The Illustration of the Everyday

Abstract

Photomechanically reproduced pen-and-ink line drawings were hugely popular in the magazines of the 1890s. Illustrators such as Phil May, Maurice Greiffenhagen, Leonard Raven-Hill, Bernard Partridge, and Fred Pegram produced social caricatures that, above all, explored the everyday in late-Victorian society. These sketches depicted aspects of the social scene that the photograph could not. The modern illustrator was a knowing observer of the contemporary scene differentiating in minimal drawings the meaningful details of the bodies and dress of city dwellers. Furthermore, their sketches could depict subject matter that would have been unacceptable if shown in photographic halftones. The photograph was considered too direct and too detailed to show poverty, carnage, or sex. Critics saw the sketch as a radical new art form able to portray contemporary life directly to a modern audience unfettered by academic conventions. The sketch was characterized as an immediate, subjective impression, its speed and authenticity attested to by the supposed autographic qualities of process reproduction. These sketches gave magazine readers a reassuring sense that the city and its denizens were knowable, legible. Rapid minimal sketches were deployed in the press as the antithesis to the overdetailed, static photograph, yet, as we will see, these illustrations were influenced both directly and indirectly by photography.

Is it not strange how some events are fixed in the memory — silhouetted, sharp, distinct, like one of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley’s “latest latitudes”?

— Emily Soldene, “How the Alhambra Was Shut,” TheSketch, January 30, 1895¹