Dear diary book illustration8/2/2023 ![]() ![]() Duchamp said that art should not be retinal, existing only for the purpose of aesthetic and ocular beauty, and that Manet marked the height and the end of retinal art. At the same time, figurative art was similarly shunned in the art world as outdated and taboo. Of course, trends in both book publishing and visual art shifted considerably in the 20th century, and the practice of publishing visual representations alongside text in adult literature saw a major decline, and book illustration became increasingly associated with children’s literature and “low-brow” or popular writing (such as Classics Illustrated). Brown (“Phiz”) engraving for David Copperfield, 1850 This meant that Phiz’s visual interpretation of a character became as important as Dickens’s description, if not more so. Browne (pen name “Phiz”), worked under the author’s close instruction as to the specific appearance of characters, and the composition of plates. At the bicentennial of Charles Dickens’s birth, Melanie McDonagh in The Independentrecalled Dickens’s close collaborative relationships with illustrators: “…he gave them an outline of the plot before he wrote the text and he monitored the drawings to ensure that they matched precisely with his own conceptions.” Dickens’s most famous illustrator, H.K. More specifically, the practice of publishing adult fiction accompanied by representational images is strongly linked with 18 th- and 19 th-century western literature, and the rise of the novel. Biblia Pauperum page from the Nordisk familjebok As most famously seen in the Biblia Pauperum (“Pauper’s Bible”), they look something like medieval graphic novels. These works were a natural progression from the older illuminated manuscript form. Book illustration has existed in some form since the advent of the written word. The tradition that has guided modern book illustration originates in western literature dating back to 15th-century block books, in which the text of a book was carved into the same block as the image. ![]()
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