The Pre-Raphaelite Illustrators (review)

This handsome volume is nothing less than a passionate labor of love and scholarship. In The Pre-Raphaelite Illustrators, art historian and graphic illustrator Gregory Suriano treats us to some five hundred illustrations taken primarily from his extensive personal collection. From the most popular to the most rare (some are printed here for only the second time), they represent the most comprehensive catalogue raisonné to date of every Pre-Raphaelite etching, steel or wood engraving, and lithograph ever published for the purposes of illustrating a book, periodical, or original print.

Suriano divides his lavish book into several sections. The introductory essay, "The Pre-Raphaelites and Published Graphic Art in Victorian England," meticulously relates the development of nineteenth-century engraving techniques and then discusses Pre-Raphaelite style itself. From Hogarth's copper engravings to Blake's relief etchings, we learn of the artist-etching tradition and its development into the popular Etching Club that would provide the impetus behind Pre-Raphaelite illustration in the 1850s. There are wonderful tidbits, gleaned from Suriano's vast collection of autograph letters and contemporary periodicals, about specific engravers and the techniques that set them apart from others (who used color blocks, whose work was more "tonal," who specialized in wood engraving or photogravure). Suriano correctly underscores the symbiotic relationship of artists, engravers, and publishers as the popular Penny Magazine,Illustrated London News, and Punch increased the public's thirst for illustrated periodicals and classics. By midcentury, a "revolution against styleless, slapdash illustrations" was waiting to be born, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Thomas Woolner, answered the call. Eschewing the "pedantic pomposity" of academic British art, they espoused the "earnest simplicity" of early Italian painters, the linear art of past German masters (Dürer, Richter), and the drawing from life by contemporary Nazarene artists. The resulting scenes were hyperrealistic and sometimes mystical, with glowing colors and emotion-charged narratives about medieval, religious, and literary subjects and themes of love, death, and personal loss. These elements translated well as black-and-white illustrations, which the Pre-Raphaelites considered as important as their paintings, and essentially revolutionized English graphic art with The Music Master (1855), Poems by Alfred Tennyson (1857), and The Poets of the Nineteenth Century (1857).

Three sections of critical biography follow this introduction and characterize forty-one artists as major Pre-Raphaelites (Rossetti, Millais, Hunt, Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes, Edward Burne-Jones), Pre-Raphaelite associates (John Ruskin, Thomas Seddon, Thomas Woolner), or those who worked in the Pre-Raphaelite style (Walter Crane, George Du Maurier, John Tenniel). An easy-to-consult catalog accompanies each biography. Different typefaces, headings, and symbols announce which illustrations appeared in periodicals, books, books with reprints, or as original prints. The graphics are pleasingly balanced with the text and include the names of their engravers; even the novice should soon differentiate the styles of, say, Joseph Swain and the Dalziel brothers. Yet more exciting are the "gems" that Suriano has unearthed. It is fascinating to view an artist's corrections of wood-engraving proofs (as with Millais's The Unmerciful Servant) or to compare photographs of an artist's drawing on wood blocks with the resulting wood engraving (as with Hunt's The Lady of Shallot).

Rounding out the edition are an extensive bibliography and an invaluable index of illustrations and artists, engravers, publishers, and writers. Given the volume's attention to organization and typesetting, however, it is surprising that the index does not differentiate between pages on which illustrations are reproduced and those on which they are merely mentioned. Also in need of better structure is the introductory critical essay. Suriano appears to be more in his element when treating the history of engraving, for his discussion of the Pre-Raphaelites wanders. He also refers to the "P.R.B." without glossing it as "Pre...