Richard Caton Woodville (1856-1927) at the Illustrated London News

Between 1877 and 1925, the Illustrated London News published nearly 1,800 pictures by Richard Caton Woodville, an artist who also achieved great success as a painter of battles and other military scenes. This essay traces his output for the magazine over these years, investigating the volume, variability, and variety of his contributions. It then focuses on Woodville’s feature pictures, which inscribe him as an artist rather than just an illustrator. His pictures of encounters between Europeans and local inhabitants in Egypt and India produce what I call “intention effects,” the capacity of an image to invite inference, referring meaning back from the picture to its author. These images bolstered Woodville’s status as artist, but they also promoted the magazine, which symbiotically shared this prestige.