The History of Illustration

ORIGINS OF AMERICAN ILLUSTRATION

Of necessity, the earliest illustrations grew out of the primitive conditions of a frontier country. Cut off from the sophistication of the arts in Europe, many early American artists trained themselves, and improvised methods for inscribing printing plates of wood or of copper. Early books, broadsides, newspapers and magazines reflected this crude technique, and it was at least another 150 years after John Foster before European standards of training and technology could be challenged.

Though backward, Americans had a rich mine of subject matter to exploit. There is also a sense that these primitive but talented American artists could present their observations more honestly than with the interfering gloss of technical facility. A good example is George Catlin, whose portraits and paintings of native life could be seen only in traveling exhibitions. Their reproduction in color would have to wait decades until the invention of new printing methods.

In both Europe and America, limitations to the reproduction of the art was the major barrier to accurate, printed translation of the original drawings or paintings.

The invention of printing with movable type in the sixteenth century had a profound influence on the form of this art. Earlier hand-penned texts could be illustrated (or "illuminated") with elaborate full-color, painted imagery, but audiences were limited to the elite since each book was highly precious. While the new audience for printed texts grew explosively, the printing technology imposed severe restrictions on illustrators. Their means of expression was abruptly limited by the requirements of the printing process. Images became reduced to those that could be cut into wood or metal plates mounted into forms with the movable type, which were then inked and pressed firmly onto sheets of paper.

Over the next four centuries, artists (and printers) gradually improved and refined their crafts, gaining increased freedom of expression in the process, and raising the engraving quality to remarkable levels of interpretive artistry. It was not until the combination of photography with halftone engraving at the end of the nineteenth century, however, that the artists began to see reproduction of their works with fidelity to their original drawings or paintings.

Freed from their dependence on the middlemen engravers to interpret tonal works into line plates (which had removed most of the distinguishing hallmarks of an individual artist's technique), illustrators could begin to display their personal virtuosity. The combination of high-speed rotary plate presses, ever-improving quality of halftone engraving and an enlarging audience by the 1890s brought about a Golden Age of Illustration. By World War I, Americans had overcome their sense of cultural inferiority to Europe, and American illustrators were greatly respected. The best artists of that era were attracted to this mode of expression and vigorously competed in pursuit of the huge readership of nationally distributed magazines, books and newspapers, which eventually dwarfed that of Europe.