions, all of them with differences in the plates. The “Petits voyages” followed a similar course, beginning in 1598 and ending in 1628. Although the engravings, many of which are placed unpretentiously amid the text, vary greatly alike in the interest of their subjects, the value of the original designs, and the skill of the engraving, taken as a whole they have given to theseGrands et petits voyagesa unique position among books of travel, and a small literature has grown up round them to certify the collector as to the best state of each plate and what constitutes a complete set.
While the illustrations to the Voyages formed their chief occupation, the De Brys found time to engrave many smaller plates for less important books. Thus in 1593 Theodor de Bry issued an emblem bookEmblemata nobilitati et vulgo scitu digna(text in Latin and German), in which each emblem is enclosed in an engraved border, mostly quite meaningless and bad as regards composition, but of a brilliancy in the “goldsmiths’ style” which to lovers of bookplates will suggest the best work of Sherborn or French. The plates marked B and D, illustratingthe lines “Musica mortales divosque oblectat et ornat” and “Cum Cerere et Baccho Veneri solemnia fiunt,” are especially fine and the “emblems” themselves more pleasing than usual.
In 1595 there was printed, again with Latin and German text, aNoua Alphabeti effictio, historiis ad singulas literas correspondentibus. Themotifis throughout scriptural. Thus for A Adam and Eve sit on the crossbar on each side of the letter, the serpent rests on its peak amid the foliage of the Tree of Knowledge. In B Abel, in C Cain is perched on a convenient part of the letter, and so on, while from one letter after another, fish, birds, fruit, flowers, and anything else which came into the designer’s head hang dangling on cords from every possible point. Nothing could be more meaningless or lower in the scale of design, yet the brilliancy of the execution carries it off.
The year after this had appeared Theodor de Bry engraved a series of emblems conceived by Denis Le Bey de Batilly and drawn by J. J. Boissard. The designs themselves are poor enough, but the book has a pretty architectural titlepage, and this is followed by a portrait of Le Bey set in an ornamental border of bees, flowers, horses, and other incongruities, portrait and border alike engraved with the most brilliant delicacy (see Plate XXXVII). In the following year, again, 1597, the two younger De Brys illustrated with line engravings theActa Mechmeti Saracenorum principis, and (at the end of these) theVaticinia Severi et Leonisas to the fate of the Turks, also theDavidof Arias Montanus. The plates are fairly interesting, but in technical execution fall far below those of their father.
Turning now to England, we find engraving in use surprisingly early in some figures of unborn babies inThe Birth of Mankind, translated from the Latin of Roesslin by Richard Jonas and printed in 1540 by Thomas Raynold, a physician, who five years later issued a new edition revised by himself, again with engravings.In 1545 there appeared a much more important medical work, aCompendiosa totius anatomie delineatioprofessedly by Thomas Geminus, a Flemish surgeon and engraver attached to the English Court. In reality this was a rather shameless adaptation of theDe Fabrica Humani Corporisof Vesalius (Basel, 1543), with engravings copied by Geminus from the woodcuts of his original. For us its chief interest lies in an elaborate engraved titlepage showing the royal arms surrounded by a wealth of architectural and strapwork ornament in the style, if not actually the work, of Peter Cock of Alost, as has been shown by Sir Sidney Colvin in the invaluable introduction to hisEarly Engravings and Engravers in England(1905). In 1553 an English translation of the anatomy was published by Nicholas Hyll, and in a second edition of this, printed in 1559, a rather heavy and stiff portrait of Elizabeth replaces the royal arms, which were burnished out to make room for it. Geminus subsequently produced a much larger portrait of the Queen, set in an architectural frame studded with emblematical figures, and a royal proclamation forbidding unauthorized “Paynters, Printers, and Gravers” to meddle with so great a subject seems to have been provoked by his handiwork.
In 1563 John Shute for his work onThe First and Chief Groundes of Architectureproduced four amateurish engravings to illustrate four of the five “orders,” a woodcut being considered good enough for the fifth. In 1568 we find the first edition of the “Bishops’” Bible adorned with an engraved titlepage in the centre of which, in an oval, is a not unpleasing portrait of the Queen, holding sceptre and orb, set in a mass of strapwork, amid which are seated Charity and Faith with the royal arms between them, while below the portrait a lion and dragon support a cartouche enclosing a text. Besides this titlepage, attributed by Sir Sidney Colvin to Franciscus Hogenberg, before the book of Joshua there is an engraved portrait of Leicester, while the “Blessed is the man”of the first Psalm is heralded by another engraved portrait which shows Lord Burghley holding in front of him a great B. In 1573 Remigius Hogenberg, brother of Franciscus, engraved after a picture by John Lyne a stiff but rather impressive portrait of Archbishop Parker, prefixed to some copies of hisDe Antiquitate Ecclesiae Britanniae. The year before this the second edition of the “Bishops’” Bible had been enriched with a decorative engraved map of the Holy Land, and in 1574 Archbishop Parker employed John Lyne to engrave for theDe Antiquitate Academiae Cantabrigiensisof Dr. Caius (printed by Day) a plate of the arms of the colleges, a plan of the University schools, and a large map of the town. In 1579 there appeared a work which had occupied the intermediate five years, a series of maps of England from the drawings of Christopher Saxton, engraved by Augustine Ryther (like Saxton a native of Leeds), Remigius Hogenberg and others, and with a fine frontispiece showing the Queen seated in state beneath an architectural canopy, which Sir Sidney Colvin thinks may perhaps be the work of Ryther. Ryther was subsequently concerned with other maps, including the series illustrating the defeat of the Armada (Expeditionis Hispanorum in Angliam vera descriptio), and other cartographers got to work who hardly concern us here. Two long engraved rolls, the first by Marcus Gheraerts, representing a procession of the Knights of the Garter (1576), the second by Theodor de Bry, from the designs of Thomas Lant, the funeral of Sir Philip Sidney (1587), although most safely preserved when bound in book form, can hardly be reckoned as books. Yet over the latter I must stop to confess a dreadful sin of my youth, when I jumped to the conclusion that the portrait on the first page stood for Sidney himself, whereas it really represents the too self-advertising Lant. That it appears in the sky, above the Black Pinnace which bore home Sidney’s body, and itself bears the suggestive motto “God createth, Man imitateth, Virtue flourisheth, Deathfinisheth,” may palliate but cannot excuse the crime which enriched an edition ofAstrophel and Stellawith a portrait, not of Sidney, but of the illustrator of his funeral.
Not until 1590, when Hugh Broughton’sConcent of Scripturewas accompanied by some apocalyptic plates engraved by Jodocus Hondius (subsequently copied by W. Rogers), do we come across what can really be called engraved illustrations in an English book, and these, which are of little interest, were speedily eclipsed the next year by Sir John Harington’sOrlando Furioso in English Heroical versewith its engraved titlepage and forty-six plates. Of these the translator writes in his introduction:
As for the pictures, they are all cut in brasse, and most of them by the best workemen in that kinde, that haue bene in this land this manie yeares: yet I will not praise them too much, because I gaue direction for their making, and in regard thereof I may be thought partiall, but this I may truely say, that (for mine owne part) I have not seene anie made in England better, nor (in deede) anie of this kinde in any booke, except it were in a treatise, set foorth by that profound man, maister Broughton, the last yeare, upon the Reuelation, in which there are some 3. or 4. pretie figures (in octauo) cut in brasse verie workemanly. As for other books that I haue seene in this realme, either in Latin or English, with pictures, as Liuy, Gesner, Alciats emblemes, a bookede spectrisin Latin, & (in our tong) the Chronicles, the booke of Martyrs, the book of hauking and hunting, and M. Whitney’s excellent Emblems, yet all their figures are cut on wood, & none in metall, and in that respect inferior to these, at least (by the old proverbe) the more cost, the more worship.
As for the pictures, they are all cut in brasse, and most of them by the best workemen in that kinde, that haue bene in this land this manie yeares: yet I will not praise them too much, because I gaue direction for their making, and in regard thereof I may be thought partiall, but this I may truely say, that (for mine owne part) I have not seene anie made in England better, nor (in deede) anie of this kinde in any booke, except it were in a treatise, set foorth by that profound man, maister Broughton, the last yeare, upon the Reuelation, in which there are some 3. or 4. pretie figures (in octauo) cut in brasse verie workemanly. As for other books that I haue seene in this realme, either in Latin or English, with pictures, as Liuy, Gesner, Alciats emblemes, a bookede spectrisin Latin, & (in our tong) the Chronicles, the booke of Martyrs, the book of hauking and hunting, and M. Whitney’s excellent Emblems, yet all their figures are cut on wood, & none in metall, and in that respect inferior to these, at least (by the old proverbe) the more cost, the more worship.
The passage is of considerable interest, but hardly suggests, what is yet the fact, that, save for the addition on the titlepage of an oval portrait of the translator and a representation of his dog, all the plates in the book are closely copied from the engravings by Girolamo Porro in the Venice edition of 1584. The English titlepage was signed by Thomas Cockson. We are left to conjecture to whom Harington was indebted for the rest of the plates.
Although, as we shall see, from this time forward a great number of English books contain engraved work, those which can be said to be illustrated during the next sixty years are few enough, a study of Mr. A. M. Hind’s very usefulList of the Works of Native and Foreign Line-Engravers in England from Henry VIII to the Commonwealth,68tempting me to place the number at about a score. The year after theOrlando Furiosocame another curious treatise by Hugh Broughton, not printed with type, but “graven in brasse by J. H.,” whom Sir Sidney Colvin identifies with Jodocus Hondius, a Fleming who lived in England from about 1580 to 1594, and may have done the plates in theConcent of Scriptureand some at least of those in theOrlando. Six years later (1598) we find Lomazzo’sTracte containing the artes of curious Paintingewith an emblematical titlepage and thirteen plates by Richard Haydock, the translator, four of the plates being adapted from Dürer’s book on Proportion, and all of them showing very slight skill in engraving. In 1602 came Sir William Segar’sHonour, Military and Civil, with eight plates showing various distinguished persons, English and foreign, wearing the robes and insignia of the Garter, the Golden Fleece, S. Michael, etc. Three of the plates are signed by William Rogers, the most distinguished of the English Elizabethan engravers, and the others are probably his also. Most of them are very dignified and effective in the brilliantly printed “first states” in which they are sometimes found, but ordinary copies with only the “second states” are as a rule disappointing.
The beginning of the reign of James I was directly responsible for one ambitious engraved publication, Stephen Harrison’sThe Archs of Triumph erected in honor of the High and mighty prince James, the first of that name king of England and the sixt of Scotland, at his Maiesties Entrance and passage through his HonorableCity & Chamber of London vpon the 15th day of march 1603 [1604] Invented and published by Stephen Harrison Joyner and Architect and graven by William Kip. Here an engraved titlepage, with dangling ornaments in the style of the De Bry alphabet, is followed by seven plates of the seven arches, the most notable of which (a pity it was not preserved) was crowned with a most interesting model of Jacobean London, to which the engraver has done admirable justice.
In 1608 came Robert Glover’sNobilitas politica et civilis, re-edited two years later by T. Milles as theCatalogue of Honour, with engraved illustrations (in the text) of the robes of the various degrees of nobility, attributed by Sir Sidney Colvin to Renold Elstracke, the son of a Flemish refugee, and also two plates representing the King in a chair of state and in Parliament. After this we come to two works illustrated by an English engraver of some note, William Hole, Tom Coryat’sCrudities(1611), with a titlepage recalling various incidents of his travels (including his being sick at sea) and five plates (or in some copies, six), and Drayton’sPolyolbion(1612, reissued in 1613 with the portrait-plate in a different state), with a poor emblematic title, a portrait of Prince Henry wielding a lance, and eighteen decorative maps of England. In 1615 we come to a really well-illustrated book, theRelation of a Journey, by George Sandys, whose narrative of travel in Turkey, Egypt, and the Holy Land, and parts of Italy, is accompanied with little delicately engraved landscapes and bits of architecture, etc., by Francis Delaram. The work of the decade is brought to a close with two print-selling ventures, theBasiliωlogiaof 1618 andHerωologiaof 1620. The former of these works describes itself as being “the true and lively effigies of all our English Kings from the Conquest untill this present: with their severall Coats of Armes, Impreses and Devises. And a briefe Chronologie of their lives and deaths. Elegantly graven in copper. Printed for H. Holland and are to be sold by Comp.[ton]Holland over against the Exchange.” The full set of plates numbers thirty-two, including eight additions to the scheme of the book, representing the Black Prince, John of Gaunt, Anne Boleyn, a second version of Elizabeth, Mary Queen of Scots, Anne of Denmark, Prince Henry, and Prince Charles. Fourteen of the plates, mostly the earlier ones, are signed by Elstracke, and Simon Passe and Francis Delaram each contributed four. It need hardly be said that they are of very varying degrees of authenticity as well as merit. Several of the later plates are found in more than one state.
With the second of the two ventures Henry Holland was also concerned, but the expenses of the book were shared by Crispin Passe and an Arnhem bookseller named Jansen. Its title reads: “Herωologia Anglica: hoc est clarissimorum et doctissimorum aliquot Anglorum qui floruerunt ab anno Cristi MD. usque ad presentem annum MDCXX.” It is in two volumes, the first containing thirty-seven plates, the second thirty. Two of these represent respectively Queen Elizabeth’s tomb and the hearse of Henry Prince of Wales. All the rest are portraits of the notable personages of the reigns of Henry VIII and his successors, some of them based on drawings by Holbein, the majority on earlier prints, and all engraved by William Passe (younger brother of Simon) and his sister Magdalena.
The next decade was far from productive of works illustrated with more than an engraved titlepage and a portrait, but in 1630 appeared Captain John Smith’sTrue Travelswith several illustrations, one of them by Martin Droeshout; in 1634-5 came Wither’sEmblems, with plates by William Marshall, and in 1635 Thomas Heywood’sHierarchie of the Blessed Angels, with an engraved title by Thomas Cecill and plates representing the several orders, Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones being entrusted to John Payne, Dominations to Marshall, Powers and Principalities to Glover, Virtues to Droeshout, etc. Some of the plates record the name of the patronwho paid for them, another suggestion that it was money which stood most in the way of book-illustrating. In 1638 Marshall illustrated Quarles’sHieroglyphikes of the Life of Man, with engravings, most of which seem chiefly made up of a candle, but in one the candle is being extinguished by Death egged on by Time, and to this not very promising subject (Plate XXXVIII) Marshall, the most unequal engraver of his day, has brought some of his too rare touches of delicacy and charm. In 1640 Wenceslaus Hollar, whom Thomas Earl of Arundel had discovered at Cologne (he was born at Prague) and brought to England, published his charming costume bookOrnatus Muliebris Anglicanus, and his larger work,Theatrum Mulierum, must have been almost ready when Charles I hoisted his standard at Nottingham, since it was published in 1643. After this the Civil War interfered for some time with the book trade.
While fully illustrated books were thus far from numerous in the half century which followed theOrlando Furiosoof 1591, the output of engraved titlepages and portraits to be prefixed to books was sufficient to find work for most of the minor engravers. The earlier titlepages were mostly architectural and symbolical, their purport being sometimes explained in verses printed opposite to them, headed “The Mind of the Front.” William Rogers engraved a titlepage to Gerard’sHerbal(1597), which is never found properly printed, and others to Linschoten’sDiscourse of Voyages into yeEast and West Indies(1598), Camden’sBritannia(1600—a poor piece of work), and Moffett’sTheatrum Insectorum, this last having only survived in a copy pasted at the head of the author’s manuscript at the British Museum. William Hole did an enlarged title for Camden’sBritannia(1607), titles for the different sections of Chapman’sHomer, a portrait of John Florio for the Italian-English dictionary which he was pleased to callQueen Anna’s New World of Words, a charming titlepage to a collection of virginal music known asParthenia(1611-12), another to Browne’sBritannia’s Pastorals, and much less happy ones to Drayton’sPolyolbion(1612), and theWorksof Ben Jonson (1616).
The best-known titlepages engraved by Renold Elstracke are those to Raleigh’sHistory of the World(1614) and theWorkes of the Most High and Mightie Prince James(1616), the latter a good piece of work which when faced, as it should be, by the portrait of the king by Simon van de Passe, makes the most decorative opening to any English book of this period. Passe himself was responsible for the very imaginative engraved title to Bacon’sNovum Organum(1620), a sea on which ships are sailing and rising out of it two pillars with the inscription: “Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia” (Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased). His son William, besides his work on theHerωologia, already mentioned, engraved a complicated title for Chapman’s version ofThe Batrachomyomachiaor Battle of the Frogs and Mice, humorously calledThe Crowne of all Homer’s Worckes.
After 1620 the old architectural and symbolical titlepages began to be replaced by titles in compartments, in which a central cartouche is surrounded by little squares, each representing some incident of the book. Portraits of the author remained much in request, and nearly a hundred of these were done by William Marshall, who was employed also on about as many engraved titlepages. As has been noted, his work was strangely uneven, and he fully deserved the scorn poured on him by Milton for the wretched caricature of the poet prefixed to thePoemsof 1645. Yet Marshall could at times do a good plate, as, for instance, that in Quarles’sHieroglyphikesalready mentioned, a portrait of Bacon prefixed to the 1640 Oxford edition of hisAdvancement of Learningand the charming frontispiece to Brathwait’sArcadian Princess. Marshall at his worst fell only a little below the work of Thomas Cross; at his best he rivalled or excelled the good work of Thomas Cecill and George Glover.
After Cromwell’s strong hand had given England some kind of settled government the book market revived, and some ambitiously illustrated books were soon being published. The too versatile John Ogilby, dancing-master, poet, and publisher, appeared early in the field, his version of the Fables of Aesop, “adorned with sculpture,” being printed by T. Warren for A. Crook in 1651. The next year came Benlowe’sTheophila, or Love’s Sacrifice, a mystical poem, some copies of which have as many as thirty-six plates by various hands, with much more etching than engraving in them. In 1654 Ogilby produced his translation of Virgil, a great folio with plates dedicated to noble patrons by Pierre Lambart. Ogilby’s other important ventures were the largeOdysseyof 1665, and the Aesop’sFablesof the same year, with plates by Hollar, D. Stoop, and F. Barlow, and two portraits of the translator engraved respectively by Pierre Lambert and W. Faithorne. Faithorne embellished other books of this period, e.g. the Poems of the “Matchless Orinda” (1667), with portraits, and publishers who could not afford to pay Faithorne employed R. White. The presence of a portrait by White in a copy of the first edition of Bunyan’sPilgrim’s Progress, to which it was very far indeed from certain that it really belonged,69has once made the book sell for over £1400, but save for the sake of completeness his handiwork is not greatly prized by collectors, nor is there any English illustrated book of this period after the Restoration which is much sought after for the sake of its plates, although those of Ogilby’sVirgilwere sufficiently well thought of to be used again for Dryden’s version in 1697.
Meanwhile, books with illustrationsen taille doucewere being issued in some numbers both at Paris and at Amsterdam. In the former city François Chauveau (1613-76), in the latter Jan and Casper Luyken arecredited by Mr. Hind (A Short History of Engraving and Etching, 1908) with having produced “hosts of small and undistinguished plates,” and these damning epithets explain how it is that even patriotic French collectors like Eugène Paillet and Henri Béraldi thought it wise to leave the illustrated books of the seventeenth century severely alone.
We meet the first advance guard of the brilliant French eighteenth century school of book-illustration in 1718, when a pretty little edition ofLes Amours de Daphnis et Chloé(as translated by Bishop Amyot from the Greek of Longus) made its appearance with twenty-eight plates by Benoît Audran, after the designs of no less a person than the Regent of France, and duly labelled and dated “Philippus in. et pinx. 1714.” The plates vary very much in charm, but that with the underlineChloé sauve Daphnis par le son de sa flûtecertainly possesses it, and one of the double-plates in the book,Daphnis prend ses oyseaux pendant l’Hyver pour voir Chloé, is really pretty. We find no other book to vie with this until we come to a much larger and more pretentious one, the works of Molière in six volumes, royal quarto, published in 1734. This was illustrated with thirty-three plates, in the mixture of etching and engraving characteristic of the French school of the day, by Laurent Cars, after pencil drawings by François Boucher, and by nearly two hundred vignettes and tailpieces (not all different) after Boucher and others by Cars and François Joullain. Another edition of this in four volumes with Boucher’s designs reproduced on a smaller scale was published in 1741 and reprinted three times within the decade.
After the Molière, books and editions which collectors take count of come much more quickly. There was an edition of Montesquieu’sLe Temple de Gnidein 1742 (imprint: Londres), aVirgilin 1743 with plates by Cochin, engraved by Cochin père, theContesof La Fontaine (Amsterdam, 1743-5) also illustrated by Cochin, Guer’sMoeurs et usages des Turcs, with plates afterBoucher (1746), an edition of the works of Boileau in five volumes, with vignettes by Eisen and tailpieces by Cochin (1743-5), and in 1753 aManon Lescaut(imprint: Amsterdam) with some plates by J. J. Pasquier, which are stiff, and others by H. Gravelot, which are feeble.
In the four-volume edition of theFablesof La Fontaine (1755-9) with illustrations after J. B. Oudry, we come to a very ambitious piece of work, handsomely carried out, which a book-lover may yet find it hard to admire. Oudry’s designs are always adequate, and have more virility in them than is often found in the work of this school, and they are competently interpreted by a number of etchers and engravers, some of whom, it may be noted, worked together in pairs on the same plate, so that we find such signatures as “C. Cochin aqua forti, R. Gaillard cælo sculpsit,” and “Gravé à l’eau forte par C. Cochin, terminé au burin par P. Chenu”—a very explicit statement of the method of work. But adequate as the plates may seem, if they are judged not as book-illustrations but as engravings, no one could rate them high, and as a book what is to be said of an edition of La Fontaine’sFables, which fills four volumes, each measuring nearly nineteen inches by thirteen? The bookman can only regard such a work as a portfolio of plates with accompanying text, and if the plates as plates are only second rate, enthusiasm has nothing to build on.
We return to book-form in 1757, when Boccaccio’sDecameronewas published in Italian (imprint: Londra) in five octavo volumes, with charming vignettes and illustrations mostly by Gravelot, although a few are by Boucher and Eisen. Gravelot, who was more industrious than successful as an illustrator, is seen here to advantage, and deserves some credit for having made his designs not less but more reticent than the stories he had to illustrate. This praise can certainly not be given to the famous 1762 edition of theContesof La Fontaine, the cost of which was borne by the Fermiers-Généraux (imprint: Amsterdam). Thefleuronsby Choffard arethroughout delightful and the plates are brilliantly engraved, but the lubricity of Eisen’s designs is wearisome in the first volume and disgusting in the second, and possessors of the book are not to be envied. It is to be regretted that the next book we have to notice, theContes Morauxof Marmontel (3 vols., 1765), has very little charm to support its morality, the plates after Gravelot being poor, while the head- and tailpieces, or rather the substitutes for them, are wretched. A much better book than either of these last is the edition in French and Latin of Ovid’sMetamorphosesin four quarto volumes (1767-71); with plates after Boucher, Eisen, Gravelot, and Moreau, and headpieces by Choffard at the beginning of each book. The imprint, “A Paris, chez Leclerc, Quai des Augustins, avec approbation et privilège du Roi,” prepares us to find that the designers have kept their licence within bounds, and many of the plates have a combined humour and charm which are very attractive. If I had to choose a single plate to show Gravelot at his best, I doubt if prolonged search would find any success more complete than that of the illustration to Book I, xi.,Deucalion et Pyrrha repeuplant la Terre, suivant l’Oracle de Themis(see the frontispiece to this volume, Plate I), and though Eisen was a much better artist than Gravelot, hisApollon gardant les troupeaux d’Admet, dans les campagnes de Messene(II, x.) is certainly one of his prettiest pieces.
During the next few years illustrated books became the fashion, so that in 1772 Cazotte wroteLe diable amoureux, nouvelle d’Espagne, with the false imprint Naples (Paris, Lejay) and six unsigned plates, said to be by Moreau after Marillier, on purpose to ridicule the craze for putting illustrations into every book. In 1768 the indefatigable Gravelot had illustrated an edition of the works of Voltaire, published at Geneva, with forty-four designs. In 1769Les Saisons, a poem by Saint Lambert, was published at Amsterdam, with designs by Gravelot and Le Prince andfleuronsby Choffard. Inthe same year there was published at Paris Meunier de Queslon’sLes Graces, with an engraved title by Moreau, a frontispiece after Boucher, and five plates after Moreau. In 1770 came Voltaire’sHenriadewith ten plates and ten vignettes after Eisen, and more highly esteemed even than this, Dorat’sLes Baisers(La Haye et Paris), with a frontispiece and plate and forty-four head- and tailpieces, all (save two) after Eisen, not easily surpassed in their own luxurious style (see Plate XXXIX). In 1771 Gravelot, more indefatigable than ever, supplied designs for twenty plates and numerous head- and tailpieces for an edition of Tasso’sGerusalemme Liberata, and was honoured, as Eisen had been in the Fermiers-Généraux edition of La Fontaine’sContes, by his portrait being prefixed to the second volume. In 1772 a new edition of Montesquieu’sLe Temple de Gnide, in which the text was engraved throughout, was illustrated with designs by Eisen, brilliantly interpreted by Le Mire, and Imbert’sLe Jugement de Pariswas illustrated by Moreau, With,fleuronsby Choffard. In 1773Le Temple de Gnidewas versified by Colardeau, and illustrated by Monnet, and selections from Anacreon, Sappho, Bion, and Moschus by Eisen, while Moreau and others illustrated theChansonsof Laborde in four volumes and the works of Molière in six. After this the pace slackened, and we need no longer cling to the methods of the annalist. Moreau illustrated Saint Lambert’sLes Saisonsand Fromageot’sAnnales du règne de Marie Therèse(both in 1775), Marmontel’sLes Incas(1777), the seventy-volume Voltaire (1784-9),Paul et Virginie(1789), and many other works, living on to illustrate Goethe’sWertherin 1809; other books were adorned by Marillier, Cochin, Duplessis, Bertaux, Desrais, Saint Quentin, Fragonard, Gérard, and Le Barbier, and the fashion survived the Revolution and lingered on till about 1820.
We must go back now to England, where at the end of the seventeenth century the requirements of book-illustration were neglected, partly because of the growingtaste for a neat simplicity in books, partly because the chief English engravers all devoted themselves to mezzotint. A few foreigners came over to supply their place, and Michael Burghers, of Amsterdam, illustrated the fourth edition ofParadise Lost, a stately folio, in 1688, with plates which enjoyed a long life and were also imitated for smaller editions. Burghers also illustrated the Oxford almanacs, and supplied frontispieces to the Bibles and other large books issued by the University Press up to about 1720. Another Dutchman who came to England not much later (in about 1690) was Michael Van der Gucht, who worked for the booksellers, as his children did after him. How low book-illustration had fallen in England at the beginning of the eighteenth century may be seen by a glance at the wretched plates which disfigure Rowe’s Shakespeare in 1709, the first edition on which an editor and an illustrator were allowed to work their wills. The year after this Louis Du Guernier came to England, and was soon engaged in the not too patriotic task of helping Claude Du Bosc to illustrate the victories of Marlborough. In 1714 he and Du Bosc were less painfully, though not very successfully, employed in making plates for Pope’sRape of the Lock. Du Bosc subsequently worked on theReligious Ceremonies of all Nations(1733), an English edition of a book of Bernard Picart’s, and on plates for Rapin’sHistory of England(1743), but he was far from being a great engraver. It is a satisfaction that the plates to the first edition ofRobinson Crusoe(1719) were engraved by two Englishmen, and not very badly. Their names are given as “Clark and Pine,” the Clark being presumably John Clark (1688-1736), who engraved some writing-books, and the Pine, John Pine (1690-1756), who imitated some designs by Bernard Picart to the book of Jonah in 1720, and may have been a pupil of his at Amsterdam.
It should, perhaps, have been mentioned that two years beforeCrusoean English engraver, John Sturt(1658-1730), produced a Book of Common Prayer, of which the text as well as the pictures was engraved. This is rather a curiosity than a work of art, the frontispiece being a portrait of George I made up of the Creed, Lord’s Prayer, Ten Commandments, Prayer for the Royal Family, and Psalm XXI. written in minute characters, instead of lines. Sturt produced another engraved book,The Orthodox Communicant, in 1721.
In 1723 William Hogarth began what might have proved a notable career as a book-illustrator had not he soon found more profitable work. He illustrated the Travels of Aubry de la Mottraye in 1723, Briscoe’sApuleius(1724), Cotterel’s translation ofCassandra(1725), Blackwell’sCompendium of Military Discipline(1726), and (also in 1726) Butler’sHudibras, his plates to which, though grotesque enough, show plenty of character. For some years after this he worked on frontispieces, e.g. to Leveridge’sSongs(1727), Cooke’sHesiod(1728), J. Miller’s comedy,The Humours of Oxford(1729), Theobald’sPerseus and Andromeda(1730), and in 1731 to a Molière, Fielding’sTragedy of Tragedies, and Mitchell’sHighland Fair. But the success of his set of prints on “The Harlot’s Progress” diverted him from bookwork, although many years after he contributed frontispieces to Vols. II and IV ofTristram Shandy, and in 1761 a head-and tailpiece (engraved by Grignion) to a Catalogue of the Society of Arts.
In 1733 Hubert Gravelot was invited from France by Du Bosc to help in illustrating Picart’sReligious Ceremonies. He illustrated Gay’sFablesin 1738, Richardson’sPamelain 1742, Theobald’sShakespearein 1740, and, mainly after Hayman, Hanmer’s in 1744-6. Neither of the sets of Shakespeare plates deserves any higher praise than that of being neat and pretty, but at least they were a whole plane above those in Rowe’s edition.
The year after Gravelot came to England, in 1733, Pine produced the first volume of hisHorace, engraved throughout, and with head- and tailpieces in admirabletaste. The second volume followed in 1737, and in 1753 the first of an illustratedVirgilwhich Pine did not live to complete.
Besides his work on Hanmer’sShakespeare, Francis Hayman designed illustrations to Moore’sFables of the Female Sex(1744), which were well engraved, some of them by Charles Grignion, a pupil of Gravelot’s, born in England (1717), but of foreign parentage. Hayman also illustrated theSpectator(1747), Newton’sMilton(1749-52), and later on, with the aid of Grignion, Smollett’sDon Quixote(1755), and Baskerville’s edition of Congreve’sPoems(1761). The plates to the earlier edition ofDon Quixote, that of 1738, had been chiefly engraved by Gerard van der Gucht after Vanderbank, but two are by Hogarth.
Samuel Wale (died 1786), a pupil of Hayman, was also an illustrator, and in 1760 supplied Sir John Hawkins with fourteen drawings for his edition of Walton’sAngler. These were engraved by the luckless W. W. Rylands, who was hanged for forgery in 1783, and the Walton thus produced is one of the prettiest and least affected of the illustrated books of its day (see Plate XL). Wale also drew designs for Wilkie’sFables(1768) and Goldsmith’sTraveller(1774). He also worked for the magazines which about the middle of the century made rather a feature of engravings, often as headpieces to music. A few of the isolated books may be named, thus Paltock’sPeter Wilkins(1750) was illustrated very well by Louis Peter Boitard, who had previously contributed numerous plates to Spence’sPolymetis, and in 1751 supplied a frontispiece to each of the six books of theScribleriadby R. O. Cambridge. Another book which, likePeter Wilkins, was concerned with flight, Lunardi’sAccount of the first aerial voyage in England(1784), has a portrait of the author by Bartolozzi and two plates. For Baskerville’s edition of theOrlando Furioso(Birmingham, 1773) recourse was had to plates by De Launay, after Moreau and Eisen.