The Pre-Raphaelite Illustrators: The Published Graphic Art of the English Pre-Raphaelites and Their Associates.

KOOISTRA, LORRAINE JANZEN

Gregory R. Suriano. The Pre-Raphaelite Illustrators: The Published Graphic Art of the English Pre-Raphaelites and Their Associates. New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, and London: The British Library, 2000. 336 pp.; $49-95 US (hardcover). ISBN 1-58456-021-5.

With its intense black lines and emotionally charged, symbolic compositions, Pre-Raphaelite illustration has always had an immediate appeal even for the casual viewer. This large and lovely book on Pre-Raphaelite illustration, the result of two decades of research and collection by the author, will appeal to an audience ranging from the consumer looking for a coffee table book on an appealing visual subject to the committed bibliophile and collector to the scholar working in the field of Victorian illustration. For the latter two groups, The Pre-Raphaelite Illustrators will serve as an important reference source. The nearly 500 reproductions and the detailed catalogues identifying not only each artist's entire illustrative oeuvre, but also each work's publication history, make this book the most extensive and complete of its kind yet published. Extending the recent work on Victorian illustrators by Paul Goldman and Simon Houfe, and building on the pioneering studies of Forrest Reid and W.E. Fredeman, Suriano's book ambitiously seeks to identify "every Pre-Raphaelite etching, every engraving on steel and wood, every original print ever published by the major Pre-Raphaelites" as well as the work of other illustrators associated with, or influenced by, Pre-Raphaelite art. The result is virtually a catalogue raisonne of Pre-Raphaelite publications in periodicals and books and as such will be highly valued by both scholars and connoisseurs.

Suriano's four-part plan for the book includes an Introduction to the Pre-Raphaelites in the context of published graphic art in nineteenth-century England followed by sections on the illustrations of the major Pre-Raphaelites, the illustrations of their associates, and the illustrations of contemporary artists occasionally working in a Pre-Raphaelite-influenced style. Each of these "Artists and Their Works" sections includes a biographical essay on the artist, followed by a Catalogue listing artworks created specifically to illustrate a book or periodical and an itemization of each work's reprint history, all lavishly illustrated. Indeed, one of the book's main strengths lies in its numerous, well reproduced, illustrations. Never before has so much Pre-Raphaelite graphic art, some reproduced here for the first time, been available in a single source.

The introductory essay provides a useful overview of published graphic art in nineteenth-century England prior to the revolutionary Pre-Raphaelite innovation. While this material will be familiar to all but the novice, the explication of the technological and artistic shifts provides a helpful context for the significant changes, inaugurated by the Pre-Raphaelite artists at mid century, that were to alter the course of English illustration. Suriano shows the European influence of early Italian painting and German graphic art as well as the influence of the great English forerunner, William Blake. In summarizing the essential elements that came to characterize Pre-Raphaelite illustration, he emphasizes that it was their work as literary artists conveying a symbolic/allegorical "idea" that distinguished the true Pre-Raphaelite illustrators from their spurious imitators.

Regrettably, Suriano does not always use this definition of Pre-Raphaelite illustration to guide his selection of artists and their work. Instead of focusing on the interpretive and intellectual approach to illustration that distinguished Pre-Raphaelite graphic art in his three sections on artists and their work, he is so inclusive in his selections as to make the term "Pre-Raphaelite illustration" all but meaningless. With his inclusion of virtually every black-and-white illustrator of note under the rubric of "Pre-Raphaelite" illustration, Suriano comes to use the term simply as a descriptor for good graphic art. This approach is especially evident at the end of the book when he writes that "The quality of [Fred] Walker's work is so high it would almost be a shame not to include him here; fortunately, he created a famous work that smacks of Pre-Raphaelitism and points to the Aesthetic movement." Walker was, indeed, a fine illustrator, but even the decorative poster Suriano cites (without a supportive reproduction) does not give him any claim to Pre-Raphaelite credentials. As Laurence Housman, a fine illustrator in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition himself, once wrote: "the main difference between their work and that of the others was that the Pre-Raphaelites had something to say very pertinent to the subject in hand, the rest nothing--nothing, that is to say, to show that they had any sense that they were illustrating not nature but literature" (Arthur Boyd Houghton: A Selection from his Work in Black and White, 1896). While Suriano seems to recognize this crucial aspect of Pre-Raphaelite illustration in his Introduction, his subsequent selections lose sight of this important distinction.

The organizational principle for the three sections of artists and their works also reveals a gap between the theory of the Introduction and the practice of critical selection. For example, Suriano includes William Bell Scott in the first section dealing with illustrations of the major Pre-Raphaelites, even though Scott's etchings, by his own admission, have more in common with the 1840s-style illustration than the wood-engravings of the Sixties. If Scott is included because of his undeniable personal connections with the Pre-Raphaelite circle, it is not at all clear why he is not then placed in the second section dealing with the Pre-Raphaelite associates--or why, in this second section, there are no less than two of the original Pre-Raphaelite brothers (James Collinson and Thomas Woolner) grouped as artists merely "associated" with the Pre-Raphaelite style. The criteria for selecting artists in the three critical sections seem to vary from aesthetic style to quantitative output to degree of personal connection. One criteria, though, is consistent across all categories: the artist's masculinity.

In a compendious collection whose net is cast so widely as to include all manner of artists with the most tenuous connections to Pre-Raphaelite illustration, one wonders how the author managed not to snare at least a couple of female illustrators. Suriano does not seem to be aware of the extensive work done in this field by scholars such as Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nun, who have not only written widely on the subject, but also mounted a stunning exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1998. One might appropriately argue that, as artists who worked principally on canvas rather than in graphic art, these female Pre-Raphaelites produced work outside the scope of Suriano's study. And yet Suriano includes certain male artists who similarly published no real work of illustration as he defines it--"a new work of art, created specifically for use in a new publication"--men such as John Inchbold, Val Prinsep, John Ruskin, James Smetham, and Thomas Seddon. Moreover, if Walter Deverell can be given a full-page critical essay on the strength of a single etching reproduced in The Germ, it is difficult to see why Elizabeth Siddal should be presented only in passing as Dante Gabriel Rossetti's muse, lover, and model, in the traditional, and long since corrected, manner. Her reputation as an artist has been re-evaluated since the Tate Gallery included her work in its Pre-Raphaelite exhibition in 1984, and especially since Marsh published The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal in 1989 and the Ruskin Gallery in Sheffield mounted a retrospective view of her work in 1991. Suriano does not even mention Ruskin's praise and patronage of her work, and he presents Dante Gabriel Rossetti's encouragement as evidence of his generosity rather than his discernment. One of the difficulties with the selection of artists and illustrations for this book is that the author does not establish a specific time frame as part of his criteria. One infers that the "influenced by" category is limited to illustrators of the same generation, more or less, as the original Pre-Raphaelites. It is difficult otherwise to account for the exclusion of such fine graphic artists working in the Pre-Raphaelite style of illustration as Laurence Housman, Charles Ricketts, Florence Harrison, and even Aubrey Beardsley. Either some reference to the artists in Pre-Raphaelitism's "third" phase, or a rationale for excluding them, would have been more helpful than the inclusion of artists whose work is only tenuously associated, if at all, with Pre-Raphaelite illustration.

The biographies of artists and the bibliographies of their published work demonstrate very thorough archival research. Suriano's method of letting the storyteller's voice tell his own story through the use of letters is a good one, and the many references to extant drawings, proofs, and corrections, provide much-needed information on the artists' working methods and publishing conditions. In such an enormous undertaking, it is inevitable that a few errors creep in, such as identifying Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market and The Prince's Progress volumes as among the Dalziels' Fine Art Books, and presenting the correspondence over Kate Faulkner's recutting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's title-page vignette for Goblin Market as having to do with the lettering for the second edition rather than with supplying the missing jaw line for the sleeping sister. The confusion continues in the Catalogue, where the frontispiece and title-page designations for The Prince's Progress and Other Poems are mis-assigned.

The Catalogues for each artist are the book's most useful feature and generally meet the author's wish to be "reader-friendly." The variety of typographic symbols, however, could have benefited from a "Guide to Symbols" section early on; it is only by skimming the Preface that a reader can refresh the memory that an asterisk appearing after a title indicates the author's assessment that the work is "in the Pre-Raphaelite style." The organization of the works in this bibliographic section is helpfully categorized and very accessible. Each Catalogue begins with a section on Periodical publications, followed by Books, Reprints, and Individual Prints. In the first section, the decision to organize alphabetically by periodical title makes locating an artist's graphic art a simple task. However, given that Pre-Raphaelite illustration is all about relating an image to a particular text, one wishes that Suriano had included the names of the authors whose works were so illustrated. In the Millais catalogue, for example, the information that Tennyson was the author of "The Grandmother's Apology" published in Once a Week, and that Christina Rossetti was the author of "Maude Clare," if provided, would add to the user's knowledge of Pre-Raphaelite graphic art by acknowledging the relationships of artist and author. In the Book section, a chronological rather than an alphabetical ordering would have been more useful, especially with reference to a work's publication history in reprints.

The reservations listed above, however, do not detract from the overall merit and achievement of this book. Suriano's scope in The Pre-Raphaelite Illustrators is staggering; its very size accounts for some messiness of organization and lacunae of coverage. Nevertheless, this compendious volume adds greatly to our knowledge of Pre-Raphaelite graphic artists and their work and the book should hold an honoured place on any reference shelf for many years to come.

LORRAINE JANZEN KOOISTRA
Nipissing University